Karen Hao
MIT Tech Review
Cambridge, MA, United States
Contact Karen
Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.
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Past articles by Karen:
A concept in psychology is helping AI to better navigate our world
The concept: When we look at a chair, regardless of its shape and color, we know that we can sit on it. When a fish is in water, regardless of its location, it knows that it can swim. This is known as the theory of affordance, a term coined by psychologist James J. Gibson. It… → Read More
AI researchers say scientific publishers help perpetuate racist algorithms
The news: An open letter from a growing coalition of AI researchers is calling out scientific publisher Springer Nature for a conference paper it reportedly planned to include in its forthcoming book Transactions on Computational Science & Computational Intelligence. The paper, titled “A Deep Neural Network Model to Predict Criminality Using Image Processing,” presents a… → Read More
Facebook’s AI is still largely baffled by covid misinformation
The news: In its latest Community Standards Enforcement Report, released today, Facebook detailed the updates it has made to its AI systems for detecting hate speech and disinformation. The tech giant says 88.8% of all the hate speech it removed this quarter was detected by AI, up from 80.2% in the previous quarter. The AI… → Read More
An AI algorithm inspired by how kids learn is harder to confuse
Information firehose: The standard practice for teaching a machine-learning algorithm is to give it all the details at once. Say you’re building an image classification system to recognize different species of animals. You show it examples of each species and label them accordingly: “German shepherd” and “poodle” for dogs, for example. But when a parent… → Read More
Machine learning could check if you’re social distancing properly at work
Andrew Ng’s startup Landing AI has created a new workplace monitoring tool that issues an alert when anyone is less than the desired distance from a colleague. Six feet apart: On Thursday, the startup released a blog post with a new demo video showing off a new social distancing detector. On the left is a… → Read More
Facebook is using bots to simulate what its users might do
Facebook has developed a new method to play out the consequences of its code. The context: Like any software company, the tech giant needs to test its product any time it pushes updates. But the sorts of debugging methods that normal-size companies use aren’t really enough when you’ve got 2.5 billion users. Such methods usually… → Read More
Here are the states that will suffer the worst hospital bed shortages
Every state’s healthcare capacity will have an outsized impact on Covid-19 deaths. → Read More
Why does it suddenly feel like 1999 on the internet?
The coronavirus pandemic has turned back the clock to a kinder time on the web, before the novelty of virtual connection wore off. Will it last? → Read More
Google taught this robotic dog to learn new tricks by imitating a real one
Google researchers are using imitation learning to teach autonomous robots how to pace, spin, and move in more agile ways.What they did: Using a data set of motion capture data recorded from various sensors attached to a dog, the researchers taught a quadruped robot named Laikago several different movements that are hard to achieve through traditional hand-coded robotic controls.How they did it:… → Read More
Why does it suddenly feel like 1999 on the internet?
The coronavirus pandemic has turned back the clock to a kinder time on the web, before the novelty of virtual connection wore off. Will it last? → Read More
AI can’t predict how a child’s life will turn out even with a ton of data
Hundreds of researchers attempted to predict children’s and families’ outcomes, using 15 years of data. None were able to do so with meaningful accuracy. → Read More
Google is using AI to design chips that will accelerate AI
A new reinforcement-learning algorithm has learned to optimize the placement of components on a computer chip to make it more efficient and less power-hungry.3D Tetris: Chip placement, also known as chip floor planning, is a complex three-dimensional design problem. → Read More
Google is using AI to design chips that will accelerate AI
A new reinforcement-learning algorithm has learned to optimize the placement of components on a computer chip to make it more efficient and less power-hungry. 3D Tetris: Chip placement, also known as chip floor planning, is a complex three-dimensional design problem. It requires the careful configuration of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of components across multiple layers in… → Read More
Warmer weather could slow the spread of the coronavirus
Several initial analyses of transmission data suggest the pandemic could ease up in summer. But that may not be enough. → Read More
Over 24,000 coronavirus research papers are now available in one place
The data set aims to accelerate scientific research that could fight the Covid-19 pandemic. → Read More
A new computer chip mimics the neurocircuitry of our noses to smell
It draws inspiration from the structure and electrical activity of the brain to distinguish between odors. → Read More
This is how the CDC is trying to forecast coronavirus’s spread
It has tapped one of the nation’s best flu-forecasting labs to retool its prediction algorithms for the Covid-19 pandemic. → Read More
How to practice social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic
Not everyone can work from home or cease traveling. Here’s what you can do when circumstance forces you to be out and about during the COVID-19 outbreak. → Read More
A hybrid AI model lets it reason about the world’s physics like a child
A new data set reveals just how bad AI is at reasoning—and suggests that a new hybrid approach might be the best way forward.Questions, questions: Known as CLEVRER, the data set consists of 20,000 short synthetic video clips and more than 300,000 question and answer pairings that reason about the events in the videos. → Read More
How Facebook uses machine learning to detect fake accounts
Fraudsters use fake accounts to spread spam, phishing links, or malware. Now Facebook is revealing details on how it uses AI to fight back. → Read More