Most Popular in the Last...

Home

Joi Ito

See the following -

Medicaid’s Data Gets an Internet-Era Makeover

Steve Lohr | The New York Times | January 9, 2017

Jini Kim’s relationship with Medicaid is business and personal. Her San Francisco start-up, Nuna, while working with the federal government, has built a cloud-computing database of the nation’s 74 million Medicaid patients and their treatment. Medicaid, which provides health care to low-income people, is administered state by state. Extracting, cleaning and curating the information from so many disparate and dated computer systems was an extraordinary achievement, health and technology specialists say. This new collection of data could inform the coming debate on Medicaid spending...

Read More »

My Phone Says I've Looked Better

By Kim Bellard | November 11, 2015

Current AI can sift through millions of photos to pick you out of a crowd, with varying degrees of success.  Camera angles, make-up, hats, quality of image all factor into how successful such software is.  Given the recent rapid rates of improvement, though, these are bumps in the road, not insurmountable barriers. Other software can process your facial expressions, allowing them to make some good guesses about your emotions.  If you are a marketer, or a law enforcement officer, this information might be gold, but if your privacy is important, it might be a scary invasion.  Someone is always watching. What I want to know is when this AI can tell if I look sick.

Read More »

Sometimes Innovation Requires Disobedience

By Kim Bellard | March 28, 2017

The M.I.T. Media Lab is taking nominations for its Disobedience Award, which was first announced last year.  As the award's site proudly quotes Joi Ito, the Director of the Lab and who came up with the idea: "You don't change the world by doing what you are told." I love it. The site, and the award's proponents, make clear that they are not talking about disobedience for the sake of disobedience.  It's not about breaking laws.  They're promoting "responsible disobedience," rule-breaking that is for the sake of the greater good.  The site specifies...

Read More »