The Download: digital twins, and where AI data really comes from

Steven Niederer, a biomedical engineer at the Alan Turing Institute and Imperial College London, has a cardboard box filled with 3D-printed hearts. Each of them is modeled on the real heart of a person with heart failure, but Niederer is more interested in creating detailed replicas of people’s hearts using computers. 

These “digital twins” are the same size and shape as the real thing. They work in the same way. But they exist only virtually. Scientists can do virtual surgery on these virtual hearts, figuring out the best course of action for a patient’s condition.

After decades of research, models like these are now entering clinical trials and starting to be used for patient care. The eventual goal is to create digital versions of our bodies—computer copies that could help researchers and doctors figure out our risk of developing various diseases and determine which treatments might work best.

But the budding technology will need to be developed very carefully. Read the full story to learn why.

—Jessica Hamzelou

This story is from the forthcoming magazine edition of MIT Technology Review, set to go live on January 6—it’s all about the exciting breakthroughs happening in the world right now. If you don’t already, subscribe to receive future copies.

This is where the data to build AI comes from

AI is all about data. Reams and reams of data are needed to train algorithms to do what we want, and what goes into the AI models determines what comes out. But here’s the problem: AI developers and researchers don’t really know much about the sources of the data they are using.

The Data Provenance Initiative, a group of over 50 researchers from both academia and industry, wanted to fix that. They wanted to know, very simply: Where does the data to build AI come from?

Their findings, shared exclusively with MIT Technology Review, show a worrying trend: AI’s data practices risk concentrating power overwhelmingly in the hands of a few dominant technology companies. Read the full story.

—Melissa Heikkilä