More than half of Americans faced coronavirus-fueled cabin fever last year by playing video games. SuperData, a Nielsen company, reports 55 percent of people turned to console, PC and mobile games during the first phase of COVID-19 lockdowns. Video games and interactive media generated $139 billion in 2020, a 12 percent spike, with digital games alone raking in $126 billion. 'Consumers had to turn to games as other forms of entertainment such as professional sports and movie theaters were on pause,' the report indicates. Free-to-play games like Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone generated 78 percent of the total games revenue.

This article is part of Demystifying AI, a series of posts that (try to) disambiguate the jargon and myths surrounding AI. At some point, every one of us has had the feeling that online applications like YouTube and Amazon and Spotify seem to know us better than ourselves, recommending content that we like even before we say it. At the heart of these platforms' success are artificial intelligence algorithms--or more precisely, machine learning models--that can find intricate patterns in huge sets of data. Corporations in different sectors leverage the power of machine learning along with the availability of big data and compute resources to bring remarkable enhancement to all sorts of operations, including content recommendation, inventory management, sales forecasting, and fraud detection. Yet, despite their seemingly magical behavior, current AI algorithms are very efficient statistical engines that can predict outcomes as long as they don't deviate too much from the norm.

Tinder is set to make online dating amid coronavirus lockdowns more personal. The dating site is adding a video-chatting feature to its popular app by the end of June, allowing those in isolation to virtually meet one-on-one. The feature was announced during the Match Group's, Tinder's parent company, first quarter earnings call and this is the largest addition to the platform since launching in 2012. Along with the video chatting service, Tinder also shared that it has seen a surge in usage during the pandemic - with women users swiping 37 percent more each day than before. Tinder is set to make online dating amid coronavirus lockdowns more personal.

Apple has released data from its Maps app to track whether people are complying with coronavirus lockdowns. The data shows whether its users are still requesting directions from their iPhones, and so can be used to see how much people are travelling compared to before the lockdowns came into effect. It shows a dramatic reduction in the number of people using driving, walking and transport directions to get around, suggesting that stay-in-place orders and other rules to stop the spread of coronavirus are working. In the San Francisco Bay area, for instance, requests for driving directions are down 70 per cent, and people looking for transit directions have dropped 84 per cent. In New York, transit requests were down 89 per cent.

Kabul – On most mornings, Somaya Farooqi and four other teenage girls pile into her dad's car and head to a mechanic's workshop. They use back roads to skirt police checkpoints set up to enforce a lockdown in their city of Herat, one of Afghanistan's hot spots of the coronavirus pandemic. The members of Afghanistan's prize-winning girls' robotics team say they're on a life-saving mission -- to build a ventilator from used car parts and help their war-stricken country battle the virus. "If we even save one life with our device, we will be proud," said Farooqi, 17. Their pursuit of a low-cost breathing machine is particularly remarkable in conservative Afghanistan.

Video games have always been a source of solace in tough times for Rosemary Kelley. Now, as everything across the U.S. is being shut down and slowed down, the 25-year-old has her game controller in hand again. "I originally had every single weekend booked, and now I have nothing," she said. For Kelley, an esports caster and host for games like "Pokémon," "Overwatch" and "Hearthstone," the worsening coronavirus pandemic has led to a halt in bookings and an array of cancellations for events. The Game Developer's Conference, known as GDC, supposed to happen in March is now postponed to the summer.

Health experts analyze the Spanish Flu, Asian Flu, Hong Kong Flu and swine flus of 1976 and 2009 in a special hosted by Harris Faulkner. Some police departments in California plan on using drones to enforce a coronavirus lockdown and to, in part, monitor the homeless population, according to a report on Friday. The Chula Vista Police Department, located just south of San Diego near the California-Mexico border, recently purchased two $11,000 drones -- doubling its fleet -- that will be outfitted with speakers and night vision cameras. "We have not traditionally mounted speakers to our drones, but ... if we need to cover a large area to get an announcement out, or if there were a crowd somewhere that we needed to disperse -- we could do it without getting police officers involved," said Capt. The Chula Vista Police Department plans on using drones to enforce a coronavirus lockdown.