Covid-19

Governments are repurposing Covid-focused face recognition systems as tools of repression. Russia’s internal security forces are using Moscow’s visual surveillance system, initially meant to help enforce pandemic-era restrictions, to crack down on anti-government...

Odds are that the next mass contagion will jump to humans from animals. But which species? Virus hunters are using learning algorithms to learn which animals are likely to carry microbes that pose a danger to humans.

There’s a reason why artificial intelligence is sometimes referred to as “software 2.0”: It represents the most significant technological advance in decades. Like any groundbreaking invention, it raises concerns about the future, and much of the media focus is on the threats it brings.

The real-estate website Zillow bought and sold homes based on prices estimated by an algorithm — until Covid-19 confounded the model’s predictive power. Zillow, whose core business is providing real-estate information for prospective buyers, shut down its house-flipping division after...

Greece’s border agents last year had enough Covid tests to swab only 17 percent of people who sought to enter the country. They managed the shortage by using an AI system to flag high-risk visitors.

DeepMind opened access to AlphaFold, a model that finds the shapes of proteins, and to its output so far — a potential cornucopia for biomedical research. The research lab, a division of Google’s parent company Alphabet, made AlphaFold freely available.

A new report assessed how AI has helped address Covid-19 and where it has fallen short.

U.S. immigration officials expect over 2 million migrants to reach the country’s southern border by the end of the year. They’re counting on face recognition to streamline processing of those who seek asylum.

Transformer models trained on sequences of amino acids that form proteins have had success classifying and generating viable sequences. New research shows that they also capture information about protein structure.

Many medical drugs work by modulating the body’s production of specific proteins. Recent research aimed to predict this activity, enabling researchers to identify drugs that might counteract the effects of Covid-19.

Commercial AI research and deployments are on the rise, a new study highlights. The latest edition of the AI Index, an annual report from Stanford University, documents key trends in the field including the growing importance of private industry and the erosion of U.S. dominance in research.

The pandemic has pushed hospitals to their limits. A new machine learning system could help doctors make sure the most severe cases get timely, appropriate care.

U.S. government approval of medical AI products is on the upswing — but information about how such systems were built is largely unavailable. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a a plethora of AI-driven medical systems.

A neural network learned to read the genes of viruses as though they were text. That could enable researchers to page ahead for potentially dangerous mutations. Researchers at MIT trained a language model to predict mutations that would enable infectious viruses to become even more virulent.

A pair of neural networks is helping to prioritize Covid-19 cases for contact tracing. The public health department of California’s Contra Costa County is using deep learning to sort Covid-19 cases reported via the pre-internet technology known as fax.