The new polymer bank note, shown in an image provided by the Bank of England, was unveiled to the public nearly two years after officials first announced it would honor Turing. The new polymer bank note, shown in an image provided by the Bank of England, was unveiled to the public nearly two years after officials first announced it would honor Turing. The Bank of England has unveiled the new £50 note featuring mathematician and computer science pioneer Alan Turing, who helped the Allies win World War II with his code-breaking prowess but died an outcast after facing government persecution over his homosexuality. The bank revealed the note's design and features -- which include a number of clever visual references to Turing's work -- on Thursday, nearly two years after first announcing that it would honor Turing. The banknote will officially enter circulation on June 23, Turing's birthday.

Machine learning could help tiny microrobots swim through a fluid and reach their goal without being knocked off target by the random motion of particles they encounter on their journey. Microrobotic "swimmers" are often designed to mimic the way bacteria can propel themselves through a fluid – but bacteria have one key advantage over the robots. "A real bacterium can sense where to go and decide that it goes in that direction because it wants food," says Frank Cichos at the University of Leipzig, Germany. It is difficult for the bacteria-sized microrobots to stay on course because their small size – some are just 2 micrometres across – means they are buffeted by particles in the fluid. Unlike the bacteria, they can't correct their direction of travel, and so they tend to follow a random path described by Brownian motion.

Health challenges represent one of the long-standing issues in the Arab region that hinder its ability to develop. Prevalence of diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, liver cirrhosis and cancer among many others has contributed to the deteriorated health status across the region leading to lower life expectancy compared to other regions. For instance, the average life expectancy in the Arab world is approximately 70 years, which is at least 10 years lower than most high-income countries.2 Among many directions of healthcare development across the region, biomedical computing research represents one main arm of tackling health challenges. Advances in computational technologies have enabled the emergence of biomedical computing as one of the most influential research areas worldwide.

Arabic poses a set of unique speech recognition challenges due to its rich dialectal variety.

David Keyes is a professor of applied mathematics and computational science and director of the Extreme Computing Research Center at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia.

Though Arabic NLP has many challenges, it has seen many successes and developments.

Traffic accidents are a major unsolved problem worldwide. Yearly, it causes around 1.35 million deaths and 10 million people sustain nonfatal injuries9 in addition to having substantial negative economic and social effects. With approximately 90% of accidents being due to human errors, autonomous driving (AD) will play a vital role in saving human lives and substantial property damage. Moreover, it promises far greater mobility, energy saving, and less air pollution. Despite the recent advances to achieve such promising vision, enabling autonomous vehicles in complex environments is still decades away.6

When it was released by Google just a few years ago, a deep-learning model called BERT demonstrated a major step forward in natural language processing (NLP). BERT's core structure, based on a type of neural network known as a Transformer, has become the underpinning for a range of NLP applications, from completing search queries and user-written sentences to language translation. The models even score well on benchmarks intended to test understanding at a high school level, such as Large-scale ReAding Comprehension (RACE) developed at Carnegie Mellon University. In doing so, they have become marketing tools in the artificial intelligence (AI) gold rush. At Nvidia's annual technology conference, president and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang used RACE to claim high performance for his company's implementation of BERT.

With improvements, especially those that raise ethical concerns like a greater inaccuracy with darker skin tones, such programs may help in diagnosing and managing Parkinson's, the researchers wrote. Their study, "Detecting facial characteristics of Parkinson's disease by novel artificial intelligence (AI) softwares," was published in the journal Brain Supplement. Parkinson's-associated motor symptoms, such as tremors and muscular rigidity, affect a person's ability to show emotions via facial expressions, with implications for a patient's sense of self-esteem and engagement in social life. Artificial intelligence (AI) may be more able than other methods to track and quantify these changes with disease progression. AI-based facial recognition technology analyzes facial characteristics, such as age, emotions, and skin texture, and could prove useful in assessing Parkinson's-related changes.

Researchers have used advanced AI and large sets of genomic data to unveil how humans have adapted to recent diseases. The method could also be applied to new pathogens such as the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, helping identify which gene mutations may be associated with more severe cases of the disease. The study, by researchers from Imperial College London, the Middle East Technical University, Turkey, and the Universita degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Italy, is published today in a Special Issue of Molecular Ecology Resources, "Machine Learning techniques in Evolution and Ecology." Natural selection is the process by which beneficial gene mutations are preserved from generation to generation, until they become dominant in our genomes--the catalog of all our genes. One thing that can drive natural selection is protection against pathogens.