Deep reinforcement learning has trained AIs to beat humans at complex games like Go and StarCraft. Could it also do a better job at running the economy? | Continue reading
Covid-19 conspiracy theorists are still getting millions of views on YouTube, even as the platform cracks down on health misinformation. | Continue reading
Starting in the fall of 2016 and continuing into 2018, researchers at Columbia University in Manhattan began collecting nasal swabs from 191 children, teachers, and emergency workers, asking them to record when they sneezed or had sore throats. The point was to create a map of co … | Continue reading
Note from Arthur Obermayer, friend of the author: In 1959, I worked as a scientist at Allied Research Associates in Boston. The company was an MIT spinoff that originally focused on the effects of nuclear weapons on aircraft structures. The company received a contract with the ac … | Continue reading
What it is, where it comes from, how it hurts us, and how we fight it. | Continue reading
There is widespread agreement that the only way to safely reopen the economy is through a massive increase in testing. The US needs to test millions of people per day to effectively track and then contain the covid-19 pandemic. This is a tall order. The country tested only around … | Continue reading
If AI is really going to make a difference to patients we need to know how it works when real humans get their hands on it, in real situations. | Continue reading
The coronavirus pandemic is turning medical professionals into social media stars, even the most successful say that being a positive influence is difficult. | Continue reading
Starting in the fall of 2016 and continuing into 2018, researchers at Columbia University in Manhattan began collecting nasal swabs from 191 children, teachers, and emergency workers, asking them to record when they sneezed or had sore throats. The point was to create a map of co … | Continue reading
Using Bluetooth signals to tell you if you’ve been put at risk of covid-19 is the cornerstone of contact tracing apps. But doing it well is a complex and challenging task—even for the experts. | Continue reading
The frustration in Marc Andreessen’s post on our failure to prepare and respond competently to the coronavirus pandemic is palpable, and his diagnosis is adamant: “a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to ‘build.’” Why don’t we have vaccines and medicines … | Continue reading
Just like that, our internet connection has become an umbilical to the outside world. We now depend on it to do our jobs, to go to school, and to see other people. It is our primary source of entertainment. And we’re using it a lot. Between January and late March, internet traffi … | Continue reading
The data was gathered from more than one million Facebook users who filled in a survey created by Carnegie Mellon University about whether they were experiencing symptoms like a cough or a fever. | Continue reading
How researchers, archivists, and citizens are racing to preserve a record of we lived and changed during this strange period of history. | Continue reading
Transfusions of blood serum from people who’ve recovered from covid-19 could help severe cases recover, according to a new study from China. Plasma donation: The concept of using blood from survivors—or “convalescent plasma”—isn’t new, but it’s now being tried against covid-19 be … | Continue reading
“It’s my first global pandemic. How about you?” Jonathan Rothberg wanted to know. Rothberg is a high-energy biotech entrepreneur who has been trapped in quarantine on his super-yacht, the Gene Machine, since mid-March, when we first reached him by phone. The creator of a fast DNA … | Continue reading
Andrew Ng’s startup Landing AI has created a new workplace monitoring tool that issues an alert when anyone is less than the desired distance from a colleague. Six feet apart: On Thursday, the startup released a blog post with a new demo video showing off a new social distancing … | Continue reading
The inside story of how one Indian state is flattening the curve through epic levels of contact tracing and social assistance. | Continue reading
Coronavirus was a test, and many of the world’s most advanced nations have all too visibly failed. What can we do better? | Continue reading
It’s widely accepted that the first computer program was written by Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, in 1842, although a device for which it was intended wasn’t built in her lifetime. But a reader asks: what is the oldest computer program that was not only written and put into use … | Continue reading
A new reinforcement-learning algorithm has learned to optimize the placement of components on a computer chip to make it more efficient and less power-hungry. 3D Tetris: Chip placement, also known as chip floor planning, is a complex three-dimensional design problem. It requires … | Continue reading
Two weeks ago, Danielle Baskin had an idea for a tongue-in-cheek art project. Now, she’s suddenly big in China. While talking with friends about the coronavirus outbreak, Baskin, an artist in San Francisco, realized that people using face masks to protect themselves from infecti … | Continue reading
On a sultry summer night in July 2019, the MV Manukai was arriving at the port of Shanghai, near the mouth of the Huangpu River. This busy tributary of the Yangtze winds through the city and includes the Bund, a historic waterfront area and tourist hot spot. Shanghai would be the … | Continue reading
In one of the first such efforts in the country, San Francisco is assembling a task force to interview and trace the interactions of every person who tests positive for covid-19. The goal is to find who gave it to them and whom they may have given it to, in the hopes of isolating … | Continue reading
To stop coronavirus we will need to radically change almost everything we do: how we work, exercise, socialize, shop, manage our health, educate our kids, take care of family members. We all want things to go back to normal quickly. But what most of us have probably not yet reali … | Continue reading
How many people have really been infected by the coronavirus? In one German town a preliminary answer is in: about 14%. The municipality of Gangelt, near the border with the Netherlands, was hard hit by covid-19 after a February carnival celebration drew thousands to the town, tu … | Continue reading
Just like that, our internet connection has become an umbilical to the outside world. We now depend on it to do our jobs, to go to school, and to see other people. It is our primary source of entertainment. And we’re using it a lot. Between January and late March, internet traffi … | Continue reading
Regulatory changes and anxiety heightened by isolation are leading to a boom in use of mental health apps and teletherapy—but are they good enough? | Continue reading
You asked about Covid-19. We answer. | Continue reading
The coronavirus pandemic has turned back the clock to a kinder time on the web, before the novelty of virtual connection wore off. Will it last? | Continue reading
That could lend more weight to the argument in favor of wearing a mask while in public. | Continue reading
The news: An artificial intelligence called Agent57 has learned to play all 57 Atari video games in the Arcade Learning environment, a collection of classic games that researchers use to test the limits of their deep-learning models. | Continue reading
Zoom has rapidly become the video-conferencing platform of choice as people stay home during the coronavirus pandemic. Now it’s under pressure. | Continue reading
We spoke to Ian Haydon, who will soon be one of 45 people who will get an experimental covid-19 vaccine in Seattle. | Continue reading
Digital manufacturers are stepping in to crank out nasal swabs, ventilator parts, and more as critical supply chains fail. | Continue reading
A new reinforcement-learning algorithm has learned to optimize the placement of components on a computer chip to make it more efficient and less power-hungry.3D Tetris: Chip placement, also known as chip floor planning, is a complex three-dimensional design problem. | Continue reading
It won’t be pleasant, but it could help prove quickly if a Covid-19 vaccine works. | Continue reading
Watch our visualization to see how confirmed cases outside China have exploded in recent weeks. | Continue reading
The virus prefers steel and plastic, materials commonly found in hospitals and homes. | Continue reading
By pitting neural networks against one another, Ian Goodfellow has created a powerful AI tool. Now he, and the rest of us, must face the consequences. | Continue reading
Once enough people get Covid-19, it will stop spreading on its own. But the costs will be devastating. | Continue reading
Francois Balloux, a computational epidemiologist who worked on an influential new coronavirus model, on the trade-offs that have to be made. | Continue reading
Social distancing is here to stay for much more than a few weeks. It will upend our way of life, in some ways forever. | Continue reading
Though it’s theoretically possible, there is no evidence that physical money—or any inanimate surface, for that matter—helps the virus spread. | Continue reading
Private Kit: Safe Paths shares information about your movements in a privacy-preserving way—and could let health officials tackle coronavirus hot spots. | Continue reading
Two men who invented game-changing 3D computer graphics techniques now widely used in the film industry have won the highest distinction in computer science: the Turing Award. | Continue reading
Social distancing is here to stay for much more than a few weeks. It will upend our way of life, in some ways forever. | Continue reading