Social isolation and depression have become commonplace in older adults, with estimates suggesting almost 5 percent of adults aged 50 and above lived with major depression in 2015. What if you could address the problem through communication technology?

From online forums to community groups, research and experience shows people are more willing to insult and use menacing language online than in person, especially when there’s the protection of anonymity behind a computer. New research indicates that people react less strongly to malicious speech on digital platforms and see the victims as less “harmed” than if the words were said directly to a person.

Automating caricatures poses challenges due to the amount of intricate details and shapes involved and level of professional skill required. A team of computer scientists have developed an innovative deep learning-based approach to automatically generate the caricature of a given portrait
efficiently and realistically.

With machine learning systems now being used to determine everything from stock prices to medical diagnoses, it's never been more important to look at how they arrive at decisions. A new approach out of MIT demonstrates that the main culprit is not just the algorithms themselves, but how the data itself is collected.