TSMC reports a record ~$17B in Q1 revenue, up 36% YoY and above estimates, boosted by increased demand for chips as the prolonged shortage helped raise prices (Betty Hou/Bloomberg)

Betty Hou / Bloomberg: TSMC reports a record ~$17B in Q1 revenue, up 36% YoY and above estimates, boosted by increased demand for chips as the prolonged shortage helped raise prices  —  Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. revenue rose to a record in the first quarter on demand for chips used in smartphones …

Gartner: total global tech spending will rise 4% YoY to $4.4T in 2022, device spending will reach $824.6B, and software spending will rise 9.8% YoY to $674.9B (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)

Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE: Gartner: total global tech spending will rise 4% YoY to $4.4T in 2022, device spending will reach $824.6B, and software spending will rise 9.8% YoY to $674.9B  —  The respected analyst firm Gartner Inc. said today in its latest forecast that worldwide information technology is expected …

US judge sentences Denys Iarmak, a Ukrainian and member of the FIN7 hacking group, to five years in prison; FIN7 has stolen 20M+ credit card numbers since 2015 (Tonya Riley/CyberScoop)

Tonya Riley / CyberScoop: US judge sentences Denys Iarmak, a Ukrainian and member of the FIN7 hacking group, to five years in prison; FIN7 has stolen 20M+ credit card numbers since 2015  —  Denys Iarmak, a high-level member of the criminal hacking group FIN7, was sentenced to five years in prison today by a U.S. […]

Bridging communities to reimagine cultural preservation

Many young people in rural communities around the world feel the need move to big cities in order to find work. The migration has unfortunate ripple effects. In the cities, people with less formal education are often relegated to slums and can become the victims of exploitation. Meanwhile, the families, communities, and rich cultural traditions […]

Twitter says its ALT badge for images with text descriptions and an expanded description window is now available globally, after testing the features in March (Kim Lyons/The Verge)

Kim Lyons / The Verge: Twitter says its ALT badge for images with text descriptions and an expanded description window is now available globally, after testing the features in March  —  The platform said earlier this year it was making improvements to the process  —  Twitter said Thursday that its ALT badge …

Microsoft says it obtained a court order to take control of seven domains used by Russia-linked hacking group Strontium, disrupting its attacks on Ukraine (Sergiu Gatlan/BleepingComputer)

Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer: Microsoft says it obtained a court order to take control of seven domains used by Russia-linked hacking group Strontium, disrupting its attacks on Ukraine  —  Microsoft has successfully disrupted attacks against Ukrainian targets coordinated by the Russian APT28 hacking group after taking …

Sensor Tower: Tencent’s Honor of Kings and PUBG Mobile are the world’s most lucrative mobile games, respectively earning $735.4M and $643M in revenue in Q1 2022 (Xinmei Shen/South China Morning Post)

Xinmei Shen / South China Morning Post: Sensor Tower: Tencent’s Honor of Kings and PUBG Mobile are the world’s most lucrative mobile games, respectively earning $735.4M and $643M in revenue in Q1 2022  —  Honour of Kings, PUBG Mobile and Genshin Impact remained the most lucrative mobile games in the world in the first quarter […]

MIT welcomes two from the Heising-Simons Foundation 51 Pegasi b Fellowship for 2022

MIT’s School of Science welcomes postdocs Malena Rice and Eva Scheller, recipients of the 2022 51 Pegasi b Fellowship. The announcement was made March 31 by the Heising-Simons Foundation. The 51 Pegasi b Fellowship, named after the first exoplanet discovered orbiting a sun-like star, was established in 2017 to provide postdocs with the opportunity to […]

Q&A: Climate Grand Challenges finalists on using data and science to forecast climate-related risk

Note: This is the final article in a four-part interview series featuring the work of the 27 MIT Climate Grand Challenges finalist teams, which received a total of $2.7 million in startup funding to advance their projects. This month, the Institute will name a subset of the finalists as multiyear flagship projects. Advances in computation, […]

MIT to name Building 12, home of MIT.nano, in honor of Lisa Su

Building 12, the home of MIT.nano, will soon be named in honor of Lisa T. Su ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’94, chief executive officer and chair of the Board of Directors of AMD. Su is the first MIT alumna to make a gift for a building that will bear her own name.  Lisa Su led […]

Tencent will shutter its game streaming service Penguin Esports on June 7, after China blocked a Tencent-led merger between Huya and DouYu (Zheping Huang/Bloomberg)

Zheping Huang / Bloomberg: Tencent will shutter its game streaming service Penguin Esports on June 7, after China blocked a Tencent-led merger between Huya and DouYu  —  Tencent Holdings Ltd. announced it will shut down its game streaming service, more than a year after Beijing blocked its effort to create China’s equivalent …

One-click checkout service Bolt acquires crypto payments startup Wyre, sources say for around $1.5B (Paul Vigna/Wall Street Journal)

Paul Vigna / Wall Street Journal: One-click checkout service Bolt acquires crypto payments startup Wyre, sources say for around $1.5B  —  Deal extends crypto’s hot M&A market following record deal activity in 2021  —  Bolt Financial Inc., a payments-focused financial technology company, is acquiring crypto-services startup …

How Gwyneth Paltrow, Mila Kunis, and others are pushing women to invest in NFTs, which critics see as a form of self-serving feminism centered on white women (Nitasha Tiku/Washington Post)

Nitasha Tiku / Washington Post: How Gwyneth Paltrow, Mila Kunis, and others are pushing women to invest in NFTs, which critics see as a form of self-serving feminism centered on white women  —  Gwyneth Paltrow and Mila Kunis joined a Zoom in January to encourage 5,000 women in the audience to break into the male-dominated […]

Nord Security, the Lithuania-based startup behind NordVPN, raises $100M, its first ever funding, at a $1.6B valuation led by Novator Ventures (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Nord Security, the Lithuania-based startup behind NordVPN, raises $100M, its first ever funding, at a $1.6B valuation led by Novator Ventures  —  VPN usage has surged in the last several years, with growing concerns over data privacy and security — and sometimes completely different motivations …

Sources: banks including JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo are considering whether to use Zelle as a payment option to compete with Visa and Mastercard (Wall Street Journal)

Wall Street Journal: Sources: banks including JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo are considering whether to use Zelle as a payment option to compete with Visa and Mastercard  —  The money-transfer service boomed amid pandemic.  Some banks want to expand it to retail payments.

Letter regarding graduate student unionization election

The following letter was sent to MIT graduate students, and subsequently shared with the wider MIT community, today by Chancellor Melissa Nobles and Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate and Graduate Education Ian A. Waitz. To MIT graduate students, The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has counted the ballots from the graduate student unionization election held on […]

Emery Brown earns American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering Pierre Galletti Award

The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering has awarded its highest honor this year to Emery N. Brown, the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Computational Neuroscience and Health Sciences and Technology in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT. Brown, who is also an […]

An optimized solution for face recognition

The human brain seems to care a lot about faces. It’s dedicated a specific area to identifying them, and the neurons there are so good at their job that most of us can readily recognize thousands of individuals. With artificial intelligence, computers can now recognize faces with a similar efficiency — and neuroscientists at MIT’s […]

Twitter changed how embeds work for deleted tweets, causing blank spaces on websites; Twitter says it is “to better respect” when users deleted their tweets (Kevin Marks)

Kevin Marks: Twitter changed how embeds work for deleted tweets, causing blank spaces on websites; Twitter says it is “to better respect” when users deleted their tweets  —  Twitter Edits You 2022-04-06 With all the fuss about Twitter’s promised edit button, and how they might design it …

Sky Mavis, which runs Axie Infinity, raises $150M led by Binance, with participation from Animoca, a16z, and others, to reimburse users after the Ronin exploit (Vishal Chawla/The Block)

Vishal Chawla / The Block: Sky Mavis, which runs Axie Infinity, raises $150M led by Binance, with participation from Animoca, a16z, and others, to reimburse users after the Ronin exploit  —  Sky Mavis, the creator of play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, has raised $150 million to reimburse its users who lost funds during …

Inside Kyiv’s IT office, whose workers have spent the past five weeks adapting and repurposing everyday tech, like the Kyiv Digital smartphone app, for wartime (Vera Bergengruen/TIME)

Vera Bergengruen / TIME: Inside Kyiv’s IT office, whose workers have spent the past five weeks adapting and repurposing everyday tech, like the Kyiv Digital smartphone app, for wartime  —  Even the app’s logo reflects this shift.  What was once a friendly sky-blue “K” for Kyiv has been redesigned into a black-and-gray military camo pattern.

QS World University Rankings rates MIT No. 1 in 12 subjects for 2022

MIT has earned a No. 1 spot in 12 subject areas, according to the QS World University Rankings for 2022, announced today. The Institute received a No. 1 ranking in the following QS subject areas: Architecture/Built Environment; Chemistry; Computer Science and Information Systems; Chemical Engineering; Civil and Structural Engineering; Electrical and Electronic Engineering; Materials Science; […]

Does this artificial intelligence think like a human?

In machine learning, understanding why a model makes certain decisions is often just as important as whether those decisions are correct. For instance, a machine-learning model might correctly predict that a skin lesion is cancerous, but it could have done so using an unrelated blip on a clinical photo. While tools exist to help experts […]

Ocean vital signs

Without the ocean, the climate crisis would be even worse than it is. Each year, the ocean absorbs billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere, preventing warming that greenhouse gas would otherwise cause. Scientists estimate about 25 to 30 percent of all carbon released into the atmosphere by both human and natural sources is […]