The year 2020 was profoundly challenging for citizens, companies, and governments around the world. As covid-19 spread, requiring far-reaching health and safety restrictions, artificial intelligence (AI) applications played a crucial role in saving lives and fostering economic resilience. Research and …
Category: Tech News
We may have only weeks to act before a variant coronavirus dominates the US
The US may face a rapidly closing window to bring a suspected extra-contagious variant of covid-19 under control.
If the variant strain, first spotted in the United Kingdom, is as infectious as some suspect, it could dominate US case …
Jumbled-up sentences show that AIs still don’t really understand language
Many AIs that appear to understand language and that score better than humans on a common set of comprehension tasks don’t notice when the words in a sentence are jumbled up, which shows that they don’t really understand language at …
2021 planning: New business models, big opportunity
When the pandemic threw the world into disarray in spring 2020, most organizations responded by holding on—barely, at times. Executives assessed the impact on operations and dealt with the immediate emergency. Now businesses are ready to move beyond resilience and …
Big Tech’s attention economy can be reformed. Here’s how.
This week a violent mob mounted the biggest attack on the Capitol, the seat of American democracy, in more than 200 years, driven by the false belief that the presidential election had been stolen. The chief author of that claim …
Users, not tech executives, should decide what constitutes free speech online
On January 7, following the violent white supremacist riots that breached the US Capitol, Twitter and Facebook both suspended President Donald Trump from their platforms. The next day, Twitter made its suspension permanent. Many praised the decision for preventing …
Five ways to make AI a greater force for good in 2021
A year ago, none the wiser about what 2020 would bring, I reflected on the pivotal moment that the AI community was in. The previous year, 2018, had seen a series of high-profile automated failures, like self-driving-car crashes and discriminatory …
The odds of US climate progress just improved a bit
The outcomes in Georgia’s runoff Senate elections hand the Democratic Party control of both chambers of Congress, easing the path for President-elect Joe Biden to achieve progress on his ambitious climate agenda, at least during the next two years.
The …
Without leadership on vaccine rollout, scams are inevitable
To say the first few weeks of vaccine delivery have been turbulent would be an understatement. States across the US have found themselves struggling with underdeveloped logistics that have caused problems in delivery and made rollout slower than promised. …
Singapore’s police now have access to contact tracing data
The news: Police will be able to access data collected by Singapore’s covid-19 contact tracing system for use in criminal investigations, a senior official said on Monday. The announcement contradicts the privacy policy originally outlined when the government launched …