As 2021 draws to a close, we look back on some of the AI research, news, policy developments and awards that have piqued our interest. We start our round-up with awards, with many prestigious prizes being presented this year. Launched last year, the AAAI Squirrel AI Award recognises positive impacts of artificial intelligence to protect, enhance, and improve human life in meaningful ways with long-lived effects. The winner of the 2021 award was Cynthia Rudin for work in interpretable and transparent AI systems in real-world deployments. The 2021/2022 ACM Athena Lecturer Award went to Ayanna Howard, who was recognised for fundamental contributions to the development of accessible human-robotic systems and AI, and for her efforts to broaden participation in computing through entrepreneurial and mentoring.

Cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and many more have helped to build chatbots and voicebots for the utmost customer satisfaction in the highly competitive market. Industries need to leverage more AI products and solutions to deliver optimized performance in the long run efficiently and effectively without any damage and error. Here is an exclusive interview with Amit Gandhi, Founder, and CEO, NovelVox, who has enlightened the readers about how the company leverages artificial intelligence to offer a Conversational AI-based platform as well as a sentiment analyzer to have a better understanding of the market. NovelVox can be referred to as a software product house that has been revolutionizing the contact center industry for over the past decade. Since 2008, it has been offering tools to integrate core applications of multiple industries, including healthcare, retail, banking, insurance to name a few.

Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division (NSWC Crane), Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the NavalX Midwest Tech Bridge (MTB) recently announced the winners of the Artificial Intelligence for Small Unit Maneuvers (AISUM) Prize Challenge. EpiSys Science, Inc. (Episci) took first place and Draper, Inc. (Draper) took second place. According to their website, Episci is "a multidisciplinary innovation company that develops next-generation autonomous technologies for defense, aerospace, and commercial applications." Draper's website says the organization "serves our nation's interests and security needs; advances technologies at the intersection of government, academia, and industry; cultivates the next generation of innovators; and solves the most complex challenges." "The overall goal of this challenge was to move the technology needle," said Amy Ross, Program Manager for the AISUM Prize Challenge.

We had the pleasure of chatting with Mari Joller, Founder and CEO of Snackable AI, a content discovery engine for the audio-first world for the RE•WORK Women in AI podcast. Below is a transcript of the discussion (generated via Snackable AI). Listen to the podcast in full here. Chapter 1: Creating a Startup 00:04 - 00:21 Question from Nikita Johnson (RE•WORK): Hi, Mari, thank you for joining the Women in AI podcast today. It's fantastic to have you here with us. So firstly, it would be great if you can tell us a bit about yourself and also introduce us to Snackable.

A recent study by Gartner indicates that by 2025 the 10% of enterprises that establish Machine Learning (ML) or Artificial Intelligence (AI) engineering best practices will generate at least three times more value from their AI and ML efforts than the 90% of enterprises that don't. With such a high value estimated to be derived only from the adoption of ML/AI practices, it is difficult to not agree that the future of enterprises rests heavily on AI and ML technologies with other digital technologies. The pandemic has unveiled a world that embraced technology at a pace that would have otherwise taken ages to evolve. Traditional practices that saw monolithic systems, lack of flexibility and manual processes were all blocking innovation. However, mass new-age technology acceptance induced by the pandemic has helped enterprises overcome these challenges.

In 1961, a young Clive Sinclair was developing and selling pocket calculators, digital wristwatches, and mail-order radio kits through his own company, Sinclair Radionics. In 1975, he founded the company that would become Sinclair Research and began development of the electronics he would best be known for. The Sinclair ZX80 personal computer debuted in 1980. True to his radio-building background, Sinclair marketed the computer in both kit form for £80 ($108) or preassembled for £100 ($135). It was one of the first computers available at that price point, especially compared to the likes of the Apple II Plus, released a year earlier for $1,195.

I want to start off with a quick question – can you recognize the two personalities in the below image? I'm certain you got one right. For most of us early age math enthusiasts, the movie "A Beautiful Mind" is inextricably embedded into our memory. Russell Crowe plays the role of John Nash in the movie, a Nobel prize winner for economics (and the person on the left-hand side above). Now, you would remember the iconic scene often regarded as: "Don't go after the blonde". "….the best outcome would come when everyone in the group is doing what's best for himself and the group."

In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared on Nautilus in our "Universality" issue in April, 2021. It all started with an odd pile of shells: a pile that, upon closer inspection, fell apart like a flower losing its petals, introducing a burned-out nature documentarian named Craig Foster--and, in time, the world--to the octopus hiding cleverly inside. Known simply as "her," she would become the star of My Octopus Teacher, the Oscar-nominated Netflix documentary and surprise pandemic hit that told the story of Foster's unlikely relationship with that eight-armed mollusk. Released in September 2020, it arrived at the perfect moment. Audiences exhausted by lockdowns and unrelenting 2020-ness were primed for escape into the undersea fantasia of South Africa's kelp forests, where Foster met her. Best-selling books like The Soul of an Octopus and Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness had whetted public curiosity about these uncannily intelligent creatures with whom humans last shared a common ancestor 600 million years ago. Yet while most writing about octopuses emphasizes their ostensibly alien, unknowable nature,1 and serious, science-minded nature documentaries elevate concern about biodiversity over sentiment for a single animal, My Octopus Teacher defied convention. It embraced Foster's feelings for the octopus, which over the course of a year evolved from curiosity to care--even to love. And though her own feelings were left for viewers to interpret, the film's indelible impression was of nature populated by species who are not only beautiful and exquisitely evolved and ecologically important, but highly sentient, too.

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With the success of Peter Jackson's Get Back, the documentary streaming on Disney Plus, Beatlemania is back. Watching Paul McCartney create the eponymous song out of seemingly nothing, as George Harrison stands nearby yawning, is one of 2021's cinematic pleasures. The Beatles are arguably the most successful pop group in history and, in the years since their heyday, countless artists, producers and songwriters, not to mention record companies and now music streaming services, have tried to recreate the same magic. The latest tool for capturing elusive pop music gold is artificial intelligence. Usually when we think of artificial intelligence creating art, it's making something bizarre or unintentionally hilarious. Take Google's horrifying Deep Dream with its thousands of dog eyes, or Sunspring, a movie written by an AI that was fed hundreds of sci-fi scripts.