News

Softheon, a Stony Brook-based digital health company, is expanding its services beyond the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid marketplaces following its merger with NextHealth Technologies, an AI-driven healthcare analytics firm. This acquisition enables Softheon to enhance care management by leveraging AI to guide patients toward more efficient healthcare options, potentially saving significant medical and operational costs. The combined entity now serves approximately 60 million Americans, with Softheon processing over $25 billion in health insurance premiums and collaborating with major insurers like UnitedHealthcare, Humana, and Aetna. The merger also adds about 50 employees from NextHealth, bringing Softheon’s total workforce to around 250, with annual revenues estimated at $100 million

​Snopes offers guidance on identifying social media bots, which are automated accounts used for various purposes, including boosting follower counts and influencing public opinion. Indicators of bot accounts include a lack of a profile picture, generic usernames, low follower counts, limited posts, and low engagement rates. Bots often exhibit behaviors such as click or like farming, hashtag hijacking, repost storms, sleeper bots, and trend jacking. To detect bots, Snopes recommends using tools like Botometer, which assesses the likelihood of an account being a bot based on its activity. Regularly removing bot followers can improve the authenticity of your social media presence.

​Stony Brook University has awarded its inaugural ProFund Seed Grants to six interdisciplinary research projects aimed at enhancing competitiveness for federal funding. The selected initiatives span diverse fields, including advanced materials science, quantum processing, environmental health, energy storage, digital histopathology, and sustainable ammonia synthesis. Each project is led by a principal investigator from various departments, such as chemistry, physics, biomedical informatics, and engineering. These grants are designed to support innovative research endeavors and foster collaboration across disciplines.

Researchers at the University of Central Florida (UCF) have developed an innovative device that mimics the human retina, enabling artificial intelligence (AI) to instantly recognize and process visual information. This breakthrough combines sensing, memory, and processing into a single compact unit, significantly enhancing speed and efficiency compared to traditional systems. The device operates across a broad spectrum, including ultraviolet, visible, and infrared wavelengths, making it particularly valuable for applications in self-driving vehicles and robotics. By integrating these functions, the technology offers a more streamlined and responsive approach to AI-driven image recognition.