Athens, Greece – "Let's go see something that looks really nice," says Anastasios Salis, head of information and communications technology at the Greek Migration and Asylum Ministry in Athens, before entering an airtight room sealed behind two interlocking doors, accessible only with an ID card and fingerprint scan. Beyond these doors is the ministry's newly-installed centralised surveillance room. The front wall is covered by a vast screen. More than a dozen rectangles and squares display footage from three refugee camps already connected to the system. Another screen shows the playground and another the inside of one of the containers where people socialise.

The end of the year is always a good time for a bit of introspection and self-reflection. It also seems right to pause to celebrate some of the high points from a challenging year. We asked our writers and editors to look back over all the stories we published in 2021 and tell us which ones really stood out. Which stories did their colleagues publish that made them proud to work for MIT Technology Review? (And no, they weren't allowed to choose their own.) An edited version of the list runs below, but there was one story that our team kept coming back to as a touchstone for the kind of coverage that we do: Karen Hao's investigation into Facebook.

Entrepreneur, business magnate and billionaire Elon Musk believes Neuralink's sophisticated implantable brain-machine interfaces and not Mark Zuckerberg's VR-driven metaverse could soon put humans "fully into virtual reality." Neuralink co-founder Musk took a dig at Zuckerberg and other proponents of virtual reality and metaverse in an interview with the conservative and Christian satire site Babylon Tree on Tuesday. During the interview, the billionaire revealed his lack of support for the metaverse and Web3, two trends believed to radically change the tech world. For the Time Magazine's 2021 Person of the Year, his neurotechnology company, Neuralink, is more capable of providing a better environment for people to fully immerse in virtual reality. "In the long term, a sophisticated Neuralink could put you fully into virtual reality," Musk noted.

The Cabinet approved a defense budget Friday of ¥5.40 trillion ($47 billion) for fiscal 2022, setting a record high for the eighth consecutive year, to advance the development of new technologies in the face of China's growing military might and the North Korean nuclear threat. The draft budget, including outlays for hosting U.S. military bases, rose 1.1% from the current fiscal year ending in March as Japan ramps up its defense capabilities. The increase for a 10th year in a row is largely attributable to a sharp rise in research and development spending, for which the Defense Ministry has earmarked ¥291.1 billion, up ¥79.6 billion, or 37.6%, from a year earlier. The ministry will invest in advanced technologies, such as crewless planes that use artificial intelligence to fly in teams with next-generation fighter jets. "As the security environment surrounding Japan has been changing at an unprecedented speed and becoming increasingly severe, it is an urgent task for Japan to strengthen its necessary defense capabilities," Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said at a news conference.

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As a highly complex and integrated cyber-physical system, modern power grids are exposed to cyberattacks. False data injection attacks (FDIAs), specifically, represent a major class of cyber threats to smart grids by targeting the measurement data's integrity. Although various solutions have been proposed to detect those cyberattacks, the vast majority of the works have ignored the inherent graph structure of the power grid measurements and validated their detectors only for small test systems with less than a few hundred buses. To better exploit the spatial correlations of smart grid measurements, this paper proposes a deep learning model for cyberattack detection in large-scale AC power grids using Chebyshev Graph Convolutional Networks (CGCN). By reducing the complexity of spectral graph filters and making them localized, CGCN provides a fast and efficient convolution operation to model the graph structural smart grid data. We numerically verify that the proposed CGCN based detector surpasses the state-of-the-art model by 7.86 in detection rate and 9.67 in false alarm rate for a large-scale power grid with 2848 buses. It is notable that the proposed approach detects cyberattacks under 4 milliseconds for a 2848-bus system, which makes it a good candidate for real-time detection of cyberattacks in large systems.

In 2019, the UK's Immigration and Asylum Chamber of the Upper Tribunal dismissed an asylum appeal basing the decision on the output of a biometric system, alongside other discrepancies. The fingerprints of the asylum seeker were found in a biometric database which contradicted the appellant's account. The Tribunal found this evidence unequivocal and denied the asylum claim. Nowadays, the proliferation of biometric systems is shaping public debates around its political, social and ethical implications. Yet whilst concerns towards the racialised use of this technology for migration control have been on the rise, investment in the biometrics industry and innovation is increasing considerably. Moreover, fairness has also been recently adopted by biometrics to mitigate bias and discrimination on biometrics. However, algorithmic fairness cannot distribute justice in scenarios which are broken or intended purpose is to discriminate, such as biometrics deployed at the border. In this paper, we offer a critical reading of recent debates about biometric fairness and show its limitations drawing on research in fairness in machine learning and critical border studies. Building on previous fairness demonstrations, we prove that biometric fairness criteria are mathematically mutually exclusive. Then, the paper moves on illustrating empirically that a fair biometric system is not possible by reproducing experiments from previous works. Finally, we discuss the politics of fairness in biometrics by situating the debate at the border. We claim that bias and error rates have different impact on citizens and asylum seekers. Fairness has overshadowed the elephant in the room of biometrics, focusing on the demographic biases and ethical discourses of algorithms rather than examine how these systems reproduce historical and political injustices.

Artificial intelligence is making its presence felt in more and more areas of our lives. But what impact is it going to have on digital transformation projects, legislation and more? Industry experts gave us their views. AI and 5G will converge thinks EdgeQ CEO Vinay Ravuri, "The convergence of 5G and Artificial Intelligence will become more indispensable and value oriented. Enterprises will expect 5G and AI to be seamlessly integrated as a key value center of 5G deployment. This will include the use of AI for advanced network automation and for intelligent analytics to streamline operations, optimize network performance and drive greater efficiencies overall. These capabilities will be important in the deployment, management, and operation of 5G." Nick Thomson, general manager of AI at iManage believes there needs to be greater transparency, "Increasingly, there's a need for greater explainability with AI. Users need to be able to say how and why the AI arrived at a particular decision rather than just writing off AI as a'black box' whose thought process is totally opaque. Because AI is being used to assist with both process automation (extracting clauses from mountains of contracts, for example) as well as decision-making (applying rules and logic to the information that's been extracted), there needs to be more explainability at that decision-making level. Making sure that the rules and the logic behind a decision are not just fully explainable to a human being but also defensible are key to ensuring that AI isn't inadvertently making bad decisions based on poorly trained models, unintentional bias, or other faulty logic."

In recent years, many leading companies have fallen victim to high-profile cyberattacks and data breaches. Cybercriminals and hackers around the world develop new methods and techniques to break into and compromise even the most advanced security systems and gain access to sensitive information. This has led to the exposure of not only trade secrets but also the private information of millions of users. This requires that all organizations stay vigilant and protect themselves. However, not all have the required tools, staff, time and, most importantly, talent and skills needed to overcome these challenges. This has, unfortunately, led some to succumb to cyberattacks.

Prediction #6: Collaboration and investment will all but cease between American and Chinese actors ... [ ] in the field of AI. Language is humanity's most important invention. More than any other attribute, it is the defining hallmark of our species' intelligence. The ability to accurately automate language therefore opens up virtually unbounded opportunities for value creation. The field of natural language processing (NLP) has been upended and turbocharged in the past few years by a foundational new technology known as transformers, first introduced by Google researchers in a 2017 paper.