What can we take away from 2020, a year of unprecedented challenges? With more time online than ever before, many professionals found new virtual opportunities to deepen their knowledge and strengthen their skill sets. As an online learning blog for professionals, The Curve did its best to keep up by providing insights from MIT faculty, instructors, and industry experts on topics from the investment boom in recommendation engine systems to digital readiness tips for distributed organizations. Here are the five posts that The Curve's readers cared most about in 2020:

As the COVID-19 pandemic intensified across the globe in April 2020, and many cities and states shut down, Professor J. Christopher Love and his team returned to the MIT Love Lab to critical path work--developing a vaccine candidate for COVID-19.

The market for recommendation engines is predicted to grow by USD $3.57B in the next four years, according to a recent report from Technavio. What’s the story behind these growth numbers? We talked with MIT Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and co-founder of machine learning startup Celect, Devavrat Shah, about the findings from this recent report and to discuss his predictions for recommendation systems technology.

It’s more important than ever for professionals to build the skills and capabilities they need to drive innovation. In a recent McKinsey study, more than 75% of executives surveyed predicted that the COVID-19 crisis would create significant new opportunities for growth. Instead of simply adapting to it, innovators from all industries must embrace and leverage disruption to thrive.

Our abrupt and ongoing shift to remote work is having wide-ranging effects on design, engineering, and manufacturing industries, putting great pressure on organizations to be more agile, efficient, and flexible in a COVID-19 world.

Remote work tips and tricks for managers and employees from MIT Open Learning and beyond. Between 2005 to 2017, the United States' workforce saw a 159% increase in remote work. Despite this general trend, many organizations and their employees were not prepared to make their workplaces completely remote. As working from home became a mandatory step for companies across the United States to reduce the spread of COVID-19, you may have found yourself scrambling to align with scattered colleagues, or attempting to balance your newly-entangled work and home life.

The quantum computing revolution could empower companies and entire industries to solve previously intractable problems. As investment in quantum technology grows and tech giants vie for quantum advantage, demand for professionals with foundational quantum computing knowledge and hands-on quantum experience has never been higher.

This October, Google announced in an article published in the journal Nature that its quantum computer, which runs on a 53-qubit chip called “Sycamore,” took only 3 minutes and 20 seconds to calculate a problem that would take the world’s fastest conventional computer 10,000 years to solve. IBM disputed Google’s quantum supremacy claim, arguing that an ideal simulation of the same task can be performed on a classical system in 2.5 days and with far greater fidelity. And the debate continues.

IBM Watson AI Lab and MIT xPRO Collaborate to Support Lifelong Learners IBM Watson AI Lab has collaborated with MIT xPRO to develop an online quantum computing curriculum intended for professionals and leaders in business, government, and technology interested in the theoretical and practical aspects of quantum computing (QC).

The IBM Q Experience makes the world of quantum computing explorable and hands-on. Anyone seeking to learn QC can access IBM Q to create and run algorithms on real quantum computing hardware. While books and lectures have traditionally supported learning, offering people a way to get practical experience “by doing” helps too.