Nathan Worcester
Senior Editor, Mind & Behavior and Technology
Nathan Worcester, based in Chicago, is the senior editor for Mind & Behavior and Engineering for The Academic Times. Prior to that, Nathan wrote for various publications in Chicago. He has also worked as a technical writer for multiple law firms and served as managing editor of the New Art Examiner. He studied philosophy, history and English at the University of Chicago.
In an analysis of nearly 12,000 American children, researchers found that about half of those children with mental health-related distress or at elevated risk of emotional and behavioral problems had no active clinical contact with behavioral health services — and young Black children were especially underserved.
Some of our most advanced facial-recognition systems can be thwarted by tactics out of a dystopian sci-fi movie: people using two-dimensional printouts of faces or realistic masks can trick those systems into thinking they've authenticated the right person. A Chinese and British team has tackled these so-called spoofing attacks, introducing a new two-stage framework for detecting them that fuses multiple types of data to identify fake faces.
It's called the "cocktail party problem": In a crowded environment with many overlapping conversations, people with hearing aids often find it hard to pick out a single speaker. Scientists at MIT Lincoln Laboratory have proposed a solution, creating a new system to separate two simultaneous speakers while suppressing other noise that may aid tomorrow's cognitively controlled hearing aids.