Subscribe to our Newsletter

The Download: fighting blackouts with battery-swap networks, and AI surgery monitoring

On the morning of April 3, Taiwan was hit by a 7.4 magnitude earthquake. Seconds later, hundreds of battery-swap stations in Taiwan sensed something else: the power frequency of the electric grid... Read more »

What using artificial intelligence to help monitor surgery can teach us

Teodor Grantcharov, a professor of surgery at Stanford, thinks he has found a tool to make surgery safer and minimize human error: AI-powered “black boxes” in operating theaters that work in a... Read more »

How battery-swap networks are preventing emergency blackouts

Gogoro is not the only company working on battery-swapping for electric scooters (New York City recently launched a pilot program to give delivery drivers the option to charge this way), but it’s... Read more »

The data practitioner for the AI era

Data practitioners are among those whose roles are experiencing the most significant change, as organizations expand their responsibilities. Rather than working in a siloed data team, data engineers are now developing platforms... Read more »

The Download: AI propaganda, and digital twins

—Josh A. Goldstein is a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), where he works on the CyberAI Project. Renée DiResta is the research manager of the... Read more »

Digital twins are helping scientists run the world’s most complex experiments

But the term “digital twin” actually came from a NASA employee named John Vickers, who first used it in 2010 as part of a technology road map report for the space agency.... Read more »

Propagandists are using AI too—and companies need to be open about it

OpenAI’s adversarial threat report should be a prelude to more robust data sharing moving forward. Where AI is concerned, independent researchers have begun to assemble databases of misuse—like the AI Incident Database... Read more »

The Download: making surgery safer, and MDMA therapy has been dealt a blow

The operating room has long been defined by its hush-hush nature because surgeons are notoriously bad at acknowledging their own mistakes. These mistakes kill some 22,000 Americans each year. Many of the... Read more »

This AI-powered “black box” could make surgery safer

While most algorithms operate near perfectly on their own, Peter Grantcharov explains that the OR black box is still not fully autonomous. For example, it’s difficult to capture audio through ceiling mikes... Read more »

FDA advisors just said no to the use of MDMA as a therapy

If the FDA denies approval of MDMA therapy, Lykos or another company could conduct additional studies and reapply. Many of the committee members said they believed MDMA does hold promise, but that... Read more »