Is it $61 billion and 38.4% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) by 2028 or $43 billion and 37.4% CAGR by 2027? Depends on which report outlining the growth of edge computing you choose to go by, but in the end it is not that different. What matters is that edge computing is booming. There is growing interest by vendors, and ample coverage, for good reason. Although the definition of what constitutes edge computing is a bit fuzzy, the idea is simple.

Humans expect that AI is benevolent and trustworthy. A new study reveals that at the same time humans are unwilling to cooperate and compromise with machines. Picture yourself driving on a narrow road in the near future when suddenly another car emerges from a bend ahead. It is a self-driving car with no passengers inside. Will you push forth and assert your right of way, or give way to let it pass?

Success or failure in designing microchips depends heavily on steps known as floorplanning and placement. These steps determine where memory and logic elements are located on a chip. The locations, in turn, strongly affect whether the completed chip design can satisfy operational requirements such as processing speed and power efficiency. So far, the floorplanning task, in particular, has defied all attempts at automation. It is therefore performed iteratively and painstakingly, over weeks or months, by expert human engineers.

Recreating the mix of compounds and experimental conditions that interacted over billions of years to create life on Earth is impossible in the lab. But an autonomous robot can shorten the time it takes to test each possible mixture, which could help reveal the precise combination that let proteins, DNA and enzymes emerge from the prebiotic soup on early Earth.

Research, development, and production of novel materials depend heavily on the availability of fast and at the same time accurate simulation methods. Machine learning, in which artificial intelligence (AI) autonomously acquires and applies new knowledge, will soon enable researchers to develop complex material systems in a purely virtual environment. How does this work, and which applications will benefit? In an article published in the Nature Materials journal, a researcher from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and his colleagues from Göttingen and Toronto explain it all. Digitization and virtualization are becoming increasingly important in a wide range of scientific disciplines.

The mathematical engineer and robotics PhD student from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, or EPFL, had already built a computer model to simulate the trajectories of five autonomous quadcopters flying through a dense forest without hitting anything. But an errant copter wouldn't survive a tête-à-tête with a physical tree. So Soria built a fake forest the size of a bedroom. Motion-capture cameras lined a rail hanging above the space to track the movement of the quadcopters. And for "trees," Soria settled on a grid of eight green collapsible kids' play tunnels from Ikea, made of a soft fabric.

One afternoon in late November of last year, Timnit Gebru was sitting on the couch in her San Francisco Bay Area home, crying. Gebru, a researcher at Google, had just clicked out of a last-minute video meeting with an executive named Megan Kacholia, who had issued a jarring command. Gebru was the coleader of a group at the company that studies the social and ethical ramifications of artificial intelligence, and Kacholia had ordered Gebru to retract her latest research paper--or else remove her name from its list of authors, along with those of several other members of her team. The paper in question was, in Gebru's mind, pretty unobjectionable. It surveyed the known pitfalls of so-called large language models, a type of AI software--most famously exemplified by a system called GPT-3--that was stoking excitement in the tech industry.

Apple will no longer send Siri requests to its servers, the company has announced, in a move to substantially speed up the voice assistant's operation and address privacy concerns. The new feature comes two years after the Guardian revealed that Apple staff regularly heard confidential details while carrying out quality control for the feature. Apple's worldwide developers conference (WWDC) was told on Monday that, from this autumn onwards, when new versions of the company's operating systems are released, Siri will process audio "on device" – meaning that, for the majority of queries, no recording will need to be uploaded to Apple's servers. "With on-device speech recognition, the audio of users' requests is processed right on their iPhone or iPad by default," an Apple spokesperson said. "This addresses one of the biggest privacy concerns for voice assistants, which is unwanted audio recording. For many requests, Siri processing is also moving on device, enabling requests to be processed without an internet connection, such as launching apps, setting timers and alarms, changing settings or controlling music."

The Thirty-Third International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS-34) was to be held May 17-19, 2021, at the Double Tree Ocean Point Resort and Spa in North Miami Beach, Florida, USA. Due to COVID-19 pandemic and travel restriction, the conference held both virtual and in-person. The planned conference events included tutorials, invited speakers, special tracks, and presentations of papers, posters, and awards. The conference chair was Keith Brawner from the Army Research Laboratory. The program co-chairs were Roman Barták from Charles University, Prague, and Eric Bell, USA.

Kate Crawford studies the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor of communication and science and technology studies at the University of Southern California and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research. Her new book, Atlas of AI, looks at what it takes to make AI and what's at stake as it reshapes our world. You've written a book critical of AI but you work for a company that is among the leaders in its deployment. How do you square that circle?