Champ has been designed so children who are too ill to attend a football game or other sporting event can go out onto the pitch remotely with their favourite team. They can see and here what is going on, and also talk to the players via the robot.

Colleges have had success with chatbots for a few years, but high school students can now benefit from the first nationally accessible (and free) AI college adviser chatbot, Oli. The tool is the result of a partnership between Common App and Mainstay (formerly AdmitHub). Oli stands ready to help students around the clock with a wide range of tasks, such as selecting the right school, completing college and scholarship applications and understanding financial aid forms. It responds to questions via text and also sends users deadline reminders, updates and resources several times a week. When extra help is required, Oli connects students with a trained college adviser from College Advising Corps.

The system, called Battle Management Training NEXT (BMTN), provides command and control battle management operators sustained, high quality, low cost training repetitions. "BMTN was developed in partnership with Vectrona, Breakaway Games and Sentrana to provide a host of first-ever combined artificial intelligence, machine learning, biometric, and natural language processing capabilities consolidated into one command and control training system," explained Lt. Col. Kip Trausch, Western Air Defense Sector chief innovation officer. "BMTN will be the fulcrum for the Battle Control Center to break the negative training feedback loop and enable consistent and meaningful wartime preparation." BMTN, which was also rolled-out to the Air National Guard Battle Control Center enterprise, solves the negative feedback loop generated from an ever-present and high operations tempo coupled with training that can only be conducted internally that results in a lack of time, instructors, and system resources to conduct comprehensive wartime readiness on pace with friendly capability and enemy threat evolution. "BMTN is a direct tactical-level answer to CSAF Brown's Accelerate Change or Lose and systems like this have the flexibility baked in to allow headquarters, commanders, and end-users to create the latest training content to drive familiarity, proficiency, and, potentially for the first time, fluency," Trausch said.

The FDA has authorized the first artificial intelligence software to help doctors detect prostate cancer. The program, called Paige Prostate, is the first approved AI system in pathology. "We really believe this product can make a huge difference," Paige CEO Leo Grady, PhD, says. The program was approved to help doctors, not to replace them. "For a second opinion today, you ship a glass slide to somebody else or you do another stain that's really expensive or you do another molecular test," Grady says.

Scientists use super-resolution microscopy to study previously undiscovered cellular worlds, revealing nanometre-scale details inside cells. The method revolutionised light microscopy and earned its inventors the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Single-molecule localisation microscopy (SMLM) is a type of super-resolution microscopy. It involves labelling proteins of interest with fluorescent molecules and using light to activate only a few molecules at a time. Using this method, multiple images of the same sample are acquired.

The pursuit of responsible AI raises the ante on both the trustworthy computing and formal methods communities.

Greece's decision to deploy machine learning in pandemic surveillance will be much-studied around the world.Credit: Konstantinos Tsakalidis/Bloomberg/Getty A few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, operations researcher Kimon Drakopoulos e-mailed both the Greek prime minister and the head of the country's COVID-19 scientific task force to ask if they needed any extra advice. Drakopoulos works in data science at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and is originally from Greece. To his surprise, he received a reply from Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis within hours. The European Union was asking member states, many of which had implemented widespread lockdowns in March, to allow non-essential travel to recommence from July 2020, and the Greek government needed help in deciding when and how to reopen borders. Greece, like many other countries, lacked the capacity to test all travellers, particularly those not displaying symptoms.

Autonomous systems make drivers less attentive to the road even through'self-driving' technology still requires the human behind the wheel to remain focused, a new study has found. Researchers from MIT studied 290 drivers, recording where they looked and how long for before and after they had disengaged Tesla's Autopilot technology, which the researchers say is considered to be one of the most capable systems available, but found that there was "evidence that drivers may not be using AP as recommended". Data suggests that "before disengagement, drivers looked less on road and focused more on non-driving related areas compared to after the transition to manual driving. The higher proportion of off-road glances before disengagement to manual driving were not compensated by longer glances ahead". Monitoring the driver's posture, face, and view in front of the vehicle over a total of 500,000 miles between all the drivers, the researchers found that checking side mirrors and rear mirrors decreased while AutoPilot was engaged.

A tube shaped 4D-printed robot can roll uphill, carry a load, and navigate an unpredictable landscape. Wei Feng at Tianjin University in China and his colleagues designed the robot, which is built from a flat rectangular sheet of 3D-printed liquid crystal elastomer. When the surface this sheet is placed on is heated above 160 C, the sheet self assembles by rolling into a tubular form, taking on the appearance of a piece of hollow, spiralled spaghetti. This change in shape over time adds a fourth dimension to the construction process, making this what the researchers call a 4D-printed robot.

Artificial intelligence has reached a critical turning point in its evolution, according to a new report by an international panel of experts assessing the state of the field. Substantial advances in language processing, computer vision and pattern recognition mean that AI is touching people's lives on a daily basis -- from helping people to choose a movie to aiding in medical diagnoses. With that success, however, comes a renewed urgency to understand and mitigate the risks and downsides of AI-driven systems, such as algorithmic discrimination or use of AI for deliberate deception. Computer scientists must work with experts in the social sciences and law to assure that the pitfalls of AI are minimized. Those conclusions are from a report titled "Gathering Strength, Gathering Storms: The One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100) 2021 Study Panel Report," which was compiled by a panel of experts from computer science, public policy, psychology, sociology and other disciplines.