Payal Dhar

The part that artificial intelligence plays in climate change has come under scrutiny, including from tech workers themselves who joined the global climate strike last year. Much can be done by developing tools to quantify the carbon cost of machine learning models and by switching to a sustainable artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Nintendo's blockbuster game is playing digital host to Australia's annual independent arts festival.

Standing up a 4G/LTE network might seem well below the pay grade of a legendary innovation hub like Nokia Bell Labs. However, standing up that same network on the moon is another matter. Nokia and 13 other companies — including SpaceX and Lockheed-Martin — have won five-year contracts totaling over US$ 370 million from NASA to demonstrate key infrastructure technologies on the lunar surface. All of which is part of NASA’s Artemis program to return humans to the moon.

ulien Gelinas, 23, is really good at League of Legends, a multiplayer online battle arena game where players form teams of five “champions” and battle for control of an opposing team’s base. So good, in fact, that it earned him a full-ride scholarship to Maryville University, Missouri.

For India’s queer people, particularly younger people, the strict six-week nationwide lockdown between March and May meant not having access to affirming spaces.

So far, deep learning has comprised learning from static datasets, which makes AI really good at tasks related to correlations and associations. However, neural nets do not interpret cause-and effect, or why these associations and correlations exist. Nor are they particularly good at tasks that involve imagination, reasoning, and planning. This, in turn, limits AI from being able to generalize their learning and transfer their skills to another related environment.

When Shouzhong Zou and his team at the Department of Chemistry, American University, decided to try spinach as way to improve the performance of fuel cells, even they were a little surprised at how well it worked. In their proof-of-concept experiments, they used spinach—bought from local supermarkets—to make a carbon-rich catalyst that can be used in fuel cells and metal-air batteries.

Social distancing and travel are two things, much like Kipling’s East and West, that you'd imagine would never meet. Then the novel coronavirus made it clear that the tourism industry needed strategies to survive beyond the pandemic. Thus, we can now wander virtual galleries and museums, take off on digital safaris, and experience remote guided tours. But there is another way to be transported to new worlds and challenged in mind and, sometimes, body. We’re talking about gaming.

Back in the late 1980s, for English composition class, I wrote myself into the British author Enid Blyton’s novel Secret Island in the form of an impressive 25-page story. It left my teacher, who would have preferred to see my prolificacy manifest in some original writing, unmoved. But it wasn’t originality that I was after. I was looking for a place where I was accepted without question, without the second glances and probing questions that accompanied me wherever I went.

Machine assembly has commenced, but this gigantic nuclear fusion experiment costing tens of billions of dollars is nowhere near starting up.

Under normal circumstances, India’s 450-million-plus labor force is considered an asset. Yet the government’s badly handled COVID-19 lockdown has caused large-scale labor distress, especially to the poorest and most marginalized workers, who make up about a quarter of that number. Experts predicting the impact of COVID-19 on India’s economy paint a dismal picture, especially with a recent spike in the number of cases.

In India, the COVID-19 crisis is turning out to be the perfect excuse for the government to consolidate its pre-pandemic surveillance ambitions. Since May 4, as restrictions began to ease, the government has mandated the installation of its contact-tracing smartphone app for anyone who works—whether for the government, a private company, or in the gig economy—or uses public transport. Failing to do so is criminal, says the home affairs ministry.

Researchers have been banking on millions of citizen-scientists around the world to help identify new treatments for COVID-19. Much of that work is being done through distributed computing projects that utilize the surplus processing power of PCs to carry out various compute-intensive tasks.

While the SETI@home project winds down, one of the world’s most versatile telescope arrays gears up to scan the skies for alien life.