Aishwarya Jagani

Remote work, already on the rise before 2020, went mainstream during the pandemic. Now in the second year of Covid-19, even more companies are embracing ongoing remote or hybrid models of work, with employees based in other cities or other continents. According to the ADP Research Institute, more than half of employees worldwide were working remotely or in a hybrid arrangement at the end of 2020.
LinkedIn reports that since March 2020, remote job postings increased 2.8 times globally, with ev...

More than half of US companies, along with 80% of UK firms and 89% in Europe, are planning a hybrid return to work.
A PwC survey of over 700 companies and 1,000 workers in the US indicates that 51% of employers are planning to implement a mixed model, which includes hybrid workers, in-person workers and fully remote employees.
Some 78% of those surveyed prefer a remote or hybrid work set-up, with some days in the office and some remote.
Hybrid work may blend the flexibility of remote work wit...

After 3 virtual-only conferences, the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021 went hybrid this year for the first time.
With over 70 presentations and 230 sessions (including keynotes and breakout sessions), the heavily-awaited event had tons of exciting activities for virtual and in-person attendees, in addition to the presentations.
The theme of the event was Resilience Realized, a salute to the resilience and strength the cloud community has shown over the past year and a half through ...

“This is the world now. Logged on, plugged in, all the time,” said Jason Clarke in 2015 movie Terminator: Genisys set in 2029. He might as well have been talking about today. Devices have become so integral that today’s world wouldn’t be possible without artificial intelligence (AI.) AI powers everything from smart homes to customer service to airport security.

In Terminator, sentient artificial neural network Skynet sends robots back in time from 2029 to kill the humans who will, in the futu...

The ancient meditation-based practice is said to be a sustainable way to improve crop performance, but the science doesn’t yet exist to back that up.
When Balaso Rugge first heard of the idea of yogic farming in 2003, he was skeptical.
“Initially, we laughed at the concept of farming through meditation,” says Rugge, an Indian farmer from the Western state of Maharashtra, “and thought it [was] impossible that it would yield results over scientific methods of farming. Today, thousands of farmer...

The college’s Instagram was brimming with Pride celebration posts in June, but when you tour the campus you notice that the dorm bathrooms are solely differentiated by “men '' and “women” signs. Did you miss something, or is the school guilty of rainbow-washing?

Experiencing microaggressions or a non-affirmative environment as a trans student can have a drastically negative impact on the entire university experience. It’s also been linked to poorer academic performance among trans students.

W...

Facial recognition technology is severely limited by racial bias. As India seeks to build one of the world’s largest face databases, activists fear the impact for minorities beyond black and white.
On a hot May 2021 afternoon in India, when Hyderabad activist SQ Masood stepped out to get some paperwork done, he didn’t expect the police to stop and question him. Nor did he expect them to photograph him without consent.
At the time of the incident, Masood was passing through Shahran Market. It ...

When Mindy Kaling’s inexplicably popular Netflix show Never Have I Ever came out with a second season last month, I was determined not to watch it. Allegations of casteism, ableism, lazy writing, and Islamophobia in the show aside, I didn’t think I could sit through yet another teen romance with a female protagonist of colour caught between two cultures.

Bryan Johnson, CEO of neuroscience start-up Kernel, wants to put a ‘helmet in every household.’ Could Kernel’s wearable, sensor-loaded brain monitoring device be the key to understanding brain health and aging?
Neuroscience start-up Kernel has developed a wearable helmet that aims to understand how the brain ages and develops, with a series of sensors and other electronics that measure a brain’s oxygenation levels and changes in magnetic fields, analyzing how it responds to the world.
Using e...

One cold winter evening in 1998, the North American Ice Storm whipped through eastern Ontario and southern Quebec, knocking out power across homes. With no heat, pregnant women were left shivering through ice cold temperatures for as long as 40 days after the storm. Project Ice Storm surveyed 35 boys and 33 girls whose mothers were pregnant during the storm and showed they had larger amygdalas, the part of the brain that influences things like depression, anxiety, and aggression, even up to a...

In 1989 film Back to the Future II, set in an imagined California of 2015, virtual reality (VR) headsets are as common as our smartphones. Protagonist Marty McFly, seen in the first Back to the Future traveling to the 1950s and nearly erasing his existence, in the future finds his teenage offspring glued to their VR headsets.
Beyond the real year 2015, VR is yet to become a fixture in our lives. But it’s fast-growing – a study by Artillery Intelligence predicted VR will reach 25 percent of US...

India's islands battle worsening cyclones and the effects of climate change every year. Sibi Arasu's story on Kadal Osai shows how local media can keep residents safe from natural disasters.
The residents of Rameswaram, a tiny fishing town on Pamban Island, are familiar with severe cyclonic storms and natural disasters. A remnant of the land bridge that once connected southern India and Sri Lanka, islands like Pamban have been plagued by tropical cyclones for decades. Scientists say climate c...

Experts Fear For Privacy, End-to-end Encryption
America’s tech giants have felt the sting of the Indian government’s crackdown on online speech, pushing back against tough new IT regulations over privacy and surveillance concerns — while scrambling to maintain access to one of the world’s major growth markets.
The increasingly tense dispute has played out in public in recent days, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi appearing to stifle the social media platforms that conveyed intense criticism ...

Studio Self co-founder Joan Westenberg uses her experiences as a trans woman in tech to steer the industry towards transgender inclusion.
Founder, Platinum Hermes Award Recipient, writer, and angel investor Joan Westenberg has always had an entrepreneurial streak.
By the age of 14, Westenberg loved coding. She saw how popular MySpace was among her friends and peers and came up with the perfect plan to tap into the opportunity. So, she created and sold MySpace design and automation and found i...

Technology has immense potential in the quest to build more diverse and inclusive workplaces, and prevent ageism, right from recruitment to retirement — but it can come with its own pitfalls.
AI-based programs are effective in removing personal data fields from the algorithms that shortlist candidates, to ensure candidates of a certain age range, race, or gender aren’t being favored.
Remote work can prevent ageism at work, while also being a double-edged sword for older workers, who may be pe...