Technology

AI-based data analytics enable business insight

December 19, 2022
Remember buying music on CDs? Or even vinyl? From the consumer perspective, the shift to streaming services provides a limitless selection of content that we can access on all of our devices. For the music industry, it creates tremendous opportunities to collect, analyze, and monetize data about our listening habits. That was the directive SK…

Helm.ai snags $31M to scale its ‘unsupervised’ autonomous driving software

December 19, 2022

A few bright spots remain in the autonomous vehicle industry even amid macroeconomic headwinds that have nearly shut off the spigot of venture capital and led to further consolidation. Helm.ai, a startup developing software designed for advanced driver assistance systems, autonomous driving and robotics, is one of them. The Menlo Park, Calif-based startup recently raised […]

Helm.ai snags $31M to scale its ‘unsupervised’ autonomous driving software by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook?

December 19, 2022
In the fall of 2020, gig workers in Venezuela posted a series of images to online forums where they gathered to talk shop. The photos were mundane, if sometimes intimate, household scenes captured from low angles—including some you really wouldn’t want shared on the Internet.  In one particularly revealing shot, a young woman in a…

A gallery of presidents

December 19, 2022
When Sally Kornbluth becomes MIT’s 18th president on January 1, 2023, she joins a long line of leaders that includes mathematicians, chemists, physicists, engineers, an astronomer, a neurobiologist, two Rad Lab researchers, a US Census superintendent, a dean of the Sloan School, and an editor of Technology Review—many of whom served as scientific advisors to…

Rerouting

December 19, 2022
When I tell people that I work on getting robots to cook and do household chores, they often ask me why this is so difficult. “A child can learn to make an omelet,” they say. “Why is it so hard for a robot?” I usually tell them that they think it’s so easy because they’re…

The Download: metaverse ethics, and spotting AI text

December 19, 2022
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. I just watched Biggie Smalls perform ‘live’ in the metaverse For a moment on Friday, Biggie Smalls was the only man on stage. A spotlight shone on him in his red velvet suit,…