CALIFORNIA — In September, even before the October wildfires began to ravage parts of northern and southern California, governor Gavin Newsom announced two contracts totaling nearly $2 million for developing technology to facilitate wildfire detection and emergency decision-making.
As fires rage, California takes steps to integrate technology into wildfire management Read More »
MENLO PARK — Former Facebook software engineer Yi Yin didn’t expect to lose his job when he picked up the microphone during a protest last month at the entrance of the social media giant’s headquarters in Menlo Park.
Facebook employee, fired after attending protest, has no regrets Read More »
SAN FRANCISCO — Companies are preparing to deploy more of e-scooters in San Francisco after a yearlong pilot program. Despite enthusiasm among operators, there are also mounting concerns about safety from officials and residents.
New wave of e-scooters in San Francisco brings promise and peril Read More »
At Phillips Brooks Elementary School in Menlo Park, students arrange spaghetti, string and marshmallows to concoct freestanding towers, following the same design-thinking process as Stanford University undergraduates.
Design-thinking trickling into elementary school classrooms Read More »
Last month, tech writer Kate O’Neill sparked a debate online, with a sarcastic tweet speculating that Facebook’s “Ten Year Challenge” was really a ploy by the social media company to fuel it’s facial recognition machine learning algorithms. Her subsequent
Machine learning explained: How Facebook uses it to learn more about you Read More »
SILICON VALLEY — Lea Coligado was 19 years old when she held a summer internship at a small software company in Silicon Valley. While there, she faced comments about how women don’t code because they are better at art and heard insinuations that women’s brains were just not wired to handle the algorithmic complexity that their male counterparts could. Instead of complimenting her code, she received comments about her clothes.
Women of Silicon Valley: A safe haven for women in technology Read More »
PALO ALTO — After nine years of patrolling the tracks at Palo Alto’s Caltrain railroad crossings, the last of the human guards were replaced with cameras as part of the city’s Track Watch program – a suicide prevention initiative.
Palo Alto replaces Caltrain track guards with cameras in suicide prevention program Read More »
SAN FRANCISCO — At 9 a.m. on a recent Saturday, dozens of young, African-American women, ages 13 to 17, stood in a line outside a tall, glass-plaited building to learn the complexities of bitcoin — a digital currency with a market that’s worth more than $100 billion. The event was part of Black Girls Code, a nonprofit groups that teaches technology and coding skills to African American girls.
The newest players in the crypto space? Teenage girls Read More »
PALO ALTO — The tech industry has long been troubled by a lack of gender diversity and pervasive harassment problems. But a growing number of startups and nonprofits hope to make tech part of the solution.
Online platforms hope to tackle sexual harassment in the tech industry Read More »
BAY AREA — California is also home to eight of the 10 U.S. metropolitan areas with the highest year-round concentration of particulate matter. In 2018, the Bay Area ranked sixth on the list, above the notoriously polluted Los Angeles-Long Beach area.
California tackles air pollution disparities with data, policy efforts Read More »
SAN BRUNO — A motive for the shooting that left three injured and one suspect dead at YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, Calif. is not yet known, police say.
Suspect dead, three injured in YouTube headquarters shooting Read More »
In 2018, Ambreen Tariq’s story of the outdoors is camping, hiking and sightseeing. It is a promise of an annual trip to Shenandoah National Park on her birthday and skies that swirl slate blue into pink. It is a solid social media following and a demanding side-hustle. It is a hashtag. But twenty years ago,
