The only thing worse than drunk texting? Drunk tweeting, duh. Because when you’re drunk, the last thing you want is an audience, especially when that audience is the Twitter-verse. But if you’ve drunk tweeted in the past, you can regain a bit of dignity by knowing that you’ve contributed to some great research that now allows scientists to detect just how inebriated you are when using social media — or stated more simply, whether or not your latest Twitter contribution was made in a drunken stupor.
In truly monumental research, Nabil Hossain at the University of Rochester took Twitter and machine learning, and smashed them together to determine drinking habits across specific geographic locations. Hossain and his team rounded up thousands of geotagged posts that appeared on Twitter between July of 2013 and July of 2014 across the state of New York, and then parsed them down to only examine tweets that contained alcohol-related keywords (think “beer keg,” “drunk,” and the like).
This ultimately gave them a database of about 11,000 tweets to work with, which the researchers passed through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service. Every single one of those thousands of tweets were examined by three human “Turkers,” who answered three questions about the posts:
The answers derived from these questions gave the team a sense of whether or not the tweets came from folks who were drinking or drunk. Then, going even further with their research, Hossain and his team looked into where the tweeters were when they were imbibing (or at the very least, drunk tweeting). By the end of their efforts, they’d managed to create an algorithm that theoretically can pinpoint whether a user was at home when drunk tweeting with up to 80-percent accuracy.
By combining these two determinations, Hossain says that his research group can now determine where New Yorkers prefer to drink, and by extension, identify their favorite watering holes. “Our results demonstrate that tweets can provide powerful and fine-grained cues of activities going on in cities,” Hossain’s team notes, and tracking this sort of activity could help keep drinkers out of harm’s way.
So don’t be embarrassed by your drunk tweets (not for this reason at least). After all, they could save your life.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).
Two residents of Chicago have filed a lawsuit in the US over claims that robots run by Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured their facial and hand measurements without consent, bringing renewed attention to the food delivery robots. The cases raise a troubling question: If a robot delivers food to your door, can it also be gathering sensitive information about you?
According to a report by The Associated Press, the proposed class-action lawsuits were filed in Cook County on Oct. 9 and allege violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaints claim that the robots’ cameras and LiDAR sensors captured information on customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to pick up their orders. Both have denied the allegations.