Collecting and analyzing information from simple cell phones can provide surprising insights into how people move about and behave—and even help us understand the spread of diseases.

At a computer in her office at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, epidemiologist Caroline Buckee points to a dot on a map of Kenya’s western highlands, representing one of the nation’s thousands of cell-phone towers. In the fight against malaria, Buckee explains, the data transmitted from this tower near the town of Kericho has been epidemiological gold.

Mobile phones are great sources of data—but we must be careful about privacy.

Anyone who has worked with mobile-phone data knows how incredibly useful such information can be, even when it’s anonymous. It is amazing—but at the same time frightening—what massive quantities of spatio-temporal data points from mobile phones can tell us about ourselves, our lives, and our society in general.

With massive amounts of computational power, machines can now recognize objects and translate speech in real time. Artificial intelligence is finally getting smart.

When Ray Kurzweil met with Google CEO Larry Page last July, he wasn’t looking for a job. A respected inventor who’s become a machine-intelligence futurist, Kurzweil wanted to discuss his upcoming book How to Create a Mind. He told Page, who had read an early draft, that he wanted to start a company to develop his ideas about how to build a truly intelligent computer: one that could understand language and then make inferences and decisions on its own.

MIT Technology Review identifies the 10 most important technology milestones of the past year.

Our definition of a breakthrough is simple: an advance that gives people powerful new ways to use technology. It could be an intuitive design that provides a useful interface (see “Smart Watches”) or experimental devices that could allow people who have suffered brain damage to once again form memories (“Memory Implants”). Some could be key to sustainable economic growth (“Additive Manufacturing” and “Supergrids”), while others could change how we communicate (“Temporary Social Media”) or think about the unborn (“Prenatal DNA Sequencing”). Some are brilliant feats of engineering (“Baxter”). Others stem from attempts to rethink longstanding problems in their fields (“Deep Learning” and “Ultra-Efficient Solar Power”). As a whole, we intend this annual list not only to tell you which technologies you need to know about, but also to celebrate the creativity that produced them.

The designers of the Pebble watch realized that a mobile phone is more useful if you don’t have to take it out of your pocket.

Eric Migicovsky didn’t really want a “wearable computer.” When he first conceived of what would become the Pebble smart watch five years ago, as an industrial-design student at Delft University of Technology in the Nether­lands, he just wanted a way to use his smartphone without crashing his bicycle. “I thought of creating a watch that could grab information from my phone,” the 26-year-old Canadian says. “I ended up building a prototype in my dorm room.”

Messages that quickly self-destruct could enhance the privacy of online communication and make people feel freer to be spontaneous.

One essential aspect of privacy is the ability to control how much we disclose to others. Unfortunately, we’ve lost much of that control now that every photo, chat, or status update posted on a social-media site can be stored in the cloud: even though we intended to share that information with someone, we don’t necessarily want it to stay available, out of context, forever. The weight of our digital pasts is emerging as the central privacy challenge of our time.

There is an extra air of confidence in a well-dressed man. Fashionable menswear has gained increasing popularity thanks to magazines such as GQ, Esquire and the mainstreaming of style in general.

These days, the fashion police have their eyes on both men and women. Senior Nana Asareshows us the art of razor-sharp menswear.

Name/ year/ major: Nana Asare/ senior/ health administration and public policy

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