Zubin Kanga describes himself as a pianist, composer and technologist. In his latest work, Cyborg Pianist, which premiered at Kings Place, London, he commissioned composers to create new works that fused cutting-edge technology with classical piano. Using technologies such as MiMu motion detection gloves, brainwave sensors and artificial intelligence, Kanga hopes to create a new repertoire for the classical piano and bring it into the 21st century. “We now have this capability of becoming these cyborg musicians”, he says, “and generate a new way of making music using these new technologies.”

Cyborg Pianist is available now on CD and digital

Topics:

Allowing data centres to run at higher temperatures could cut the amount of energy used to cool them by 56 per cent, without impacting computational performance.

High-end servers generate a lot of heat while operating, so equipment within data centres is normally kept at lower temperatures – usually by running cold water throughout the premises to cool the hot air down. Operators normally aim to keep data centres at between 20°C and 25°C (68°F and 77°F), to prevent overheating and potential damage to the equipment.

This cooling comes at a cost, accounting for one-third of a typical data centre’s total energy consumption. The rise of streaming video and artificial intelligence services, both of which require massive data centres, has brought more focus to this energy use, with efforts under way to make cooling systems more efficient.

Shengwei Wang at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and his colleagues suggest an alternative approach: just run servers at higher temperatures.

The researchers developed a computer simulation that modelled IT equipment’s performance at different temperatures in 57 cities around the world, picked to be representative of the global picture.

They found that data centres could save between 13 and 56 per cent of the energy used on cooling by running at 41°C (106°F) compared with those running at 22°C (72°F), without significant degradation in server performance. Locations with a higher ambient temperature, such as in Brazil or West Africa, normally require the most cooling and so would allow for the greatest energy savings.

“Research that focuses on the reduction of energy consumption by data centres is very much needed, as is media coverage of the data centres’ environmental impact,” says Irina Raicu at Santa Clara University, California. “But technical improvements often involve trade-offs and, as the authors of this paper acknowledge, require careful study pre-implementation.”

Topics:

Toilets with built-in gadgets that monitor your health are poised to make a splash in the world of wellness tech – but these devices come with risks, warn security experts. Some argue that selling them as consumer devices leaves people open to data leaks and that they should instead be tightly regulated as medical devices.

A range of start-ups and research projects have developed smart toilets designed to monitor everything from heart rate to the consistency of stools and …

ONE Friday in 2021, I walked into a hotel in Exeter, UK, at 17:57:35. The next morning, I drove 9 minutes to the nearby hospital. I stayed for three days. The drive home, normally 1 hour 15 minutes, took 1 hour 40 minutes. The reason for the slow speed, my brand-new baby, dozed in the back.

These aren’t details from a journal. Instead, they are what Google knows about my daughter’s birth, based on my location history alone.

A data snapshot of that weekend reveals this isn’t all that companies know about me. Netflix remembers that I watched a variety of feel-good fluff including Gilmore Girls and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Instagram recorded that I “liked” a post about labour induction, then didn’t log in again for a week.

So what? We all know by now that we are being tracked online, and that the data collected on us is both granular and constant. Perhaps you like that Netflix and Instagram know your film and fashion tastes so well.

But a growing number of investigations and lawsuits reveal a new online tracking landscape in which the reach of companies that harvest data is more insidious than many of us realise. When I looked more closely, I found that my personal data could be affecting everything from my job prospects and loan applications to my access to healthcare. It may, in other words, be shaping my everyday life in ways that I was unaware of. “The problem’s huge, and there are always new horrors,” says Reuben Binns at the University of Oxford.

You could …

Large AIs can have a significant environmental impact because they rely on thousands of power-hungry computing servers housed within huge data centres. But the environmental damage could be reduced by better distributing the demands to different locations.

Such scheduling algorithms might lighten the AI workload on data centres in Arizona during summer droughts to reduce water-based cooling. It could also, in theory, favour a data centre region in Finland where 94 per cent of energy used is carbon-free …

The artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT could automate some aspects of AI training that currently rely on people. The chatbot can accurately classify and label text data used in training AI at a cost of just a third of a cent per work sample – about 20 times cheaper than crowdsourced human labour.

“We expect that in some tasks ChatGPT could replace humans,” says Fabrizio Gilardi at the University of Zürich in Switzerland. In other tasks, ChatGPT could help reduce the “amount of …