Dr. Albert Hsiao and his colleagues at the UC San Diego health system had been working for 18 months on an artificial intelligence program designed to help doctors identify pneumonia on a chest X-ray. When the coronavirus hit the United States, they decided to see what it could do. The researchers quickly deployed their program, which dots X-ray images with spots of color where there may be lung damage or other signs of pneumonia. It has now been applied to more than 6,000 chest X-rays, and it's providing some value in diagnosis, said Hsiao, the director of UCSD's augmented imaging and artificial intelligence data analytics laboratory. His team is one of several around the country that has pushed AI programs into the COVID-19 crisis to perform tasks like deciding which patients face the greatest risk of complications and which can be safely channeled into lower-intensity care.

Our intelligence is what makes us human, and AI is an extension of that quality. Artificial Intelligence is a branch of science producing and studying the machines aimed at the stimulation of human intelligence processes. The main objective of AI is to optimize the routine processes improving their speed and efficiency (provided it has been implemented and supported properly). As a result, a number of companies adopting AI continues to grow worldwide. According to Research and Markets, "The analysts forecast the Artificial Intelligence Market in the US Education Sector to grow at a CAGR of 47.77% during the period 2018-2022."

"In Q1 2020, venture capital firms deployed over $4.0 billion of fresh capital into 148 deals for artificial intelligence companies. The data shows that strategic and financial investors are looking for companies that are combining emerging, connected and smart technologies to digitally transform their industry." Technology innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating at a breakneck pace, and the ability to innovate, adopt and integrate AI techniques to evolve business models will separate those businesses that recover from the COVID-19 pandemic from those that will fail. Four artificial intelligence technologies are poised to lead the global economy out of the pandemic-induced recession. Applications for these technologies across verticals abound.

As businesses rush to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) for products and services--from driverless cars to algorithms that can spot cancer--technologists, philosophers and governments are starting to tap the brakes. How can we be sure that AI will be trustworthy? How can we know that its applications are unbiased, that they are secure from attack, protect privacy and will do more good than harm? To chart a path forward, the European Union has taken a leading role in laying out guidelines for how companies can put AI to work ethically and responsibly. Two years ago, the EU formed the High-Level Expert Group on AI--a group of 52 leaders from education, business, law and other disciplines--to develop a set of AI ethics guidelines.

On New Year's Eve of last year, the artificial intelligence platform BlueDot picked up an anomaly. It registered a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China. BlueDot, based in Toronto, Canada, uses natural language processing and machine learning to track, locate, and report on infectious disease spread. It sends out its alerts to a variety of clients, including health care, government, business, and public health bodies. It had spotted what would come to be known as Covid-19, nine days before the World Health Organization released its statement alerting people to the emergence of a novel coronavirus.

Oxford University spin-out Navenio has announced £9m in Series A funding for its efficiency-boosting location technology. The funding round was led by QBN Capital and includes G.K. Goh, Hostplus, Big Pi Ventures, Oxford Investment Consultants, as well as existing investors like Oxford Sciences Innovation (OSI), IP Group plc and the University of Oxford. Navenio provides infrastructure-free indoor location solutions to power a range of apps and platforms in sectors including healthcare. Hospitals, for example, can use Navenio's artificial intelligence (AI) led'intelligent workforce solution' to assign tasks to healthcare teams based on their location. This helps prioritise workload in real-time.

The virtual International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) was held on 26-30 April and included eight keynote talks. Courtesy of the conference organisers you can watch the talks in full and see the question and answer sessions. The aim of Mihaela's research is to contribute to the transformation of healthcare by rigorous formulation and development of diverse new tools in machine learning and AI. Her group has worked on many problems in medicine and healthcare, including risk prognosis, modelling disease trajectories, adaptive clinical trials, individualised treatment, early-warning systems in hospitals, and personalised screening. They needed to develop a variety of machine learning methods to carry out this work.

Facial recognition technology can determine a person's personality by analysing an emotionless selfie, a study claims. Researchers built an artificial neural network that assessed 128 different factors of a person's face, such as the width of the mouth and the height of the lips or eyes. It used the data from these readings to categorise a person based on five personality traits: conscientiousness, neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and openness. When compared to questionnaires filled in by the volunteers, the AI was accurate 58 per cent of the time. Researchers say pure chance would get this right 50 per cent of the time and humans are less consistent than the facial recognition method.

Brandon Moak felt as if a freight train had hit him. It was mid-March, and the cofounder and CTO of the autonomous- trucking startup Embark Trucks had been keeping tabs on the emergence of covid-19. As a shelter-in-place order went into effect throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, where Embark is based, Moak and his team were forced to ground almost all their 13 self-driving semi-trucks (a few stayed on the road moving essential freight but weren't in autonomous mode) and send home the majority of their workforce, with no idea how long it'd be before they could return. For safety reasons, autonomous vehicles typically have two operators apiece. That's a no-go in the age of social distancing, and leaders of autonomous-vehicle companies knew they'd have to mothball their fleets.

Scientists have developed an artificial eye that could provide vision for humanoid robots, or even function as a bionic eye for visually impaired people in the future. Researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology built the ElectroChemical Eye – dubbed EC-Eye – to resemble the size and shape of a biological eye, but with vastly greater potential. The eye mimics the human iris and retina using a lens to focus light onto a dense arrays of light-sensitive nanowires. Information is then passed through the wires, which act like the brain's visual cortex, to a computer for processing. During tests, the computer was able to recognise the letters'E', 'I' and'Y' when they were projected onto the lens.