Tiny robots made using pollen could one day be used to clean contaminated water. Waste water from some factories contains mercury, a metal that can cause illness if consumed. There are techniques to remove mercury in water treatment plants, but they are time consuming and expensive. Martin Pumera at the University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague, in the Czech Republic, and his colleagues are working on a low-cost alternative.

In a nation famed for its cutting-edge robots and toilets, one prefecture is going defiantly low-tech in its effort to defend its officials against COVID-19. In what has been proudly dubbed a "Tottori-style office system," the Tottori Prefectural Government has begun using cardboard and plastic sheets as partitions between officials' desks. The use of cardboard boxes, which was requested in a notice sent to officials Tuesday, has already been implemented in many divisions within the prefectural office where space constraints prevent staff from sitting two meters away from each other, said Hideki Maeta, a human resources official. In fact, use of the partitions has even been adopted by other entities under the prefecture's jurisdiction, such as tax offices, Maeta said. "Almost all divisions have a stockpile of unused cardboard, so it's a very low-cost, immediate way of reducing the risk of droplet infections," the official said.

In the last two articles, you learned to use ML-Agents and trained two agents. The first was able to jump over walls, and the second learned to destroy a pyramid to get the golden brick. It's time to do something harder. When I was thinking about creating a custom environment, I remembered the famous scene in Indiana Jones, where Indy needs to get the golden statue and avoid a lot of traps to survive. I was thinking: could my agent could be as good as him?

One subject never fails to light up the eyes of senior bankers and regulators when they're questioned about their efforts to end the money laundering-related scandals that have spread across northern Europe over the last two years: technology. There can be no more damning indictment of the integrity of a bank, or its host nation, than the public revelation that a licensed institution is being used as a laundromat for ill-gotten gains. And what is more enlivening for money-laundering supervisors and bank-compliance officers than showing your firm and country is at the forefront of a technology that could make these troubles disappear? Some of the biggest actors in Europe's financial sector are converts. The UK's Financial Conduct Authority is particularly enthusiastic about using technology to fight money laundering.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is informing just about every facet of society, from detecting fraud and surveillance to helping countries battle the current COVID-19 pandemic. But AI is a thorny subject, fraught with complex terminology, contradictory information, and general confusion about what it is at its most fundamental level. This is why the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), the University of Oxford's research and teaching department specializing in the social science of the internet, has partnered with Google to launch a portal with a series of explainers outlining what AI actually is -- including the fundamentals, ethics, its impact on society, and how it's created. The Oxford Internet Institute is a multidisciplinary research and teaching department of the University of Oxford, dedicated to the social science of the Internet. At launch, the "A-Z of AI" covers 26 topics, including bias and how AI is used in climate science, ethics, machine learning, human-in-the-loop, and Generative adversarial networks (GANs).

Question: You lead the "Scientific Data Management" research group at TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology. You focus your research on how big data technologies can be used in the health sector to improve health care. What exactly are you researching? The amount of available big data has grown drastically in the last decade, and it is expected a faster growth rate in the coming years. Specifically, in the biomedical domain, there are a wide variety of methods, e.g.

OneConnect, a leading technology-as-a-service platform serving financial institutions in China, is pleased to announce that its artificial intelligence research institute, Gamma Lab, won the FinTech Team of the Year award for its strong technical prowess, wide range of deployment scenarios across the financial sector and high-speed growth at The Asset Triple A Digital Awards 2020 held by international authoritative media The Asset. The Gamma O platform was awarded the Best Digital Financial Project for its success since launch in providing one-stop solutions that empowered financial institutions and technology service providers in connecting with each other. The Asset was founded in 1999, with its Triple A awards gaining a high level of influence and authority in Asian and international financial markets. For two consecutive years, Gamma Lab won the FinTech Team of the Year award, demonstrating OneConnect's industry leading position in both AI technology R&D and deployment. OneConnect's information extraction technology led at the international AI competition SemEval 2020, representing another world first for Gamma Lab in new AI technologies beyond the successes that the institute had achieved in terms of performance in the areas of microexpression recognition, facial action unit recognition, machine reading comprehension, natural language generation, emotion recognition and deep learning model inference.

You've heard of chloroquine by now. Originally developed by German scientists in the 1930s, the anti-malaria drug is based on a natural compound present in the bark of certain South African trees. For nearly a century it's been saving lives globally, but remained under the radar of countries where malaria isn't a big problem. Thanks to Covid-19, chloroquine is back in the media spotlight as a potential treatment to reduce severe coronavirus symptoms. To be clear: we don't know if it works.

The European Commission is being urged to publish reports on the trials of an Artificial Intelligence lie detector technology, iBorderCTRL, which has been bankrolled by the EU's long-term research and development funding mechanism, Horizon 2020. Green MEP Patrick Breyer, who is currently embroiled in a legal battle with the Commission's Research Agency for its refusal to disclose ethical assessments of the iBorderCTRL system, said on Tuesday (31 March) that the executive is also refusing to publish information on trials that have been conducted for the technology. The iBorderCTRL system has been tested on various frontiers throughout the EU and uses advanced artificial intelligence technologies to analyse micro-expressions. One of its uses is to detect whether a user is lying or not, when presented with a series of questions, in what has been termed'deception detection.' As part of the trials of the technology, MEP Breyer had sought out information on this component of iBorderCTRL and the proportion of'false positives' that had been identified by the system, following an investigation by The Intercept, which found that the technology made several errors, incorrectly identifying four out of sixteen honest answers as false. Breyer had also pressed the Commission on whether the technology discriminates against certain groups of people, including people of colour, women, the elderly, children, and people with disabilities.

The challenge is based on the CORD-19 dataset, which contains tens of thousands of research papers. It is growing rapidly – faster than any researcher can read and digest. The challenge is to build tools to help medical researchers extract the information they need, even as more information continues to be published. On Monday, March 16, in the US, the White House together with, among others, the National Institutes of Health and Georgetown University, released the CORD-19 dataset and issued a call to action. In just a few days, more than 362 people from Ericsson raised their hands and offered to participate.