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95 articles from Technology Review Feed - Tech Review Top Stories

Going lean: How vendor consolidation creates big gains

The second quarter of 2020 launched many digital transformation projects that didn’t necessarily happen at the behest of chief innovation officers, but because of the wrecking ball of disruption known as covid-19. Even if companies did succeed at rapidly orienting operations and services to digital, the transformation journey is far from over—and that means procurement and vendor management...

There’s not one reason California’s covid-19 cases are soaring—there are many

It’s troubling, though not surprising, to see covid-19 cases spiking across the American South and Southwest, where public officials delayed lockdowns, rushed to reopen businesses, or refused to require people to wear masks. But what’s the matter with California? The nation’s most populous state was the first to enact statewide shelter-in-place rules, took decisive steps to build up the...

Beyond covid-19 lies a new normal—and new opportunities

The covid-19 pandemic has unleashed changes that seemed unthinkable just a few months ago. In February, it seemed unthinkable the entire white-collar workforce of many countries would soon be working solely from home. It seemed unthinkable air travel would plummet by 96%, or millions of migrant workers in India would be forced to undertake a herculean exodus, walking thousands of miles to their...

Pandemic reveals opportunities for 5G connectivity

5G cellular technology, which has been promised to provide a connective fabric that will cover the globe in a seamless digital experience, is starting to take shape. But the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 that has forced hundreds of millions of people to work and socialize remotely has made it clear that the connective fabric is still missing a few stitches. This article was produced by Insights,...

Is it safe to send kids back to school?

Covid-19 has been disruptive and bewildering for everyone, but especially for children. In the UK and in most US states, schools closed in March. Many of them will keep their doors shut until the fall. That’s six months without the normality of a school day, not to mention a significant break without any formal education for the many children who cannot access online classes. It’s a global...

How Reddit kicked off a day of bans for Trump and the far right

The news: Early on Monday, Reddit banned r/The_Donald, a once-notorious pro-Trump forum, for repeated rule-breaking. CEO Steve Huffman announced that it was just one of 2,000 subreddits banned by the site as it institutes rule changes designed to make the platform less accommodating to hateful and abusive communities. The other news: Later in the day, live-streaming video service Twitch...


MONDAY 29. JUNE 2020


India bans TikTok—plus 58 other Chinese apps

On Monday, India banned TikTok and dozens of other apps made in China, escalating tension between the countries two weeks after a long-simmering border dispute in the Himalayas turned deadly. The news: In a statement, India said the apps “engaged in activities which [are] prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order.” Messaging and...

Covid-19 spurs collaboration in telehealth

The coronavirus pandemic has led to enhanced health-care collaboration, innovation, and increased use of digital technologies. Telehealth enables doctors to safely connect with patients virtually and monitor them remotely, whether in different cities or down the hall. And smarter and smaller medical devices are producing better outcomes for patients—a disruption is sensed, like low blood…


SATURDAY 27. JUNE 2020


A supermassive black hole lit up a collision of two smaller black holes

Astronomers from Caltech have reported that they’ve observed a collision between two black holes. Normally such an event is invisible, but this time a more massive black hole sitting nearby helped illuminate the other two as they collided. If confirmed, the findings, published in Physical Review Letters, would be the first optical observations ever made of a black hole merger. What happened:...


FRIDAY 26. JUNE 2020


Alumni in the coronavirus conversation

The virus “I am very wary of simplistic projections about the ongoing outbreak based solely off of its current growth patterns” —Maimuna Majumder, SM ’15, PhD ’18, faculty, Boston Children’s Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program, and research associate, Harvard Medical School (ABC News, March 16)  “Closing schools, bars, and movie theaters...

Trump’s freeze on new visas could threaten US dominance in AI

Even before president Trump’s executive order on June 22, the US was already bucking global tech immigration trends. Over the past five years, as other countries have opened up their borders to highly skilled technical people, the US has maintained—and even restricted—its immigration policies, creating a bottleneck for meeting domestic demand for tech talent. Now…

A new US bill would ban the police use of facial recognition

The news: US lawmakers have introduced a bill which would ban the use of facial recognition technology by federal law enforcement agencies. Specifically, it would make it illegal for any federal agency or official to “acquire, possess, access or use” biometric surveillance technology in the US. It would also require state and local law enforcement to bring in similar bans in order to receive...


THURSDAY 25. JUNE 2020


Mainframe 2020: A catalyst for transformation

When it comes to supporting DevOps initiatives, mainframe technology—introduced in the early 1950s—isn’t likely to be the first to come to mind. This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. Yet combining the processing power of mainframe computing with one of today’s leading...

Human rights activists want to use AI to help prove war crimes in court

In 2015, alarmed by an escalating civil war in Yemen, Saudi Arabia led an air campaign against the country to defeat what it deemed a threatening rise of Shia power. The intervention, launched with eight other largely Sunni Arab states, was meant to last only a few weeks, Saudi officials had said. Nearly five years later, it still hasn’t stopped. By some estimates, the coalition has since...

Pandenomics: How open data is guiding public policy

Generals always fight the last war, runs the military aphorism. Politicians have also drawn heavily from battlefield lexicon in framing the fight against covid-19, but they too are at risk of leaning on outdated concepts and responses based on past crises that bear limited resemblance to the pandemic.  With a vaccine likely to be many months and possibly more than a year away, they have to...


WEDNESDAY 24. JUNE 2020


If AI is going to help us in a crisis, we need a new kind of ethics

Jess Whittlestone at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and her colleagues published a comment piece in Nature Machine Intelligence this week arguing that if artificial intelligence is going to help in a crisis, we need a new, faster way of doing AI ethics, which they call ethics for urgency.  JESS WHITTLESTONE For Whittlestone, this means...


TUESDAY 23. JUNE 2020


Amazon creates a $2 billion climate fund, as it struggles to cut its own emissions

Amazon launched a $2 billion venture fund to invest in companies developing ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions, marking the latest corporate effort to allocate major resources to combating climate change. Investment areas: In a press release, Amazon said the new fund would focus on startups that could help it and other businesses achieve “net zero” emissions by 2040. It will...

AI researchers say scientific publishers help perpetuate racist algorithms

The news: An open letter from a growing coalition of AI researchers is calling out scientific publisher Springer Nature for a conference paper it reportedly planned to include in its forthcoming book Transactions on Computational Science & Computational Intelligence. The paper, titled “A Deep Neural Network Model to Predict Criminality Using Image Processing,” presents a face recognition...

Coronavirus and the big shift to cloud

In the space of a few months, covid-19 has upended economic and social activity worldwide, sending billions of people home for months on end and causing productivity to tumble. In Asia, the first region to be affected, huge disruption occurred across what have been the world’s fastest-growing economies. The Asian Development Bank forecasts that productivity in Asia-Pacific could shrink between...

TikTok teens and K-pop stans don’t belong to the “resistance”

The great TikTok teen and K-pop fan plan to embarrass US President Donald Trump at his rally last weekend in Tulsa, Oklahoma, began with a grandmother named Mary Jo Laupp. Two weeks ago the 51-year-old from Iowa made a TikTok video for her 1,000 followers encouraging people to protest against Trump by signing up for his rally online and then not showing up.  The idea wasn’t exactly new....


MONDAY 22. JUNE 2020


Asian-Americans are using Slack groups to explain racism to their parents

Jess Fong was feeling restless. Black Lives Matter protests stemming from the death of George Floyd were spreading, and she wanted to help. So she started scrolling through the plethora of lists that appeared online in the days after Floyd’s death of resources on how to fight racism. She found the advice limiting, particularly for the Asian-American community. “We’re not Black and we’re...

Cloud and complexity in IT

It’s an old story by now—cloud is the computing of the future. What has become evident in recent years, however, is cloud has established itself as the computing of the present—and the agile IT architecture it has enabled is critical to any organization’s efforts to increase efficiency and business resilience. In other words, transitioning IT capabilities to the cloud is seen as a (if not...

Improving data strategy to create the best customer experiences

Businesses today have a wealth of information to draw upon. It comes from customer touchpoints, mobile interactions, internet-of-things (IoT) devices, e-commerce transactions, and many more sources. And corporate governance has made it easier to comply with data privacy rules, so organizations can be confident about the data quality. But usefulness? That’s a major challenge that many brands...

Baidu’s deep-learning platform fuels the rise of industrial AI

AI is driving industrial transformation across a variety of sectors, and we’re just beginning to scratch the surface of AI capabilities. Some industrial innovations are barely noticed, such as forest inspection for fire hazards and prevention, but the benefits of AI when coupled with deep learning have a wide-ranging impact. In Southeast Asia, AI-powered forest drones have helped 155...

How green sand could capture billions of tons of carbon dioxide

A pair of palm-tree-fringed coves form two narrow notches, about a quarter of a mile apart, along the shoreline of an undisclosed island somewhere in the Caribbean. After a site visit in early March, researchers with the San Francisco nonprofit Project Vesta determined that the twin inlets provided an ideal location to study an obscure method of capturing the carbon dioxide driving climate...

Virgin Galactic and NASA have launched a new program to train private astronauts

Virgin Galactic announced it has signed a deal with NASA to develop a “private orbital astronaut readiness program” that trains and supports private astronauts for missions to the International Space Station. The background: Last year NASA announced it was accepting bids from private companies for missions to the space station, both as a tourist destination and to use its resources and the...

Lockdown forced sports to go virtual. The experience will change them forever.

The roar inside a packed stadium is felt more than heard, a kind of whole-body buzz. As the announcer on the PA brings the crowd to a crescendo, techno music pumping and lights strafing our heads, distant figures file onto the stage, sit in front of keyboards and PC screens, and fit helicopter-grade headphones over their ears to shut out the sound of 10,000 people chanting their names.  ...


SUNDAY 21. JUNE 2020


Trump’s data-hungry, invasive app is a voter surveillance tool of extraordinary power

Ahead of President Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his 2020 re-election campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted about the event. “Just passed 800,000 tickets,” he wrote. “Biggest data haul and rally signup of all time by 10x. Saturday is going to be amazing!” Parscale’s numbers for the rally—originally scheduled for Juneteenth and still set to occur…


FRIDAY 19. JUNE 2020


The UK’s contact tracing app fiasco is a master class in mismanagement

There are advantages to being one of the world’s largest single-payer health-care systems. For the UK’s National Health Service, the NHS, big data is increasingly one of them.  Its Recovery Trial, launched early in the coronavirus outbreak to collect information from across the system, has led to the discovery of dexamethasone as one of the most promising life-saving treatments for the...

Our biggest questions about immunity to covid-19

We’re still not very sure how covid-19 immunity works. As we inch closer to a vaccine and pin our hopes on herd immunity to allow us to safely open up communities again, the uncertainties will only get more pressing. Here’s a look at some of the biggest questions we’re still trying to answer.  How much immunity are we talking about? When most people (i.e., the general public) talk about...

The global AI agenda: The Middle East and Africa

This report is part of “The global AI agenda,” a thought leadership program by MIT Technology Review Insights examining how organizations are using AI today and planning to do so in the future. Featuring a global survey of 1,004 AI experts conducted in January and February 2020, it explores AI adoption, leading use cases, benefits, and challenges, and seeks to understand how organizations...


THURSDAY 18. JUNE 2020


Here’s how genes from covid-19 survivors could help you

Potential weapons against covid-19 include manufactured antibodies, serum transfusions from survivors, antivirals, steroids, and more than 100 vaccine candidates, some now advancing toward decisive tests in volunteers. But there’s another approach to battling the virus—one that hasn’t won much attention, but which in the future could become the fastest way to beat back a pandemic. It...

The UK is abandoning its current contact tracing app for Google and Apple’s system

The news: The UK is going to abandon its current contact tracing app in favor of one based on technology built by Apple and Google, the BBC reports. Tests of its existing app among residents on the Isle of Wight found it had trouble recognizing iPhones. The app had been supposed to launch for the rest of the country in mid-May. What this means: All contact tracing apps work on the same...

The startup making deep learning possible without specialized hardware

The discovery that led Nir Shavit to start a company came about the way most discoveries do: by accident. The MIT professor was working on a project to reconstruct a map of a mouse’s brain and needed some help from deep learning. Not knowing how to program graphics cards, or GPUs, the most common hardware choice for deep-learning models, he opted instead for a central processing unit, or CPU,...


WEDNESDAY 17. JUNE 2020


Lecturing at home

Jacob White, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, was invited by Dean of Digital Learning Krisha Rajagopal to share the details of his teaching-from-home set up with the Academic Continuity Working Group. In this short video during one of the ACWG’s 8 a.m. calls, he walks through how he devised a makeshift lecture...

Podcast: Robots are the new recruits on the pandemic’s front lines

We give robots some pretty scary and stressful jobs: cleaning up nuclear sites, inspecting pipelines from the inside, exploring  the frozen wastes of Mars. The arrival of the coronavirus has transformed more familiar settings, like grocery stores and hospitals, into potentially hazardous environments as well. Erika Hayasaki, a writer and journalism professor in California, learned…

Weather and climate lab lecture

After students in 12.307 left campus, they were able to study atmospheric wind patterns using a virtual laboratory created from video of a real experiment using animation software. The above video shows a can of icy water placed at the center of a circular tank of warm water on a slowly rotating platform, creating flow patterns that can be...

Toy Design Lectures

Watch a sample lecture: This clip from a “new and improved” 2.00b lecture covers goals for the students’ CAD milestone and provides tips for designing under constraints. It’s part of a 1.5-hour lecture that also includes a tutorial on using electronics components. The 2.00b teaching team wrote, filmed, and produced the full-length...