IT infomation

This weekend I’m going to break my isolation for the first time in two months. Aside from occasional socially distanced bike rides and walks in the park with a handful of trusted friends, I haven’t spent time with anyone, much less touched anyone beyond a hasty (and sleeved) elbow bump. But now I’ve agreed with […]

As the covid-19 pandemic rages, technologists everywhere have been rushing to build apps, services, and systems for contact tracing: identifying and notifying all those who come in contact with a carrier. Some are lightweight and temporary, while others are pervasive and invasive: China’s system, for example, sucks up data including citizens’ identity, location, and even

The news: In a fresh spin on manufactured pop, OpenAI has released a neural network called Jukebox that can generate catchy songs in a variety of different styles, from teenybop and country to hip-hop and heavy metal. It even sings—sort of.  How it works: Give it a genre, an artist, and lyrics, and Jukebox will

In Portland, Oregon, earlier this spring, a programmer named Ian Hilgart-Martiszus pulled out a needle and inserted it into the arm of social worker Alicia Rowe as she squinted and looked away. He was testing for antibodies to the coronavirus. He’d gathered 40 friends and friends of friends, and six homeless men too. As a

Since the onset of the pandemic, the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard Kennedy’s Shorenstein Center, where I am the director, has been investigating how misinformation, scams, and conspiracies about covid-19 circulate online. If fraudsters are now using the virus to dupe unsuspecting individuals, we thought, then our research on misinformation should focus

The covid-19 pandemic has shown us how much health care is in need of not just tweaking but radical change. The pressure on global health systems, providers, and staff has already been increasing to unsustainable levels. But it also illustrates how much can be achieved in times of crisis: for example, China and the UK

Rizwan Malik had always had an interest in AI. As the lead radiologist at the Royal Bolton Hospital, run by the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), he saw its potential to make his job easier. In his hospital, patients often had to wait six hours or more for a specialist to look at their x-rays.

Coronavirus testing in the US is nowhere near where it should be. A recent road map suggested we need to test upwards of 20 million people every day in order to safely reopen the economy (we’re currently running around 150,000 a day). To scale up, we need to move beyond conventional methods—and that might require an entirely different

One of Israel’s largest health maintenance organizations is using artificial intelligence to help identify which of the 2.4 million people it covers are most at risk of severe covid-19 complications. Maccabi Healthcare Services says the system—which it developed with AI company Medial EarlySign—has already flagged 2% of its members, amounting to around 40,000 people. Once identified,

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, or even masks and ventilators? He writes: “We could have these things but we

When President Trump suggested during a press conference that doctors should look into treating covid-19 patients with an “injection inside” of disinfectant, “or almost a cleaning,” Austin Chiang, a gastroenterologist at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, knew he had to react.  In his lab coat and scrubs, a stethoscope draped around his neck, and

Ingredients: 2 Cups flour (300 grams) 1 Tablespoon baking powder 3 Tablespoons sugar ¼ Teaspoon salt 5 Tablespoons salted butter, very cold and cut into small chunks ¾ Cup dried fruit, such as dried cherries, currants, dried blueberries, or chocolate chips 1 ¼ Cups heavy cream Granulated sugar for sprinkling on top Baking instruction: Preheat

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 detector. On the left is a

Ron Kim was already convinced that money should be redesigned. Now that the coronavirus epidemic has hit, he’s doubling down.  Before covid-19 started spreading in the United States, Kim, a New York assemblyman who represents a district in Queens, had been pushing for the state to create a publicly run digital payment system. He and

Results from surveys tracking the true spread of the coronavirus are all over the map—but one done in the heart of the technology sector says the germ is more widespread, and less deadly, than widely believed. The new survey looked for antibodies to covid-19 in the blood of 3,300 residents of Santa Clara County, which

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine announced plans to launch a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying two astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) on May 27. If the launch takes place, it will be the first time an American rocket will carry passengers to orbit since the final space shuttle launch on July 8, 2011. The

I stop the car when I see him walking slowly down the empty footpath outside our now shuttered building—I know he lives on campus and is far from home. I sent my students away more than a week ago; I think of them as diasporic now, not necessarily remote, but it is still a shock

The blood sample arrived in Vancouver by courier on February 25. It wasn’t much to look at, but to the scientists at the 117-person biotechnology company AbCellera, it was precious. The blood had been drawn from an male survivor of covid-19 in the US. The company was told it was the very first blood sample