Heena Sharma Blog

A year ago, Susan Wojcicki was on stage to defend YouTube . Her company, hammered for months for fueling falsehoods online, was reeling from another flare-up involving a conspiracy theory video about the Parkland, Florida high school shooting that suggested the victims were “crisis actors.” Wojcicki, YouTube’s chief executive officer, is a reluctant public ambassador, but she was in Austin at the South by Southwest conference to unveil a solution that she hoped would help quell conspiracy theories: a tiny text box from websites like Wikipedia that would sit below videos that questioned well-established facts like the moon landing and link viewers to the truth. Wojcicki’s media behemoth, bent on overtaking television, is estimated to rake in sales of more than $16 billion a year. But on that day, Wojcicki compared her video site to a different kind of institution. “We’re really more like a library,” she said, staking out a familiar position as a defender of free speech. “There ...

Scientists have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can better predict the risk of death in patients with heart disease than human experts. In a study published in the journal PLOS One, researchers showed how the AI could revolutionise healthcare. "It won't be long before doctors are routinely using these sorts of tools in the clinic to make better diagnoses and prognoses, which can help them decide the best ways to care for their patients," said Andrew Steele, from the Francis Crick Institute in the UK. "Doctors already use computer-based tools to work out whether a patient is at risk of heart disease, and machine-learning will allow more accurate models to be developed for a wider range of conditions," said Steele. The model was designed using the electronic health data of over 80,000 patients, collected as part of routine care. Scientists, including those from the University College London in the UK, wanted to see if they ...