When Mike Koval, the police chief of Madison, Wisconsin, abruptly resigned on a Sunday in September 2019, the community's relationship with its men and women in blue was already strained. Use-of-force issues hung over the department after the killing of a Black teenager in 2015. Then, months before Koval left, another Black teenager, in the middle of a mental health crisis, was beaten on the head by an officer while being restrained by three others. The process of selecting a new police chief followed a standard formula. A five-person team of mayor-appointed, city-council-approved commissioners would make the ultimate decision, allowing for public comment beforehand.

MIT spinoff OpenSpace invented automated 360-degree video jobsite capture and mapping. "It's not exactly an amazing observation," says CEO Jeevan Kalanithi, "but a picture really is worth a thousand words." In the world of real estate development, visual documentation of construction projects is critical. It aids in dispute resolution, prevents mistakes from being compounded, and allows for knowledge capture in case of change orders. Builders are often contractually obligated to document progress.

People who work behind a computer screen all day take it for granted that everyone's work will be tracked and accessible when they collaborate with others. But if your job takes place out in the real world, managing projects can require a lot more effort. In construction, for example, general contractors and real estate developers often need someone to be physically present on a job site to verify work is done correctly and on time. They might also rely on a photographer or smartphone images to document a project's progress. Those imperfect solutions can lead to accountability issues, unnecessary change orders, and project delays.

A new kind of visual-search engine has been developed to automatically scour sports footage for clips showing specific types of action and events. According to its creators, borrowing a few tricks from the field of machine translation seems to make all the difference in improving the accuracy of video search. Despite recent advances in visual-search engines, accurate video search still remains a challenge, particularly when dealing with sports footage, says Michael Fleischman, a computer scientist at MIT. "The difference between a home run and a foul ball is often hard for a human novice to notice, and nearly impossible for a machine to recognize." To cope with growing video repositories, cutting-edge systems are now emerging that use automatic speech recognition (ASR) to try to improve the search accuracy by generating text transcripts. The trouble is, search terms are often repeated out of context, says Fleischman.

Expedia has grown far beyond a search engine for flights -- it's now the parent company of a dozen travel brands including Trivago and Hotels.com The business of delivering quality flight search results is tough, and Fleischman describes it as an "unbounded computer science problem". The reason for this is because flight itineraries and schedules are constantly changing, and Expedia's proprietary'best fare search' (BFS) has to'learn' and adapt all the time. The extent of the problem can be summed up by one statistic. In those three seconds you will see, on average, 16,000 flight options, in order of convenience or price or time.

Machine learning is at the peak of the hype scale, but travel search giant Expedia has been building its core business on the technology for the best part of a decade. Expedia has grown far beyond a search engine for flights – it's now the parent company of a dozen travel brands including Trivago and Hotels.com The business of delivering quality flight search results is tough, and Fleischman describes it as an "unbounded computer science problem". The reason for this is because flight itineraries and schedules are constantly changing, and Expedia's proprietary'best fare search' (BFS) has to'learn' and adapt all the time. The extent of the problem can be summed up by one statistic.

Expedia has grown far beyond a search engine for flights -- it's now the parent company of a dozen travel brands including Trivago and Hotels.com The business of delivering quality flight search results is tough, and Fleischman describes it as an "unbounded computer science problem". The reason for this is because flight itineraries and schedules are constantly changing, and Expedia's proprietary'best fare search' (BFS) has to'learn' and adapt all the time. The extent of the problem can be summed up by one statistic. In those three seconds you will see, on average, 16,000 flight options, in order of convenience or price or time.