TECH

What AI is doing to health information

For decades, searching for symptoms or treatments online meant diving into long texts, technical articles, and unfriendly institutional pages. This scenario, however, is beginning to change discreetly and profoundly. Artificial intelligence incorporated into search engines is reorganizing priorities and changing the path users take to medical information. The result is not only visual—it's also behavioral. What once required careful reading is now presented in a different way, more direct, more accessible, and, in many cases, more engaging.

The recent evolution of search engines has introduced automatic summaries generated by artificial intelligence, capable of condensing complex content into a few lines. This functionality, which seemed like just a tool for speed, has begun to influence something bigger: the format of the information presented.

Analyses from platforms specializing in SEO and digital behavior indicate that, in a large part of the queries related to health and well-being, these summaries have begun to highlight audiovisual content more frequently than traditional texts. Instead of simply providing links for reading, the system now suggests materials that explain concepts through visual demonstrations, animated diagrams, and accessible language.

This change is not accidental. The algorithmic logic has begun to consider not only the veracity of the information, but also the user's ability to understand it. In medical matters—such as symptoms, procedures, or prevention—visual clarity tends to reduce ambiguities and increase content retention. The practical effect is a silent reordering of the information hierarchy: the text ceases to be the protagonist and begins to share space with formats that were previously seen as complementary.

Another relevant point is the selection criterion. Unlike what one might imagine, prioritization does not simply fall on popular or viral content. Studies indicate that artificial intelligence tends to favor materials produced by professionals with verifiable credentials, recognized institutions, and specialized channels with academic backing.

This movement reveals an attempt to balance two factors that are often opposed in the digital environment: accessibility and scientific rigor. In this context, video acts as a translator between technical language and the general public, allowing complex concepts to be explained with visual examples and a didactic tone without necessarily losing precision.

For clinics, hospitals, and healthcare professionals, the message is clear: future relevance in searches will depend not only on well-written articles, but also on the ability to communicate knowledge in more dynamic formats. Artificial intelligence does not eliminate textual content, but redefines the means by which it gains visibility.

In the emerging scenario, learning and staying informed about health tends to become an increasingly multimodal experience. Reading remains important, but seeing and hearing take on similar weight. Online medical research is no longer just a solitary reading experience and is becoming more like a quick, direct, and visual lesson—a sign that the way we assimilate specialized knowledge is, once again, transforming.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming health information into an active diagnostic and preventative tool, processing large volumes of data that would be impossible to analyze manually.

The main actions of AI with this information include:

Precision diagnosis: AI analyzes imaging exams (such as CT scans and MRIs) to detect subtle patterns and identify diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer's, and heart problems early.

Personalized treatments: By cross-referencing medical record data with clinical guidelines, AI suggests individualized therapies and predicts the likelihood of disease recurrence, as in the case of cancer.

Drug development: Tools like Google DeepMind's AlphaFold accelerate the discovery of new drugs by predicting the structure of proteins.

Hospital management and Efficiency: Algorithms optimize patient flow, reduce hospitalization times, and automate administrative tasks, such as filling out medical records.

Epidemiological surveillance: The cross-referencing of clinical and environmental data allows for the prediction of disease outbreaks and the planning of preventive public health actions. Privacy and Ethics

The use of this sensitive data requires compliance with laws such as the LGPD (Brazilian General Data Protection Law) and guidelines from the World Health Organization (WHO), focusing on transparency and protecting patient autonomy.

mundophone

DIGITAL LIFE

Mark Zuckerberg has already forgotten about the metaverse?

After changing the company's name and investing billions in digital worlds, Meta begins 2026 retreating from the metaverse. Layoffs, record losses, and a strategic shift toward AI-powered devices are reshaping the future of virtual reality. Experts explain why the original vision failed—and why this may, paradoxically, strengthen the sector.

The turn of the calendar to 2026 marked a turning point for the metaverse. What Zuckerberg presented as the next chapter of human interaction lost prominence within Meta itself. The company reduced teams, absorbed billions in losses, and repositioned priorities. Still, the end of the "metaverse era" does not mean the end of virtual reality—on the contrary, it may be the beginning of a more pragmatic phase.

In early January, Meta announced cuts of about 10% in its Reality Labs division, affecting data engineers, software engineers, and game developers. Shortly after, the fourth-quarter balance sheet confirmed the magnitude of the blow: the virtual reality area accumulated losses of US$19.1 billion in 2025, with US$6.2 billion in the last quarter alone.

In the conference call with investors, Zuckerberg made it clear that the company will continue investing in extended reality (XR), but with an increasing focus on wearable devices with AI — such as smart glasses partnerships with Ray-Ban — while virtual worlds lose centrality.

According to experts interviewed by Euronews Next, the change of course does not need to be read as a structural defeat for VR, but rather as the end of a narrative inflated by unrealistic expectations.

Billion-dollar investment and low adoption...Since its announcement, Horizon Worlds has been ridiculed by users around the world. In addition to the interface lacking detail and poor graphics, the main reason was the size of the investment for such a result: according to the company's own annual reports, Meta invested $36 billion in the project. For comparison, this amount is greater than NASA's annual budget in 2024, which was almost $25 billion. All this to show a world where the avatars didn't even have legs.

Those who tried to access it and gave it a chance were also disappointed. Users reported headaches and dizziness after prolonged use of the virtual reality glasses, a sparsely populated and lifeless world, and without much purpose – nothing presented there was revolutionary, necessary, or offered a more practical way to perform a job or even to socialize. In reality, it was more complicated to do things through Horizon Worlds than through other conventional methods. In 2023, a YouTuber decided to conduct an experiment and spend a week living on the platform, and noticed that the population was almost nonexistent: less than 1,000 daily users.

Decentraland – one of the most expensive projects within Horizon Worlds – cost $1.3 billion and in October 2022, had 38 daily users.

Security...Although the company has taken more effective measures to preserve user data and also their security while on the platform, initially, Meta Horizon Worlds was accessed by teenagers and children without parental control. In 2024, Meta announced the official opening of its metaverse to children and with this announcement, a series of measures to facilitate parental control over the type of content that could be accessed by children within the platform.

In 2022, however, this did not exist. Newer users of the platform also report that the parental control system's features are insufficient or can be completely ignored, depending on the information passed to the company's software, such as age.

Why the metaverse didn't take off...When Meta doubled down on the metaverse, the context seemed favorable. The world was still emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work was growing, and socialization had migrated to screens and platforms like Zoom. For George Jijiashvili, senior analyst at the consulting firm Omdia, that was the perfect time to try to create the next great computing platform.

There was also a strategic incentive: to reduce dependence on the mobile ecosystems controlled by Apple and Google. The ambition was clear: to lead the "post-smartphone era." The problem is that the leap was too big.

The technology is still expensive, uncomfortable for long periods of use, and unconvincing to the general public. In addition, there was a lack of truly indispensable applications. Without a "daily reason" to put on a headset, the metaverse remained restricted to niches — gamers, enthusiasts, and companies in pilot projects.

Add to that unintuitive interfaces, graphics below expectations, and a learning curve that alienated ordinary users. The result was a promising product on paper, but far from mass adoption.

Meta's retreat opens space for a more down-to-earth approach. Instead of persistent universes and ubiquitous avatars, the market tends to advance through specific use cases: corporate training, industrial design, immersive education, healthcare, and entertainment.

Lighter devices, mixed reality experiences, and integration with artificial intelligence point to a less grandiose—and more useful—future. Smart glasses, for example, can gain traction by combining computer vision, AI assistants, and contextual information in the real world, without requiring complete user isolation.

For developers and startups, the departure of the "totalizing" metaverse can be liberating. With less pressure to build a single universe, the diversity of solutions, platforms, and business models grows.

Meta paid a high price for trying to accelerate the future. But its investment also pushed the sector forward, funding research, hardware, and talent. Now, the industry has the chance to learn from its mistakes: focus on concrete experiences, reduce barriers to entry, and deliver immediate value.

No one seems to lament the end of the metaverse as a universal promise. In its place, a more modest, fragmented, and practical virtual reality emerges—exactly the type of evolution that, in the long run, tends to transform experimental technologies into everyday tools.

by mundophone

 

TECH

'Thermal diode' design promises to improve heat regulation, prolonging battery life

New technology from University of Houston researchers could improve the way devices manage heat, thanks to a technique that allows heat to flow in only one direction. The innovation is known as thermal rectification, and was developed by Bo Zhao, an award-winning and internationally recognized engineering professor at the Cullen College of Engineering, and his doctoral student Sina Jafari Ghalekohneh. The work is published in Physical Review Research.

This new technology gives engineers a new way to control radiative heat with the same precision that electronic diodes control electrical currents, which means longer-lasting batteries for cell phones, electric vehicles and even satellites. It also has the potential to change our approach to AI data centers.

"This will be a very useful technology for thermal management and for building a logical system for radiative heat flow," said Zhao, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. "For example, you would be able to keep your cell phone's battery at a comfortable temperature without overheating it, especially if it's being used in a very hot environment."

Prior to this discovery, traditional materials allowed radiative heat to travel freely in multiple directions, creating challenges for electronics, vehicles and energy systems to stay cool under stress. Zhao's technology pushes heat flow forward and is completely blocked from moving in the opposite direction.

The way Zhao's team accomplished this was by using semiconductor material placed under a magnetic field, which changes how energy moves at the microscopic level and allows heat flow to be directed with more control than previously possible.

Schematic of the system consisting of nonreciprocal surfaces. Credit: Physical Review Research (2025)

From rectifiers to heat circulators...Additionally, Zhao's team is developing a device known as a circulator, which pushes radiative heat to move in a continuous loop in only one direction. This could improve next-generation energy technologies that rely on radiative heat transfer.

"Basically, you have a hot side, a cold side and something in the middle," Zhao said. "If you look at a triangle, you want to have heat to transport counterclockwise from surface one to surface two, then surface two to surface three—you can't have it go from two to one. It essentially creates a heat loop."

The team's success isn't limited to radiative heat transfer. In a companion study published in Physical Review B, Zhao and his team demonstrated that similar principles can induce asymmetric thermal conductivity in materials and enable conduction heat rectification. This specific finding bridges the gap to everyday electronics, offering a potential solution for the conductive heat generated by high-performance microchips and batteries.

Towards real-world applications...These concepts have so far only been demonstrated theoretically, but Zhao aims to build experimental platforms to show the innovation in action. Once developed, the technology could have important implications for consumer technology ranging well beyond cell phones. For example, electric vehicles would be able to maintain a stable temperature to operate safely and efficiently.

Zhao expects the technology to be particularly valuable for space systems, where satellite electronics must stay cool despite constant exposure to sunlight. It will allow internal heat to escape while blocking solar heat from entering, thus improving reliability and reducing the risk of overheating.

Bo Zhao, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, expects his heat regulating technology to be a game changer for devices ranging from cell phones to satellites. Credit: University of Houston

Potential to reshape AI in space...And although the technology was not explicitly developed with AI in mind, Zhao speculated that the technology could help regulate heat in AI hardware, which tends to have high demand for thermal management.

That could create new opportunities for the development of AI data centers in outer space, where its vacuum lacks air for convection and makes shedding heat difficult. This, coupled with the technology's potential to better regulate solar power, could take humanity's AI prowess to new frontiers.

"This is a very innovative technology," Zhao said. "Nobody has done it, so we're very excited about it."

Provided by University of Houston

DIGITAL LIFE

Creative talent: Has AI knocked humans out?

Are generative artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT truly creative? A research team led by Professor Karim Jerbi from the Department of Psychology at the Université de Montréal, and including AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio, also a professor at Université de Montréal, has just published the largest comparative study ever conducted on the creativity of large language models versus humans.

Published in Scientific Reports, the findings reveal that generative AI has reached a major milestone: it can now surpass average human creativity. However, the most creative individuals still clearly outperform even the best AI systems.

AI reaches the threshold of average human creativity...The study tested the creativity of several large language models (including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others) and compared their performance with that of 100,000 human participants. The results mark a turning point: some AI models, such as GPT-4, now exceed the average creative performance observed in humans on tasks of divergent linguistic creativity.

"Our study shows that some AI systems based on large language models can now outperform average human creativity on well-defined tasks," explains Professor Jerbi.

"This result may be surprising—even unsettling—but our study also highlights an equally important observation: even the best AI systems still fall short of the levels reached by the most creative humans."

Analyses conducted by the study's two co-first authors—postdoctoral researcher Antoine Bellemare-Pépin (Université de Montréal) and Ph.D. candidate François Lespinasse (Université Concordia)—reveal a new and intriguing reality. While some generative AI systems now surpass average human creativity, the highest levels of creativity remain distinctly human.

In fact, the average performance of the most creative half of participants exceeds that of all AI models tested, and the top 10% of the most creative individuals open an even wider gap.

"We developed a rigorous framework that allows us to compare human and AI creativity using the same tools, based on data from more than 100,000 participants, in collaboration with Jay Olson from the University of Toronto," says Professor Jerbi, who is also an associate professor at Mila.

How do you measure human and AI creativity?...To compare human creativity with that of AI systems, the research team relied on several complementary approaches. The main one is the Divergent Association Task (DAT), a tool used in psychology to measure divergent creativity—the ability to generate many, varied, and original ideas from a single starting point.

Developed by study co-author Jay Olson, the DAT asks participants—human or AI—to produce ten words that are as semantically different from one another as possible. For example, a highly creative participant might suggest: "galaxy, fork, freedom, algae, harmonica, quantum, nostalgia, velvet, hurricane, photosynthesis."

Crucially, performance on this task in humans also reflects performance on other well-established creativity tests, used in idea generation, writing, and creative problem solving.

In other words, although the task is language-based, it does not simply measure vocabulary skills: it engages general cognitive mechanisms of creative thinking, relevant far beyond the linguistic domain. Another major advantage is that the test is quick—taking only two to four minutes—and easily accessible online to the general public.

Following this logic, the researchers then asked whether AI performance on this very simple task—generating a small set of semantically distinct words—would generalize to more complex creative activities closer to real-world creative practices.

They therefore directly compared AI models and human participants on creative writing tasks, including haiku composition (a short three-line poetic form), movie plot summaries, and short stories. Here again, the most skilled human creators retained a clear advantage, even though AI systems can sometimes outperform average human creativity.

Is AI creativity a matter of tuning?...These findings naturally led the researchers to a key question: can AI creativity be modulated? The study shows that it can—notably by adjusting the model's temperature, a technical parameter that controls how predictable or daring the generated responses are.

At low temperatures, AI produces cautious and predictable outputs; at higher temperatures, it introduces more randomness, takes greater risks, and encourages the system to move beyond well-trodden paths, generating more varied and original associations.

The study also shows that how instructions are phrased strongly influences AI creativity. For instance, a prompting strategy based on etymology—encouraging the model to draw on the origins and structure of words—leads to less obvious associations and higher creativity scores.

Together, these findings highlight a central point: AI creativity depends closely on how humans guide and parameterize these systems, making human–AI interaction a key element of the creative process.

Will human creators be replaced?...These results provide a nuanced perspective on concerns about the potential replacement of creative workers by artificial intelligence. While some AI systems can now rival human creativity on specific tasks, the study also underscores the current limits of machines and the central role of humans in creativity.

"Even though AI can now reach human-level creativity on certain tests, we need to move beyond this misleading sense of competition," says Professor Jerbi. "Generative AI has, above all, become an extremely powerful tool in the service of human creativity: it will not replace creators, but profoundly transform how they imagine, explore, and create—for those who choose to use it."

Rather than announcing the disappearance of creative professions, the study invites us to rethink AI as a creative assistant, capable of expanding possibilities for exploration and inspiration. The future of creativity may lie less in opposition between humans and machines than in new forms of creative collaboration, where AI enriches human ingenuity instead of replacing it.

"By directly confronting human and machine capabilities, studies like ours push us to rethink what we mean by creativity," concludes Professor Jerbi.

Provided by University of Montreal

TECH

How bee brains are shaping next-generation computer chips

Bees navigate their surroundings with astonishing precision. Their brains are now inspiring the design of tiny, low-power chips that could one day guide miniature robots and sensors.

When a bee leaves the nest, it already has its own version of a GPS in its head. By analyzing patterns in the sky and its flying speed, a bee can keep track of its location and safely return home. Researchers are now taking their cue from this in the hope of transforming how computers find their way around.

"A bee finds its way back without a smartphone or satellite navigation," said Anders Mikkelsen, professor at Lund University in Sweden. "They do this by looking at the polarization of the sky, and their speed. Based on that, they don't get lost."

Mikkelsen is part of a group of scientists in an EU initiative named InsectNeuroNano who want to replicate the bee's internal navigation system on a computer chip. Today's chips can already emulate how bees find their way home, but bees do it much more efficiently than computers.

"If you take a lightweight chip, it will easily weigh more than 80 grams and use more than 7 watts of power," said Mikkelsen, who coordinates the initiative. "A bee weighs under one gram and uses less than one hundredth of a watt to power its brain. Imagine if you could make a chip that efficient."

That is exactly what Mikkelsen's team—researchers from universities and labs in five European countries—is setting out to do. They are building an insect-inspired chip that can determine its own position. This chip will be smaller and more efficient than anything currently available for this kind of navigation task.

It could be used in anything from low-cost environmental sensors to insect-like robots that clean up the environment.

"We could make small, insect-sized robots with this," said Mikkelsen. "It would be like having a bee colony, but you get to tell it what to do. You could, for example, use these little bots to clean up pollution, build a structure, or artificially pollinate a field."

Hard-wired navigation...But why is the bee's brain more efficient than a chip? Today's standard chips are versatile and made to perform different tasks. For example, the central processing unit—a computer's "brain"—allows us to send emails, load webpages and edit text documents.

More specialized chips such as graphics cards handle everything from photos of cats to complex video game worlds.

The chip that the InsectNeuroNano team is designing is built to do just one thing. It uses signals from a light sensor attached to the chip, plus speed, to determine its own position.

The chip is highly specialized, much like the bee's brain, which has evolved for efficient navigation rather than versatility. That may seem like a limitation, but it allows the chip to be small and energy-efficient.

"Our chip can only do one task," said Mikkelsen. "But it can do it extremely energy efficiently and in a tiny size. It's a completely different strategy from other computer chips."

From insect brain to chip...The research team's biologists and engineers are working to bring insights from the world of insects into that of computer design. Professor Elisabetta Chicca from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, who specializes in bio-inspired circuits and systems, is one of them.

"For some problems, nature has already found a solution that is compact, low-power and efficient," said Chicca. "Insect brains offer one such solution. We don't know everything about them, but we know enough to start building a system."

Drawing on insights from biologists, Chicca built virtual models of the chips, a task made harder by the fact that insect brains are still not fully understood. "You need to make hypotheses about how they work so you can translate it to the chips," she said.

This kind of research is helpful for biologists as well. By having scientists from other fields fill in the blanks, they learn how insect brains might be working. For example, chip models could suggest how certain circuits in the insect brain might be wired.

"We are learning from biologists," said Chicca. "But the biologists are also learning from us. It's great to see that."

First steps for robot bees...The research is helping to rethink how chips work. Usually, a chip sends electrical signals between its components through wires. That has been the dominant model of computing for decades.

Instead, InsectNeuroNano uses nanophotonic circuits, which guide light through tiny structures on the chip, only billionths of a meter across, in a process called photonic computing.

"You can send more data with light in a more energy-efficient way," said Mikkelsen. "Also, our sensor detects light, so we're using light to sense and to think, which simplifies things. Both of those are quite important if we want a chip the size of an insect brain."

So far, the researchers—whose project runs until September 2026—have managed to create a first prototype chip in lab conditions that mimic insect brain function.

Still, according to Mikkelsen, it will take around 10 years before this technology finds its way into the real world.

Making chips this small, while using new design principles such as nanophotonic computing, is complicated. Still, the team's work has already helped to move the technology forward, and the researchers have learned a lot in the process.

"There are many steps we still have to take before we'll have a robot bee flying around," said Mikkelsen.

"But we have made a huge leap in this project. We went from a theoretical concept to something on a lab table that mimics insect brains."

Their work, although still requiring years of research, has paved the way for insect-sized robots that could one day navigate by reading the sky, just like real bees.

"Now we have to put together a whole system," said Mikkelsen. "We need to scale up everything we learned in the lab. The first steps have been made—now the real progress can begin."

Provided by Horizon: The EU Research & Innovation Magazine

TECH

Human-led AI opens tech jobs for refugees

AI can help displaced people avoid exploitation, but humans must call the shots, warn experts. For Susan Achiech, life began in Kenya's Kakuma refugee camp, where her South Sudanese parents fled to for safety in the early 1990s. Now 26, she lives in Canada, running her own gaming company, Tech Femme Algorithms, while working as an insurance advisor and studying gaming programming.

Her tech journey began when she sought programming training from the non-profit Learning Lions, while living in Nairobi where she had grown up after leaving Kakuma. She later secured remote coding work through Na'amal, a social enterprise that supports economic inclusion of refugees.

"As a refugee, it's challenging," Achiech tells SciDev.Net. "Most people don't have the education or the skills required for high-end jobs. So training is an issue for migrants."

Na'amal—meaning both "we work" and "we hope" in Arabic—equips refugees and other under-resourced communities with in-demand digital skills, and "essential human skills," for the global labor market, explains CEO Lorraine Charles.

AI training has become central to this work, says Charles. "We know that AI capability now carries a real hiring premium, so we are being deliberate about ensuring everyone who goes through our training develops practical, applied AI skills," she tells SciDev.Net.

The Na'amal Agency, launched in 2024, recruits skilled refugees to work on tech-based projects. The initiative seeks to plug a persistent employment gap in the digital economy, says Charles.

"While digital skills training for refugees has expanded rapidly in recent years, access to formal, paid work has not kept pace," she explains.

"Despite the growth of training programs, skilled refugees remain largely excluded from income-generating opportunities."

The company is developing an AI-supported platform to connect refugee digital talent to paid work. But Charles stresses that human oversight will remain crucial.

"AI will assist with initial matching based on skills [and] project needs, but human oversight ensures quality and ethical checks," she explains.

'Thoughtful' AI use...This balance of AI and human input is also evident at EqualReach, an organization that connects refugees with clients for remote and digital work across the world.

Here, teams of refugee workers are matched with clients, in industries such as IT and design, through a digital platform. The platform uses AI to draft project descriptions, but not to match workers with prospective clients, according to EqualReach founder Giselle Gonzales.

"We are using it thoughtfully, and I think our superpower is our relationship network building approach," she tells SciDev.Net, explaining how the company serves as a facilitator of work relationships between refugee teams and employers.

She notes that people seeking protection often move from their country to one with similar challenges and income levels, creating competition for jobs and tensions between refugees and locals.

"It impacts people economically and further silos those groups," says Gonzales, whose work aims to address some of these challenges.

Na’amal refugee and host community learners, pictured in class in Ethiopia for the Accelerating Digital Livelihoods in Ethiopia program. Credit: Accelerating Digital Livelihoods in Ethiopia

Preventing exploitation...The number of refugees and forcibly displaced people in the world has increased dramatically in the last decade. According to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, the number of forcibly displaced people had risen to an estimated 122.6 million by mid-2024, marking an 11.5% increase compared to just the previous year.

Na'amal refugee and host community learners, pictured in class in Ethiopia for the Accelerating Digital Livelihoods in Ethiopia program.

When arriving in a new country, migrants and refugees often face language barriers, administrative issues and discrimination, which can make them vulnerable to exploitation, says Yvonne Giesing, deputy director of the Center for Migration and Development Economics at the University of Munich's Ifo Institute, in Germany.

In the current political climate, where countries are increasingly tightening their immigration rules, she believes it's important not to create false hopes around AI being able to support a migration journey when prospective destination countries are closing their doors.

Avoiding middlemen...Tech platforms that help people sift through options can help people minimize the risk of falling into exploitative situations, says Sabina Dewan, founder and executive director of the JustJobs Network, which has been partnering with Canada's IDRC as part of the FutureWorks Collective research consortium.

Such exploitation is usually orchestrated by middlemen or people smugglers who make false promises to extort money or labor, she explains.

She believes using technology and AI-based systems to look for work can help migrant workers create direct channels with prospective employers, helping them avoid the middlemen.

"However, there's a big other side of it," she cautions.

Workers who get jobs through tech platforms can still find themselves disenfranchised and helpless when issues arise.

For migrants who might not be fully aware of their rights in the new country, "not having effective redressal mechanisms, or relegating redressal mechanisms to an AI platform, can actually be deeply problematic," says Dewan.

Social connections have traditionally been vital tools for most migrants to orient themselves in a new place, figure out practicalities and get help in case of need.

"Those kinds of human support networks are not something that AI can replace," she adds.

Human in the loop...One common hurdle that migrants face when attempting to enter the workforce in a new country is recognition of their qualifications, and AI can safely help with this, says Giesing.

Indima, an Austria-based startup founded in 2023, is attempting to do just this. The company charges a small amount to automatically compare the grading system of a person's school or university with that of the country that they intend to migrate to, according to Emin Vojnikovic, one of the company's co-founders.

Indima's users mostly hail from India, Pakistan and other parts of Asia, as well as Nigeria, he tells SciDev.Net.

The platform uses AI to extract information from transcripts and diplomas, using Optical Character Recognition models and "the secret sauce of extraction," says Vojnikovic, without divulging details.

"We are constantly testing and improving and benchmarking with sets of hundreds of different documents to continuously improve the extraction results," he adds.

Making sure this tool is unbiased is an essential consideration, he stresses: "As we are supporting decisions on somebody's future education or job perspectives, we are working hard to remove bias in data and results… [and] our own bias in, for example, data aggregation and research."

However, like other organizations working in this space, AI is not doing all the work for Indima.

The conversion of credit points from one country's system into another's is not AI-powered, Vojnikovic notes. Instead, Indima uses a big dataset and a deterministic model to make the right credit points conversion.

"We don't solely rely on AI, because AI could be a black box, and if we make a decision about someone's future, we want to be pretty sure about our outcomes," he says.

AI processes aren't explainable to the user, so they shouldn't be left to make decisions about that user, he believes.

"There should always be human oversight, or there should be deterministic solutions which are traceable or explainable to the user," Vojnikovic adds.

Never fully automated...Petro Kosho, the author of a paper on ethical AI use in immigrant workforce development, believes that decisions about people should never be left entirely to AI, because of its inherent bias.

"AI learns from the data you feed it," says Kosho, from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, US.

"When that data doesn't include different types of people, from different backgrounds or different parts of the world, then it is already biased."

At Na'amal, job matching, contracting and project delivery remain subject to human oversight, reducing the risk of bias and exclusion, says Charles.

She adds, "AI does not replace human judgment, automate hiring decisions, or remove accountability. All delivery remains human-led, with oversight, safeguarding, and contextual understanding embedded throughout."

For Dewan of the JustJobs Network, the increasing use of technology to manage recruitment processes for migrant workers, including those coming from low- and middle-income countries, is a good thing. But she stresses: "When it comes to human processes and human development, you cannot take the people out of it."

Provided by SciDev.Net

 

DIGITAL LIFE

Google dismantles network in China that used 9 million Androids for cybercrimes

If you've noticed your smartphone is slow or consuming more data than usual, it might not be your fault. Google has just announced one of the largest cleanup operations in Android history, dismantling a massive network that silently used about nine million devices worldwide as "gateways" to the internet, without their owners suspecting anything.

The operation targeted the China-based company Ipidea, which is accused of operating the world's largest "residential proxy network." In practice, Ipidea transformed millions of cell phones, computers, and smart devices belonging to ordinary people into an infrastructure rented to criminals.

The scheme was simple and insidious. Ipidea convinced developers of free applications (games, utilities, etc.) to include a secret software development kit (SDK) in their applications, paying them for each installation.

When a user installed one of these “free” apps, the SDK turned the device into a proxy. This allowed hackers and cybercriminals to route their internet traffic through the victim's phone.

The result: To the outside world, it appeared that the criminal activity (such as fraud or computer attacks) was being carried out by the innocent phone owner, concealing the true identity of the attackers.

This network was the basis for the creation of the Kimwolf botnet, which last year hijacked millions of devices to launch devastating DDoS attacks, considered the most powerful ever observed.

IPIDEA, one of the world's largest residential proxy networks...John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), highlighted the danger of these networks.

According to him, residential proxies are common tools, used for everything from sophisticated espionage to large-scale criminal schemes.

“By routing traffic through a person's home connection, attackers can hide in plain sight while invading corporate environments.

By taking down IPIDEA's infrastructure, we were able to dismantle a global marketplace that sold access to millions of hijacked consumer devices.”

Google also revealed that, until recently, IPIDEA's infrastructure was used by more than 550 threat groups with varied motivations, such as cybercrime, espionage, advanced persistent operations (APTs), and disinformation campaigns, originating from countries such as China, North Korea, Iran, and Russia.

These activities included access to SaaS environments and local infrastructure, as well as password spray attacks.

A recent study by Synthient showed that malicious actors behind the AISURU/Kimwolf botnet exploited vulnerabilities in residential proxy services, such as IPIDEA, to send commands to vulnerable IoT devices behind firewalls, spreading malware.

This malware, capable of transforming consumer devices into proxy endpoints, is secretly installed in applications and games already pre-installed on Android TV streaming boxes from little-known brands.

In this way, these infected devices begin to relay malicious traffic and participate in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

In addition, IPIDEA launched independent apps, aimed directly at users interested in making "easy money," offering payment for installing the applications and allowing the use of their "idle bandwidth."

Residential proxy networks allow traffic routing through IP addresses provided by internet service providers (ISPs), but they are also ideal for criminals to disguise the origin of malicious actions.

The Google Play Protect cleanup...With a US federal court order in hand, Google took down dozens of back-end systems and websites that controlled the network. In addition, the Google Play Protect security system was updated to automatically identify and remove any app containing Ipidea's malicious code, blocking new installations.

Despite Ipidea claiming that its services were for “legitimate business” use, Google considered the risks unacceptable. This case serves as a stark reminder that "free" on the internet often comes at a hidden cost. The recommendation remains: avoid installing apps from unknown sources and regularly review the permissions and apps you have on your phone.

On January 28, 2026, Google announced it had dismantled a massive, China-based residential proxy network operated by IPIDEA. The operation, supported by a U.S. federal court order, crippled a network that had hijacked approximately 9 million Android devices, along with computers, to facilitate global cybercrime and espionage.

Key details of the operation(below):

The culprit: IPIDEA operated at least 13 residential proxy brands, using software development kits (SDKs) embedded in legitimate-looking apps to turn consumer devices into "exit nodes".

The scale: The botnet comprised over 9 million infected Android devices and other internet-connected, non-Play-certified devices.

The impact: Google’s threat intelligence Group (GTIG) observed over 550 threat groups using IPIDEA’s network in a single week in January 2026 to hide their identities while performing hacking, password-spraying, and other malicious activities.

The action: Google seized dozens of domains, disabled the technical backend, and removed hundreds of associated applications, degrading the network by millions of devices.

How the network operated(below):

IPIDEA’s network acted as a "residential proxy" service, meaning criminals could route their traffic through regular consumers' home Android phones and devices.

Invisible infection: Users likely installed apps that seemed harmless but contained malicious code that turned their device into a proxy relay.

Cybercriminal anonymity: This enabled hackers to make their illegal traffic appear as if it was originating from legitimate residential homes, making it difficult for law enforcement to track them.

Global reach: The compromised devices were used for various malicious actions, including data theft and large-scale, automated attacks.

Broader context: 2025–2026 Android Threats

This action follows a trend of massive, China-linked botnets.

BADBOX 2.0 (July 2025): Google filed lawsuits against 25 Chinese entities for the "BADBOX" botnet, which infected over 10 million Android devices (smart TVs, projectors, tablets) with pre-installed malware.

Lighthouse (Nov 2025): Google sued another group, "Lighthouse," for a phishing-as-a-service platform that targeted over one million victims.

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