Apple and Google revealed Friday that they’re teaming up to take on one of the most colossal tasks in the fight to stop the spread of COVID-19: contact tracing.
If you’re like me, you probably hadn’t heard about contact tracing until the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it’s proven to be an important tool in countries that have seen a drop in their reported cases of the coronavirus.
With a little background, here are the basics of contact tracing and what you need to know.
In a rare moment of collaboration, Apple and Google said Friday they have teamed up to create a contact-tracing program that uses smartphones to stop the spread of COVID-19.
The privacy-focused solution created by the companies will use anonymous Bluetooth “chirps” from phones as a way to tell where an infected person has been and who they’ve come in contact with.
Who wouldn’t have wanted Steve Jobs to have visited their university class for a casual Q&A with the students? That’s what folks at MIT were lucky enough to experience in 1992.
Running NeXT at the time, Jobs stopped by to drop some wisdom on everything from his thoughts on leaving Apple to the state of computing to his thoughts on the right way to run a company. Excerpts from the discussion recently landed on YouTube. Check them out below.
Apple CEO Tim Cook warned MIT’s graduating class of the dangers society faces as a result of rapidly advancing technology during his commencement speech this morning.
Cook challenged the 2017 graduates to measure their impact on humanity on the lives they touch, rather than the likes you get on social media.
Steve Jobs gave one of the most memorable commencement speeches in living memory, and it seems that Tim Cook is set to take on the same challenge when he delivers the address at MIT’s 2017 graduation event next June.
“Mr. Cook’s brilliance as a business leader, his genuineness as a human being, and his passion for issues that matter to our community make his voice one that I know will resonate deeply with our graduates,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif said. “I am delighted that he will join us for commencement and eagerly await his charge to the class of 2017.”
Siri is about to get a lot smarter thank to Carnegie Mellon researcher Russ Salakhutdinov, who announced today that he is joining Apple to lead the company’s artificial intelligence efforts.
This post is brought to you by EdX.
It’s often said that the internet makes it possible for anyone to get educated on any subject. But just as in offline modes of education, the many models of online teaching and learning are far from perfect, with plenty of room for improvement and innovation.
A joint effort between Harvard and MIT — dubbed EdX — is aiming to provide not only a place for learning new skills, but a platform for innovating new ways of teaching and learning over the web. It’s a nonprofit online education platform partnered with nearly 100 of the world’s leading universities and institutions — Harvard, MIT, Microsoft, Caltech, Columbia, you get the picture — to provide students anywhere in the world access to more than 1,000 certified courses. As an open-source platform, it also offers educators an opportunity to design and implement their own modes of teaching.
Apple has added yet another wicked smart talent to its ranks recently by hiring famed robotics expert Yoky Matsuoka.
Yoky was working as the head of technology at Nest before joining Apple. She was also one of the co-founders of Google’s X Lab and is a MacArthur genius award winner.
Tesla Motors is the smartest company in the world, according to MIT Tech Review’s latest survey of the brainiest corporations. Apple, which was not on last year’s list returns at number 16, beating out other firms like ride-sharing company Uber and smartbulb-maker Philips. MIT cites the newly released Apple Watch and touchless payment method Apple Pay as its reasons for inclusion, saying that these two products “set the pace for competitors.”
You can see the full list of smartiespants in the table below.
Okay, so it’s not really Apple news, but — honestly — who could complain about a robot cheetah on a Friday afternoon?
Given Google’s disappointing lack of killer robots at its oddly boring I/O keynote yesterday, MIT has fortunately stepped up to the plate by unleashing a new video of its metallic quadruped autonomously leaping hurdles like some kind of horse Terminator.
Check out the video below. Then start running.
