The Covid-19 pandemic has been challenging and, at the same time, a transformative experience for banks and credit unions. While banking providers have invested in digital capabilities, the pandemic pushed them to rethink, redesign and re-engineer their business operations, services and products. To ensure business continuity, financial institutions transitioned to remote working models of sales, digital outreach and customer support. Apart from drastic operations changes, the pandemic also brought along a fundamental change in consumer behavior. Through social distancing and work from home, the average consumer's life was confined to home.

SCI COMMUN### Climate change The United States submitted its new goals to the Paris climate agreement last week, pledging to cut its planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions 50% to 52% below 2005 levels by 2030. The nonbinding pledge, made on Earth Day at an online climate summit convened by President Joe Biden, is one of the most aggressive targets of any wealthy country. The cuts are also higher than the 26% to 28% reduction by 2025 pledged by former President Barack Obama when the United States first joined the agreement in 2015. In the past month, Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom have also committed to cuts steeper than their earlier pledges; other large polluters, such as China, India, and Russia, have yet to increase their goals ahead of a critical U.N. climate meeting this winter in Glasgow, U.K. The U.S. pledge has a long road to reality. It will require immediate increases in renewable energy, widespread adoption of electric vehicles, and other steps, many of which will require laws that could be difficult to pass, such as Biden's climate-focused infrastructure bill. > “It is our policy … not to employ anyone who has taken the experimental COVID-19 injection.” > > Miami-based private school Centner Academy in a letter to parents this week, citing discredited claims that vaccinated people can transmit harmful substances to others. ### Biomedicine ![Figure][1] CREDITS: (GRAPHIC) J. BRAINARD/ SCIENCE ; (DATA) ASGCT/INFORMA The number of new clinical trials for gene, cell, and RNA therapies has almost tripled in the past 4 years, the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy said this month in its first ever quarterly trends report. As of 31 March, nearly 3500 of these experimental treatments were in development, most of which (53%) consist of altered genes or genetically modified (GM) cells, such as cancer-fighting T cells with modified receptors. Cancer is the target for the largest number (1200) of therapies under development. Among RNA therapies, many were vaccines (35) or COVID-19 treatments (30). The United States has more clinical trials underway in each of the three types of therapies than any other country: 1400 overall. Globally, 16 gene therapies (including GM cells), 53 non-GM cell therapies, and 15 RNA therapies have been approved for use so far. ### Vaccination The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) last week killed a rule that would have made it much more difficult for people who sustain shoulder injuries during vaccination to win compensation from a $4.1 billion government fund. The rule had been finalized on 19 January, the last day of former President Donald Trump's administration. But President Joe Biden's administration froze its implementation on 20 January. The new administration said the previous one had been “irregular in its haste” when it moved to remove shoulder injuries from a list of injuries in which the petitioner does not have to prove a vaccine caused the injury, making it easier to win a government payout ( Science , 10 April 2020, p. [121][2]). Shoulder injuries accounted for nearly 55% of more than 2400 claims filed with the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in the past 2 years, most of them after flu shots. COVID-19 vaccines fall under a different HHS program, but if they win formal approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, they could in principle be added to the national compensation program. ### Publishing Sixteen journals, including BMJ Open Science and Royal Society Open Science , say they will accept articles reviewed by the nonprofit Peer Community In Registered Reports (PCI RR). The organization, launched last week, will review one type of article: “registered reports,” describing studies for which detailed experimental plans are peer reviewed before research begins. Once the research is complete, PCI RR will do a second round of peer review including results and analysis. Papers it recommends can then be published in any of the 16 journals without further review as long as they meet a journal's normal criteria. The organization, funded by donations, will provide peer review free to authors and journals in any discipline. ### COVID-19 The National Institutes of Health (NIH) last week announced it would launch a large study repurposing existing drugs for patients with mild COVID-19 symptoms who don't need hospitalization. The $155 million trial, which aims to recruit 13,500 participants, will open in a few weeks at several research centers. It will test up to seven medications already approved for other conditions, but NIH hasn't yet named them. A recent, similar trial at the University of Oxford that has so far enrolled about 4800 patients has found that the asthma drug budesonide lessens symptoms and speeds recovery in certain COVID-19 patients. ### Medicine A large study has firmed up earlier evidence that SARS-CoV-2 increases the rate of complications for pregnant women and their babies. The study followed 706 pregnant women with COVID-19 and 1424 uninfected pregnant women at hospitals in 18 countries. Infected women had a 76% higher risk of developing problems caused by pregnancy-associated high blood pressure and a 59% higher risk of preterm birth. They were also five times more likely to be admitted to intensive care than uninfected women. Eleven women with COVID-19 died, compared with one uninfected woman, researchers report in JAMA Pediatrics . Infected women with fever and shortness of breath had babies with a fivefold increased risk of complications such as immature lungs, eye disorders, and brain damage. The coronavirus may affect pregnancy via changes in a woman's heart, lungs, and immune system. The results show pregnant women should be among priority groups for COVID-19 vaccines, the authors say. A separate study last week found no obvious safety problems in more than 800 U.S. women who gave birth after receiving messenger RNA vaccines. ### Community The American Humanist Association has decided to withdraw Richard Dawkins's 1996 Humanist of the Year award as a result of his “history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalized groups.” The decision came soon after the evolutionary biologist and former University of Oxford professor wrote a tweet comparing transgender people to Rachel Dolezal, a civil rights activist who for years posed as Black. The association said the tweet “implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient.” In 2015, Dawkins argued that trans women are not women based on their chromosomes, but said he would use the pronoun “she” out of courtesy. ### Seismology The first large-scale, phone-based earthquake early warning system will be deployed in Greece and New Zealand, Google announced this week. Since last year, the company has been testing the use of data compiled from its more than 2 billion active Android phones to pinpoint the location and strength of earthquakes. The measurement comes from the built-in Android phones' accelerometers, which sense movement just like seismometers. When the phones detect earthquakelike signals, they alert a server that combines information from many phones. If enough phones corroborate the result, an alert goes out. The cellphone results compared well to those from seismometer-based warning systems in Japan and the United States. Google chose New Zealand and Greece, both countries with high earthquake hazards and many Android phones, to premier the system because they lack operational warning systems of their own. Eventually, phone-based alerts could be available worldwide. ### Biotechnology Genetically modified mosquitoes designed to prevent the spread of viruses such as Zika and dengue are set to be released in the United States for the first time. Starting this week, the company Oxitec will free fewer than 12,000 transgenic Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, all of them nonbiting males, in the Florida Keys as part of a pilot study, the company announced on 23 April. They are engineered to carry a gene that kills their female offspring, reducing the population of mosquitoes capable of transmitting diseases. Field tests outside the United States have shown dramatic population drops, though the company has not published definitive evidence that the strategy reduces disease in humans. The project, which has long faced public opposition in Florida, won approval in May 2020 from the Environmental Protection Agency, which predicted no adverse effects on people or local wildlife. ### Science policy President Joe Biden last week picked two veterans of government service and a newcomer to fill top science positions. He named soil scientist Asmeret Asefaw Berhe of the University of California, Merced, to lead the Department of Energy's Office of Science. Berhe, born in Eritrea, has little government experience but has won accolades for her research and efforts to promote diversity in science. She would become the first Black woman to lead the science office if confirmed by the Senate. Oceanographer Rick Spinrad of Oregon State University, Corvallis, who has held numerous posts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is Biden's choice to lead that agency. To run the State Department's science bureau, he chose Monica Medina, an ocean policy expert and attorney at Georgetown University. Confirmation hearings for the three nominees could come as early as next month. ### Regulation In one of the broadest attempts to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) to date, the European Commission on 21 April proposed new rules for algorithms that power everything from medical device and credit scoring software to chatbots and facial recognition systems. The rules divide AI technologies into risk categories, and put outright bans on some, such as systems that would score individuals' “social credit.” Other “high-risk” systems, including those that collect biometric data, would require a strict vetting process. However, there are exceptions for national security, and it could take years before the rules become law: They must first pass the European Council and the European Parliament and be adopted by member countries. ### Community An effort to increase gender, racial, and geographic diversity in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has begun to bear fruit. Nearly half of the 120-member 2021 class announced last week are women, compared with one-quarter in 2011. The new cohort includes nine Black scientists; NAS officials say previous classes never had more than three and often had none. “We need to do better, but I'm amazed at how far we've come,” says plant geneticist Susan Wessler, NAS home secretary. The academy's governing council has begun to give more slots to disciplinary units that present candidate slates less skewed toward older white men. To reduce its geographic imbalance, NAS is also prohibiting members from nominating someone from their own institution. Today, 18 U.S. states have two or fewer members, whereas a handful of elite academic institutions each have more than 100. [1]: pending:yes [2]: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/368/6487/121

Life Whisperer, the fertility arm of AI healthcare company Presagen, has made a significant breakthrough in using artificial intelligence to non-invasively help embryologists rank and select genetically healthy embryos in IVF. Currently, PGT-A genetic testing requires a portion of a healthy embryo to be removed and sent away for testing. The procedure is invasive, costly, and potentially risky. Presagen CEO, Dr Michelle Perugini said: "Some future parents are just not comfortable with the thought of having to biopsy their embryo, which may ultimately become their baby. PGT-A testing is conducted because evidence suggests genetically healthy embryos can increase pregnancy success and reduce miscarriage for IVF patients who are desperate for children."

InnovationRx is your weekly digest of healthcare news. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here. While some industries were devastated by the Covid-19 pandemic, funding kept flowing to startups using artificial intelligence to solve business challenges. Several healthcare companies made the annual Forbes AI 50 list, which identifies some of the most promising companies in the space. Komodo Health uses algorithms to help identify patients for clinical trials and track drug effectiveness after it hits the market.

The L3DAS21 Challenge is aimed at encouraging and fostering collaborative research on machine learning for 3D audio signal processing, with particular focus on 3D speech enhancement (SE) and 3D sound localization and detection (SELD). Alongside with the challenge, we release the L3DAS21 dataset, a 65 hours 3D audio corpus, accompanied with a Python API that facilitates the data usage and results submission stage. Usually, machine learning approaches to 3D audio tasks are based on single-perspective Ambisonics recordings or on arrays of single-capsule microphones. We propose, instead, a novel multichannel audio configuration based multiple-source and multiple-perspective Ambisonics recordings, performed with an array of two first-order Ambisonics microphones. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that a dual-mic Ambisonics configuration is used for these tasks. We provide baseline models and results for both tasks, obtained with state-of-the-art architectures: FaSNet for SE and SELDNet for SELD. This report is aimed at providing all needed information to participate in the L3DAS21 Challenge, illustrating the details of the L3DAS21 dataset, the challenge tasks and the baseline models.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are deep learning architectures for machine learning problems on graphs. It has recently been shown that the expressiveness of GNNs can be characterised precisely by the combinatorial Weisfeiler-Leman algorithms and by finite variable counting logics. The correspondence has even led to new, higher-order GNNs corresponding to the WL algorithm in higher dimensions. The purpose of this paper is to explain these descriptive characterisations of GNNs.

While learned video codecs have demonstrated great promise, they have yet to achieve sufficient efficiency for practical deployment. In this work, we propose several novel ideas for learned video compression which allow for improved performance for the low-latency mode (I- and P-frames only) along with a considerable increase in computational efficiency. In this setting, for natural videos our approach compares favorably across the entire R-D curve under metrics PSNR, MS-SSIM and VMAF against all mainstream video standards (H.264, H.265, AV1) and all ML codecs. At the same time, our approach runs at least 5x faster and has fewer parameters than all ML codecs which report these figures. Our contributions include a flexible-rate framework allowing a single model to cover a large and dense range of bitrates, at a negligible increase in computation and parameter count; an efficient backbone optimized for ML-based codecs; and a novel in-loop flow prediction scheme which leverages prior information towards more efficient compression. We benchmark our method, which we call ELF-VC (Efficient, Learned and Flexible Video Coding) on popular video test sets UVG and MCL-JCV under metrics PSNR, MS-SSIM and VMAF. For example, on UVG under PSNR, it reduces the BD-rate by 44% against H.264, 26% against H.265, 15% against AV1, and 35% against the current best ML codec. At the same time, on an NVIDIA Titan V GPU our approach encodes/decodes VGA at 49/91 FPS, HD 720 at 19/35 FPS, and HD 1080 at 10/18 FPS.

Recently, there has been an increasing concern about the privacy issue raised by using personally identifiable information in machine learning. However, previous portrait matting methods were all based on identifiable portrait images. To fill the gap, we present P3M-10k in this paper, which is the first large-scale anonymized benchmark for Privacy-Preserving Portrait Matting. P3M-10k consists of 10,000 high-resolution face-blurred portrait images along with high-quality alpha mattes. We systematically evaluate both trimap-free and trimap-based matting methods on P3M-10k and find that existing matting methods show different generalization capabilities when following the Privacy-Preserving Training (PPT) setting, i.e., "training on face-blurred images and testing on arbitrary images". To devise a better trimap-free portrait matting model, we propose P3M-Net, which leverages the power of a unified framework for both semantic perception and detail matting, and specifically emphasizes the interaction between them and the encoder to facilitate the matting process. Extensive experiments on P3M-10k demonstrate that P3M-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both objective metrics and subjective visual quality. Besides, it shows good generalization capacity under the PPT setting, confirming the value of P3M-10k for facilitating future research and enabling potential real-world applications. The source code and dataset will be made publicly available.

Recent advances in natural language processing and computer vision have led to AI models that interpret simple scenes at human levels. Yet, we do not have a complete understanding of how humans and AI models differ in their interpretation of more complex scenes. We created a dataset of complex scenes that contained human behaviors and social interactions. AI and humans had to describe the scenes with a sentence. We used a quantitative metric of similarity between scene descriptions of the AI/human and ground truth of five other human descriptions of each scene. Results show that the machine/human agreement scene descriptions are much lower than human/human agreement for our complex scenes. Using an experimental manipulation that occludes different spatial regions of the scenes, we assessed how machines and humans vary in utilizing regions of images to understand the scenes. Together, our results are a first step toward understanding how machines fall short of human visual reasoning with complex scenes depicting human behaviors.

Get the social sector's most essential news coverage, including news highlights, opinion pieces and features to keep you up-to-date with Australia's most valuable sector. Get news covering the latest innovations in local and international for-good business practices. Get purpose-driven roles delivered straight to your inbox. Accompanied by the latest careers news, including Changemakers and who's moving where in the sector, you'll never be out of touch with career developments within the sector. Get notifications on the latest webinar topics, as well as other Pro Bono Australia professional development resources.