About: blatcho

When Erik Duhaime PhD ’19 was working on his thesis in MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence, he noticed his wife, then a medical student, spending hours studying on apps that offered flash cards and quizzes. His research had shown that, as a group, medical students could classify skin lesions more accurately than professional dermatologists; the […]

Strategies for overscheduled, under-connected employees.

How to help employees embrace curiosity, failure, and learning.

How to leverage the tension of opposing ideas to make smarter strategic decisions.

What one educator wants students, teachers, and everyone else to know about the ethics of using of AI in education.

It’s the nicest tablet the company has ever made, but it’s not worth your money.

The spotted-wing drosophila is a threat to fruit growers across the US and Europe. Crispr could thwart the pest’s numbers.

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Carl Pei’s Nothing raised $96M led by Highland ahead of its Phone (2) announcement, taking its total funding to $250M; sources put 2022 revenue at $200M  —  Smartphone sales are in decline as handset makers grapple with saturated markets and a tough consumer economic climate.

Emma Roth / The Verge: DoorDash announces new features for couriers, including “earn by time” for a guaranteed hourly minimum rate, real-time location sharing, and Dash Along the Way  —  DoorDash is making a big change to the way couriers get paid.  In an announcement on Wednesday …

New York Times: UK convenience stores are increasingly using facial recognition to combat shoplifting, something critics say is a disproportionate solution for minor crimes  —  British merchants are increasingly using the technology to combat shoplifting, raising questions about its spread as artificial intelligence rapidly improves it.

A savvy hacker can obtain secret information, such as a password, by observing a computer program’s behavior, like how much time that program spends accessing the computer’s memory. Security approaches that completely block these “side-channel attacks” are so computationally expensive that they aren’t feasible for many real-world systems. Instead, engineers often apply what are known […]

From American Born Chinese to Secret Invasion, here’s everything you should be watching on Disney+.

Generative AI is already being tapped to write books, but it struggles with basic narrative. Just look at what happens when you make one a dungeon master.

Turning your kitchen into a café is a great way to learn (or hone) the art of making the perfect shot.

Foo Yun Chee / Reuters: EU countries and lawmakers reach a provisional agreement on the Data Act, establishing rules on how Big Tech and other firms use EU consumer and corporate data  —  EU countries and EU lawmakers on Tuesday agreed on rules that govern how Big Tech and other companies use European consumer and […]

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: OpenAI’s ChatGPT iOS app adds Bing for ChatGPT Plus subscribers, letting them get answers on information that extend beyond ChatGPT’s original training data  —  ChatGPT on mobile can now surf the web.  But only via Bing.  —  Today, OpenAI announced that subscribers to ChatGPT Plus …

Sapna Maheshwari / New York Times: TikTok admits that it’s funding the TikTok creators’ lawsuit in Montana challenging the state’s ban of the app, but says it’s not paying the creators directly  —  The popular video service had deflected questions about its involvement in the creators’ lawsuit for more than a month.

Physicists have been riveted by systems composed of materials only one or a few layers of atoms thick. When a few sheets of these two-dimensional materials are stacked together, a geometric pattern called a moiré pattern can be formed. In these so-called moiré systems, new, exotic phenomena can occur, including superconductivity and unconventional magnetism. As […]

MIT has again been named the world’s top university by the QS World University Rankings, which were announced today. This is the 12th year in a row MIT has received this distinction. The full 2024 edition of the rankings — published by Quacquarelli Symonds, an organization specializing in education and study abroad — can be […]

Sihan Chen’s fascination with languages began when he was a teenager in his high school choir in his hometown of Shenzhen, China. “We sang religious and folk songs in different languages like Mandarin, English, Albanian, and Latin, and I would look up how to pronounce words in different languages,” he says. These early experiences planted […]

Multinationals that don’t have a plan for building subsidiaries in the country risk missing out on one of the most promising market opportunities in the world today.

How enterprise leaders can deliver results in scarce times — and build the capabilities to fuel future growth.

A conversation with ButcherBox CEO Mike Salguero on profitability from the get-go.

These nontoxic beds and bedsheets are easier on the environment and your health—and they feel like a dream.

Microbes aren’t as charismatic as megafauna, but they outnumber humans—and their welfare deserves consideration.

If you need a quick getaway, consider a digital stroll through the world’s biggest metropolises.

Sanne Wass / Bloomberg: The EU launches four “crash test” facilities for AI tools, funded by a €220M investment, which will let companies test AI and robotics in real-life settings  —  The Europe Union is introducing “crash test” systems for artificial intelligence to ensure new innovations are safe before they hit the market.

Wall Street Journal: Sources: US government official Kurt Campbell confronted Sequoia’s Don Vieira in DC over the VC firm’s ties to China, eventually leading to the three-way split  —  Scrutiny from Washington aggravated tensions within the venture-capital firm, fueling its decision to break up

Rebecca Bellan / TechCrunch: Tel Aviv-based NoTraffic, an AI-based traffic management service, raised a $50M Series B led by M&G Investments, following a $17.5M Series A in July 2021  —  AI-based traffic management platform NoTraffic has bagged $50 million in Series B funding as it picks up momentum in cities across …

Northvolt says that its massive factory in Sweden will soon produce enough batteries each year to power a million electric cars, with a much smaller carbon footprint than those made in China

The company’s new $1,799 smartphone proves the future is foldable.

The latest in Nintendo’s real-time strategy series is made for zoning out. In a good way.

Prepare flavorful fried food with little to no oil using this modern kitchen staple.

Rachel Metz / Bloomberg: Stability AI’s head of research David Ha and COO Ren Ito left the company in June 2023; VP of product Christian Cantrell left the company in March 2023  —  Stability AI, the closely watched artificial intelligence startup, has lost at least two top executives in recent weeks, including its head of […]

Aisha Malik / TechCrunch: Decentralized social media app Damus says Apple rejected an app update and asked it to either remove its tipping feature or use Apple’s in-app purchase system  —  Damus, a decentralized social networking app backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, will be removed from the App Store due to Apple’s strict payment […]

NewsGuard: Analysis: in May and June 2023, 141 major brands ran ads, mostly via Google Ads, across 55 low-quality sites with AI-generated articles, some posting ~1,200/day  —  NewsGuard identified 141 brands that are feeding programmatic ad dollars to low-quality AI-generated news and information sites operating with little to no human oversight

“Sensing is all around you,” said MIT.nano Associate Director Brian W. Anthony at Ambient Sensing, a half-day symposium presented in May by the MIT.nano Immersion Lab. Featuring MIT faculty and researchers from multiple disciplines, the event highlighted sensing technologies deployed everywhere from beneath the Earth’s surface to high into the exosphere. Brent Minchew, assistant professor […]

Researchers from the Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) interdisciplinary research group at Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, in collaboration with Nanyang Technological University Singapore (NTU Singapore) and National University Hospital, have discovered a novel therapy by combining two antibiotics, rifaximin and clarithromycin, to treat Mycobacterium abscessus, a non-tuberculous mycobacterium (NTM) […]

Over 600 MIT students are traveling abroad with the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) to intern, research, and work in organizations across 25 countries this summer. Twenty percent of the students were placed in areas related to climate and sustainability. Through MISTI, hundreds of MIT students travel abroad each summer to intern in […]

Who are you now, who do you want to be, and how can you stretch without taking on too much?

Protect your employees from burnout, prioritize retention, and visualize long-term success.

Identify the practices that lead organizations to overvalue the work of men.

Demis Hassabis says the company is working on a system called Gemini that will draw on techniques that powered AlphaGo to a historic victory over a Go champion in 2016.

They’re the easiest way to start building a smarter home.

Chronic illness patients often struggle to keep up with medications that need frequent, timely doses. What if a single shot lasted for months?

Financial Times: A profile of Korean chip engineer Choi Jin-seok, who embarked on a quixotic mission to lead China’s industry after his career stalled and faces IP theft charges  —  In 2006, a Korean engineer called Choi Jin-seok achieved a feat that earned him the nickname “master of semiconductor yield”.

Hope King / Axios: Amazon plans to build a local delivery network in 23 states by tapping thousands of small US businesses, such as bodegas and florists, to deliver packages  —  Amazon plans to tap thousands of U.S. small businesses, from bodegas to florists, to deliver its packages by the end of the year, Axios […]

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: IBM plans to acquire cloud IT management startup Apptio for $4.6B in cash from Vista Equity Partners, which paid $1.94B to take Apptio private in 2018  —  As cloud architecture continues to more ubiquitous among organizations, increasingly what is more apparent is that many organizations …

In need of comfort or celebration, people turn to carbs. We picked our favorite outdoor ovens for backyards, countertops, or camping.

Nina Jankowicz / The Atlantic: While there are effective laws in some states, including Virginia and California, outlawing the sharing of nonconsensual deepfake porn, a national law is needed  —  Because I was in the public eye, somebody synthesized explicit videos of me.  —  Recently, a Google Alert informed me that I am the subject […]