Increasing amounts of data require holistic governanceMIT Technology Review Insights
As companies struggle to process, store, and leverage ever-increasing amounts of structured and unstructured data, data governance is becoming a critical part of every company’s data management. Governance not only helps a company understand and use its data, but it ensures everyone has access to the data they need, when they need it. “Data doesn’t have much value if it lies dormant in your system, where no one can gain insight from it,” says Salim Syed, head of engineering for Capital One Slingshot. “A well-governed data platform brings data out of that darkness.” Effective governance also enables a company to […]
The Download: cancer-spotting AI and a new covid waveRhiannon Williams
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Doctors using AI catch breast cancer more often than either does alone The news: Radiologists assisted by an AI diagnose breast cancer more successfully than when they work alone, according to new research. That same AI also produces more accurate results in the hands of a radiologist than it does when operating solo. Why it’s important: The large-scale study, published this month in The Lancet Digital Health, is the first to directly compare an AI’s performance in breast […]
Doctors using AI catch breast cancer more often than either does aloneHana Kiros
Radiologists assisted by an AI screen for breast cancer more successfully than they do when they work alone, according to new research. That same AI also produces more accurate results in the hands of a radiologist than it does when operating solo. The large-scale study, published this month in The Lancet Digital Health, is the first to directly compare an AI’s performance in breast cancer screening according to whether it’s used alone or to assist a human expert. The hope is that such AI systems could save lives by detecting cancers doctors miss, free up radiologists to see more patients, […]
The Download: police misinformation in Minnesota, and borderless digital repressionRhiannon Williams
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The secret police: A private security group regularly sent Minnesota police misinformation about protestors When US marshals shot and killed a 32-year-old Black man named Winston Boogie Smith Jr. in a parking garage in Minneapolis on June 3, 2021, the city was already in a full-blown policing crisis. George Floyd had been murdered by a member of the police force the previous May. As protests reignited all over the city, the cops couldn’t keep up. Into the void […]
Digital repression across borders is on the riseDavid Silverberg
Khatab Alrawhani, a Yemen-born journalist and activist, thought he could escape the persecution that journalists were experiencing in the Middle East when he left the region. But it followed him. While studying in Washington, DC, in 2015, he published posts denouncing the Houthi coup, in which an armed faction overthrew the Yemeni government. His father was briefly arrested. Soon after, his brother was as well. When Alrawhani settled in Toronto, though, his online life took an unexpected turn. He started to get WhatsApp messages from women he’d never met, urging him to click a link they shared. The messages didn’t […]
The secret police: A private security group regularly sent Minnesota police misinformation about protestorsTate Ryan-Mosley, Sam Richards
When US marshals shot and killed a 32-year-old Black man named Winston Boogie Smith Jr. in a parking garage in Minneapolis’s Uptown neighborhood on June 3, 2021, the city was already in a full-blown policing crisis. Around 300 officers had quit over the previous two years amid near-constant protests and public criticism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a member of the police force in May 2020. Intense debates over the Minneapolis Police Department’s budget raged, and some Minneapolis council members were elected after campaigning on a platform of defunding the police. Adding yet more strain to the […]
The Download: a military AI boom, and China’s industrial espionageRhiannon Williams
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Why business is booming for military AI startups Exactly two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Alexander Karp, the CEO of data analytics company Palantir, made his pitch to European leaders. With war on their doorstep, Europeans ought to modernize their arsenals with Silicon Valley’s help, he argued in an open letter. Militaries are responding to the call. NATO announced on June 30 that it is creating a $1 billion innovation fund that will invest in early-stage […]
Why business is booming for military AI startups Melissa Heikkilä
Exactly two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Alexander Karp, the CEO of data analytics company Palantir, made his pitch to European leaders. With war on their doorstep, Europeans ought to modernize their arsenals with Silicon Valley’s help, he argued in an open letter. For Europe to “remain strong enough to defeat the threat of foreign occupation,” Karp wrote, countries need to embrace “the relationship between technology and the state, between disruptive companies that seek to dislodge the grip of entrenched contractors and the federal government ministries with funding.” Militaries are responding to the call. NATO announced on June […]
The Download: Tweaking AI for energy efficiency, and China’s leaked dataRhiannon Williams
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. These simple changes can make AI research much more energy efficient What’s the news?: Deep learning is behind machine learning’s most high-profile successes. But this incredible performance comes at a cost: training deep-learning models requires huge amounts of energy. Now, new research shows how scientists who use cloud platforms to train algorithms can dramatically reduce the energy they use, and therefore the emissions they create. How can they do it?: Simple changes to cloud settings are the key. […]
These simple changes can make AI research much more energy efficientTammy Xu
Deep learning is behind machine learning’s most high-profile successes, such as advanced image recognition, the board game champion AlphaGo, and language models like GPT-3. But this incredible performance comes at a cost: training deep-learning models requires huge amounts of energy. Now, new research shows how scientists who use cloud platforms to train deep-learning algorithms can dramatically reduce the energy they consume, and therefore the emissions this work generates. Simple changes to cloud settings are the key. Since the first paper studying this technology’s impact on the environment was published three years ago, a movement has grown among researchers to self-report […]