Artificial Intelligence has become so integrated into the technology stack that it goes largely unnoticed. When you take a picture with a newer iPhone, for instance, the phone collects a couple of frames and analyses it at the pixel level to identify what is in the scene and balance the exposure to produce a crisp, detailed final picture. All this happens in a fraction of the time it took you to read that sentence. Outside of turning you into a better photographer, AI is verifying your identity and enabling all the smart solutions that make your personal admin more convenient. There's an AI engine doing an instant credit assessment to approve your application in minutes.

The conversation is on hold. The Edge community has hit the road... or they're staying home. Preparing for the academic year to begin, wrapping up projects and starting new ones, celebrating with family and friends or contemplating in solitude. After a hiatus, Edge is pleased to revive Summer Postcards: Edgies reporting in from wherever they are and on whatever they're doing, as the dog days wind out and the season comes to a close. As the world slowly returns to a "new normal" with enduring COVID restrictions in the midst of renewed vaccine freedoms, this year's collection is a testament to change (temporary and lasting), a consideration of loss (will travel ever be like it was?), and a celebration of questions (that still need answering). The hammock may be away until next year, but the memories remain. I spent the summer writing and revising the final section of a longish novel I started in 2019. It seems now as though I've been from 1946 to 2021 on my hands and knees. Various lockdowns have been a liberation from obligations and the luggage carousel, and I've never known such sweet and total focus for months on end. We have the luxury of living in the country--no shortage of big skies and moody walks. All our few breaks were in the UK--Scotland, the Lake District, the West country. Even in our remote part of the Lakes, I had to keep on writing--as in photo. The best novel I read this summer was Sandro Veronesi's The Hummingbird. Best non-fiction was Peter Godfrey Smith's Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. I gave time also to some wonderful novellas--perfect fictional form for you too-busy scientists. IAN MCEWAN is a novelist whose works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He is the recipient of the Man Booker Prize for Amsterdam (1998), the National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award, and the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction for Atonement (2003). His most recent novel is Machines Like Me. In 2019, Časlav Brukner and myself were walking on a beach on Lamma Island, near Hong Kong, marvelling together at the astonishing strangeness of quantum phenomena. This summer, the conversation with Časlav has continued on another island, and quite an island: Lesbos, the northern Greek island near the Turkish coast. Lesbos is the place where lyrical poetry was born. Here lived Sappho and Alcaeus.

Dr Chris Kpodar, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Solomon Investments Ghana Limited, says artificial intelligence (AI) represents the future and that should be the direction Ghana should be going. It is the pathway to achieving increased efficiency, lower human error rates and improved workflows among other highpoints. AI refers to the use of simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think like humans and mimic their actions and may also be applied to any machine that exhibits traits associated with a human mind such as learning and problem-solving. Dr Kpodar, who is also a Chief Technical Advisor for the Centre for Greater Impact Africa (CGIA), said AI had become necessary in all spheres of life and gradually becoming the future. Ghana like all other developing countries must join the technological drive through strategic policies, he stated at a forum organized by the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in Tema.

The AfDB announced last year that it had approved a grant of just over $1m to support the creation of AI-backed systems to process customer complaints for the national banks of Ghana and Rwanda, and the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission of Zambia. A chatbot, or chatterbot, is a software application used to conduct an online chat conversation via text or text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human agent. With literally millions of data points being created in a single day at major banks, humans are unable to comb through all the information fast enough. Automated AI systems can flag up potentially fraudulent activity and push this to skilled staff in the form of alerts, allowing personnel to focus on the most important tasks easily. For some banks, the idea of adopting AI solutions can seem like a complex undertaking, especially for those institutions that have legacy infrastructure where data is stored in disparate silos.

The International Data Centre Day was launched by 7X24 Exchange International, an NGO that provides an educational forum mainly focused on the challenges faced by industry professionals. The first International Data Centre Day was celebrated four years ago, on October 29, 2019. A dedicated website, internationaldatacenterday.org, was also launched with objectives to create awareness about data centres and their future. This way, the industry can connect with future generations, ensure a steady flow of skilled labour, enhance the public image of data centres, and safeguard the ongoing prosperity of the data centre industry. Robert Cassiliano, Chairman & CEO of 7 24 Exchange International, said, "In 2015, few members challenged our organisation to find qualified talent for the data centre industry. However, we later realised that many parents, teachers and students are unaware of the data centre industry. There was a need to create awareness about what data centres are and how they operate. Hence, we started the STEM initiative, which includes mentoring programmes like – the Women in Mission Critical Operations (WiMCO) community, a Data Centre 101 session, video and then creation of International Data Centre Day".

The domain of Artificial Intelligence (AI) ethics is not new, with discussions going back at least 40 years. Teaching the principles and requirements of ethical AI to students is considered an essential part of this domain, with an increasing number of technical AI courses taught at several higher-education institutions around the globe including content related to ethics. By using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a generative probabilistic topic model, this study uncovers topics in teaching ethics in AI courses and their trends related to where the courses are taught, by whom, and at what level of cognitive complexity and specificity according to Bloom’s taxonomy. In this exploratory study based on unsupervised machine learning, we analyzed a total of 166 courses: 116 from North American universities, 11 from Asia, 36 from Europe, and 10 from other regions. Based on this analysis, we were able to synthesize a model of teaching approaches, which we call BAG (Build, Assess, and Govern), that combines specific cognitive levels, course content topics, and disciplines affiliated with the department(s) in charge of the course. We critically assess the implications of this teaching paradigm and provide suggestions about how to move away from these practices. We challenge teaching practitioners and program coordinators to reflect on their usual procedures so that they may expand their methodology beyond the confines of stereotypical thought and traditional biases regarding what disciplines should teach and how. This article appears in the AI & Society track.

Thaler first brought the image created by his "Creativity Machine" algorithm to the USCO in November 2018, Eileen Kinsella reported for Artnet News. A Recent Entrance to Paradise is part of a series Thaler describes as a "simulated near-death experience," where an algorithm repurposes pictures to create images seen by a synthetic dying brain. Thaler noted to the USCO he was "seeking to register this computer-generated work as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine." Providing this protection is required under current legal frameworks." Thaler has previously tested the limits of patent laws in numerous countries.

Artificial intelligence (AI) currently plays a central role in the digitisation and modernisation strategies of public administrations and companies throughout Europe, the United States and China. The potential improvements and advances in efficiency that the incorporation of AI can offer strategic sectors in different countries have made it indispensable in a new era of technological transformation. And while no one wants to be left behind, the main players of this new digital era have from the very beginning approached these technologies in significantly different ways. While the United States and China have already embraced AI as one more component of their geopolitical strategies, the European Union (EU) is positioning itself as a global leader in its ethical use. According to the EU, in order to be considered ethical, any AI technology used in its territory must ensure respect for the fundamental rights of EU citizens.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now firmly in the sights of African banks. From better understanding consumer needs to reducing risk, there are few areas where AI can't make a key impact on operations. Christine Wu, Managing Executive, Customer Value Management at Absa Retail and Business Bank, views artificial intelligence (AI) as an important enabler of the journey to a new banking model that is truly responsive to customer needs. "All areas of the bank's operations can benefit from AI – from the frontline, where we can make use of smarter profiling and customer interactions that are needs-based and tailored to a customer's profile, to customer servicing, where we can include clearer and more bespoke solutions to customers before they even ask – such as the automation of repetitive tasks," says Wu. AI is often defined as human-like intelligence achieved by machines – any system that "perceives its environment and takes actions that maximise its chance of achieving its goals". Advanced AI, according to experts, is also capable of learning and problem-solving.

Conditional Neural Processes~(CNPs) bridge neural networks with probabilistic inference to approximate functions of Stochastic Processes under meta-learning settings. Given a batch of non-{\it i.i.d} function instantiations, CNPs are jointly optimized for in-instantiation observation prediction and cross-instantiation meta-representation adaptation within a generative reconstruction pipeline. There can be a challenge in tying together such two targets when the distribution of function observations scales to high-dimensional and noisy spaces. Instead, noise contrastive estimation might be able to provide more robust representations by learning distributional matching objectives to combat such inherent limitation of generative models. In light of this, we propose to equip CNPs by 1) aligning prediction with encoded ground-truth observation, and 2) decoupling meta-representation adaptation from generative reconstruction. Specifically, two auxiliary contrastive branches are set up hierarchically, namely in-instantiation temporal contrastive learning~({\tt TCL}) and cross-instantiation function contrastive learning~({\tt FCL}), to facilitate local predictive alignment and global function consistency, respectively. We empirically show that {\tt TCL} captures high-level abstraction of observations, whereas {\tt FCL} helps identify underlying functions, which in turn provides more efficient representations. Our model outperforms other CNPs variants when evaluating function distribution reconstruction and parameter identification across 1D, 2D and high-dimensional time-series.