Over the past few months the world has experienced a series of Covid-19 outbreaks that have generally followed the same pathway: an initial phase with few infections and limited response, followed by a take-off of the famous epidemic curve accompanied by a country-wide lockdown to flatten the curve. Then, once the curve peaks, governments have to address what President Trump has called "the biggest decision" of his life: when and how to manage de-confinement. Throughout the pandemic, great emphasis has been placed on the sharing (or lack of it) of critical information across countries -- in particular from China -- about the spread of the disease. By contrast, relatively little has been said about how Covid-19 could have been better managed by leveraging the advanced data technologies that have transformed businesses over the past 20 years. In this article we discuss one way that governments could leverage those technologies in managing a future pandemic -- and perhaps even the closing phases of the current one.

In a newly published paper, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers propose a system for training and running AI models in a way that's more environmentally friendly than previous approaches. They claim it can cut down on the pounds of carbon emissions involved to "low triple digits" in some cases, mainly by improving the computational efficiency of the aforementioned models. Impressive feats have been achieved with AI across domains like image synthesis, protein modeling, and autonomous driving, but the technology's sustainability issues remain largely unresolved. Last June, researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst released a report estimating that the amount of power required for training and searching a certain model involves the emissions of roughly 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide -- equivalent to nearly five times the lifetime emissions of the average U.S. car. The researchers' solution, a "once-for-all" network, trains a large model comprising many pretrained sub-models of different sizes that can be tailored to a range of platforms without retraining.

A company is helping combat the coronavirus with the power of artificial intelligence. The tech company now is using it to figure out who to fit the maximum number of beds in a hospital while following social distancing guidelines. The solution won a COVID-19 Crisis Challenge launched by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. According to Galvin Widjaja, the founder of the company, it is as simple as taking a picture of a hospital room and running it through the company's software. "In a lot of hospitals that are kind of private hospitals that have been converted, they are built for luxury, not optimization. And so what you would have is you would have five beds in the space of between nine and 14 different people which means you could actually just run this on the lower density hospitals and you could increase the number of beds by two or three times," Widjaja said.

Bots are social media accounts which are controlled by artificial software rather than by humans and serve a variety of purposes from news aggregation to automated customer assistance for online retailers. However, bots have recently been under the spotlight as they are regularly employed as part of large-scale efforts on social media to manipulate public opinion, such as during electoral campaigns. A new study in Frontiers in Physics has revealed the presence of short-term behavioral trends in humans that are absent in social media bots, providing an example of a'human signature' on social media which could be leveraged to develop more sophisticated bot detection strategies. The research is the first study of its kind to apply user behavior over a social media session to the problem of bot detection. "Remarkably, bots continuously improve to mimic more and more of the behavior humans typically exhibit on social media. Every time we identify a characteristic we think is prerogative of human behavior, such as sentiment of topics of interest, we soon discover that newly-developed open-source bots can now capture those aspects," says co-author Emilio Ferrara, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Research Team Leader at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute.

For the uninitiated, biopsies are a critical tool in the detection of melanoma and other skin cancers. They involve the surgical removal of a small amount of tissue – usually in a clinic setting without general anesthesia – that is then examined by a pathologist to confirm or rule out the presence of cancer. For most patients, the occasional biopsy is no big deal. However for patients facing multiple abnormal or otherwise'suspicious' spots in highly visible places the prospect can be daunting. Dr. Jesse Wilson, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Colorado State University, hopes to change this using the power of teamwork, lasers, and artificial intelligence.

The Final Cut's new album Process was recorded in two places: a cavernous music studio in Berlin, and a Brooklyn dining hall during an immersive culinary experience in which sound was among the items on the menu. "With its swarming, chirping creatures and metallic thuds, it sounds like a cross between a distorted, futuristic version of one of the more patient strains of industrial and drone music," writes a critic for the experimental music magazine Ear Wave Event. Somehow, the anonymous writer claims that the triangulation of Berlin, Brooklyn, and drone music pays homage to Italian culture . Process, if we're to trust the critic, is a messy hodgepodge of instruments, recording processes, and cultural influences. But the Final Cut's album doesn't actually exist.

A brain implant has restored movement and a sense of touch in the hand of a man with a severe spinal cord injury. Patrick Ganzer at Battelle Memorial Institute in the US and his colleagues have developed a brain-computer interface (BCI) that has allowed 28-year-old Ian Burkhart to grasp and feel objects again. Burkhart has a severe upper spinal cord injury and has complete paralysis in his hands and legs, but can move his elbows and shoulders. He had a brain implant inserted in 2014 as part of research aiming to restore movement in his right arm. The BCI uses the implant to record brain activity that is sent to a processor that decodes these signals into movements, which in turn feed in to bands around the forearm which electrically activate his hand muscles.

With help from artificial intelligence, we can now detect patches of floating marine plastic from satellite data. The technique may eventually help environmental researchers better monitor and manage plastic waste in the ocean. Lauren Biermann at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the UK, and her colleagues have devised an AI capable of identifying sea plastic in imagery taken at varying wavelengths of light. They trained it with images from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-2 satellites, which record visual information at multiple wavelengths …

COVID-19 and its grave impact worldwide has emphasised just how critical it is for African countries to develop their healthcare systems. For the most part, these systems are woefully underfunded and understaffed. It will take many different approaches to repair these systems. Given my area of expertise and my research focus, I am interested in the role that Artificial Intelligence (AI) might play in bolstering the continent's health systems. AI embodies the field of knowledge that seeks to create machines (computers) that can emulate human cognitive functions such as learning, reasoning, understanding, vision, perception, recognition, and problem solving to a reasonable level.

I've been thinking an awful lot about the 1989 Detroit Pistons over the past few days. Rick Mahorn, the starting power forward, can't make a goddamn layup. Isaiah Thomas is missing too many shots. Do I have anyone on my team who can stop Michael Jordan, who over the past four games is averaging 83.5 points per game against a squad once known as "The Bad Boys" because of its nasty defensive disposition? Yeah, it would probably be sorry enough if I was consumed by the actual Detroit team that last played an actual NBA game at the outset of the George H.W. Bush administration. In NBA 2K20, the popular virtual hoops game that for many fans has replaced real basketball during the coronavirus pandemic, you can play using one of many fine historic NBA squads.