Raesetje Sefala grew up sharing a bedroom with her six siblings in a cramped township in the Limpopo province of South Africa. The township’s inhabitants, predominantly Black people, had inadequate access to schools, health care, parks, and hospitals. But just a few miles away in Limpopo, white families lived in big, attractive houses, with easy…
The first documented case of pancreatic cancer dates back to the 18th century. Since then, researchers have undertaken a protracted and challenging odyssey to understand the elusive and deadly disease. To date, there is no better cancer treatment than early intervention. Unfortunately, the pancreas, nestled deep within the abdomen, is particularly elusive for early detection. …
In order for natural language to be an effective form of communication, the parties involved need to be able to understand words and their context, assume that the content is largely shared in good faith and is trustworthy, reason about the information being shared, and then apply it to real-world scenarios. MIT PhD students interning with…
What is the likelihood of dying in a plane crash? According to a 2022 report released by the International Air Transport Association, the industry fatality risk is 0.11. In other words, on average, a person would need to take a flight every day for 25,214 years to have a 100 percent chance of experiencing a…
A new AI system could help detect the most common form of pancreatic cancer, new research has found. Pancreatic cancer is a difficult disease to detect. The pancreas itself is hidden by other organs in the abdomen, making it tough to spot tumors during tests. Patients also rarely experience symptoms in the early stages, meaning…
Google DeepMind has created an AI system that can solve complex geometry problems. It’s a significant step towards machines with more human-like reasoning skills, experts say. Geometry, and mathematics more broadly, have challenged AI researchers for some time. Compared with text-based AI models, there is significantly less training data for mathematics because it is symbol…
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Last year was a banner year for artificial intelligence. Thanks to products like ChatGPT, many millions of people are now directly interacting with AI, talking about it, and grappling with its impact…
ChatGPT was released just over a year ago (at the end of November 2022), and countless people have already written about their experiences using it in all sorts of settings. (I even contributed my own hot take last year with my O’Reilly Radar article Real-Real-World Programming with ChatGPT.) What more is left to say by…
There was one individual Olympic spot left. According to the intricate set of rules governing who gets slots for the games, it would come down to who placed highest in the high bar final: Croatia’s Tin Srbić or Brazil’s Arthur Nory Mariano. They were at the 2023 World Championships in Antwerp, Belgium, last October. Mariano…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Welcome back to The Algorithm! I have a chair of shame at home. By that I mean a chair in my bedroom onto which I pile used clothes that aren’t quite…