SAURON: radio intensity (purple) from MeerKAT overlaid on an optical image from the Dark Energy Survey.
Michelle Lochner / The Dark Energy Survey Collaboration 2005
Humans are expert pattern-finders. But artificial intelligence tools are better at trawling through vast data sets to find anything from waste dumps to heat-tolerant corals.
France’s goalkeeper #01 Hugo Lloris (C) jumps for the ball during the Qatar 2022 World Cup quarter-final football match between England and France at the Al-Bayt Stadium in Al Khor, north of Doha, on December 10, 2022.
Jewel Samad/AFP
How are Wikipedia pages about contentious events put together? Heather Ford discovered a hotbed of passion, a rotating pack of editors and a struggle for power behind its mirage of neutrality.
Twitter itself produces a lot of data that’s available nowhere else.
STR/NurPhoto via Getty Images
If Twitter were to go dark, with it would go a valuable source of data as well as a means of sharing information relied on by activists, journalists, public health officials and scientists.
Predictive policing may be a useful addition to traditional policing in contexts like South Africa.
Fani Mahuntsi/Gallo Images via Getty Images
Whether we’re talking songs that are popular on Spotify, or were Billboard hits through the ‘40s up to recent years, popularity cannot be attributed solely to quantifiable acoustic elements.
Kelly Bronson, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa
Big data from social media have been revealed as biased, but we should also pay attention to agriculture firms whose play for big data is likely to have detrimental environmental and social impacts.
There’s little transparency surrounding how insurance firms collect, analyse and use our personal data when they establish insurance costs.
Identifying the difference between normal genetic variation and disease-causing mutations can sometimes be difficult.
Andrii Yalanskyi/iStock via Getty Images Plus
Tumors contain thousands of genetic changes, but only a few are actually cancer-causing. A quicker way to identify these driver mutations could lead to more targeted cancer treatments.
It’s easy to blame COVID. But Australia has suffered medicine shortages for years. The pandemic has only highlighted the problem. Here’s what we could do to better avoid shortages in the first place.
Demonstration in front of Indonesia’s Election Commission office in Jakarta.
Fanny Octavianus/Antara Foto
Big data analysis has unveiled startling links between seemingly unrelated things, such as how a person’s physical elevation above sea level might influence their personality.
Disinformation, algorithms, big data, care work, climate change, and cultural knowledge can all be invisible. This exhibition brings them to the light.
The ABC’s decision to force viewers to create accounts to watch shows online raises concerns over privacy.
Commercial satellite companies provide views once reserved for governments, like this image of a Russian military training facility in Crimea.
Satellite image (c) 2021 Maxar Technologies via Getty Images
National security professionals and armchair sleuths alike are taking advantage of vast amounts of publicly available information and software tools to monitor geopolitical events around the world.
Ancient military innovations – like the bit and bridle that enabled mounted horseback riding – changed the course of history.
Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin/British Museum via WikimediaCommons
Did ancient technological advancements drive social innovation, or vice versa? Studying cause and effect in the ancient world may seem like a fool’s errand, but researchers built a database to do just that.