Teresa Carey: This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. Every morning at five o'clock, composer Walter Werzowa would sit down at his computer to anticipate a particular daily e-mail. It came from six time zones away, where a team had been working all night (or day, rather) to draft Beethoven's unfinished 10th Symphony--almost two centuries after his death. The e-mail contained hundreds of variations, and Werzowa listened to them all. Carey: Werzowa was listening for the perfect tune--a sound that was unmistakably Beethoven.

In the run up to Dreamforce 2021 in September, Salesforce announced new capabilities for Einstein Automate as well as new AI-driven workflows and RPA capabilities for Service Cloud . Prior to Dreamforce 2021, I had a chance to talk with Clara Shih, CEO of Service Cloud at Salesforce, about how the cloud-based software company sees automation and AI transforming, and actually humanizing, customer service. The following is a transcript of our interview, edited for readability. So let's talk automation, AI, RPA and how that relates to the Service Cloud and how that's kind of changing how organizations approach their interactions with their customers. Because I know that automation is a large part of many organization's digital transformation processes.

Cynthia Rudin, professor of computer science at Duke University, USA, has become the second recipient of the AAAI Squirrel AI Award. She was awarded the 2022 prize for pioneering scientific work in the area of interpretable and transparent AI systems in real-world deployments, the advocacy for these features in highly sensitive areas such as social justice and medical diagnosis, and serving as a role model for researchers and practitioners. Cynthia has worked on a variety of research topics during her career. The first applied project used machine learning to predict which manholes in New York City were at risk of exploding due to degrading and overloaded electrical circuitry. An area of particular focus for Cynthia is interpretable machine learning, which she has applied in different settings.

Bojan is a Machine Learning Modeler at NVIDIA. He has been working in Machine Learning and Data Science fields for seven years and has experience with real-world FinTech problems. He is a Quadruple Kaggle Grandmaster and is the first person to be ranked in the top 10 in all four Kaggle categories simultaneously. My interests have somewhat evolved over the years. For a while, I was really interested in NLP problems, but that field has become very hard to keep pace with.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai believes artificial intelligence could have "more profound" implications for humanity than electricity or fire, according to recent comments. Pichai also warned that the development of artificial intelligence could pose as much risk as that of fire if its potential is not harnessed correctly. "AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on," Pichai said in an interview with MSNBC and Recode, set to air on Friday, January 26. "It's more profound than, I don't know, electricity or fire." Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now Pichai went on to warn of the potential dangers associated with developing advanced AI, saying that developers need to learn to harness its benefits in the same way humanity did with fire.

HANSON: They've had a chequered past, I'll give you that. The Egyptians seemed to be confusing them for some kind of Gods at some point.

The NIH has awarded High-Risk, High-Reward grants to three Emory University researchers pursuing highly innovative research that has the potential for broad impact. The program this year awarded a total of 106 grants totaling approximately $329 million over five years to support research proposals that, due to their inherent risk, may struggle in the traditional peer review process despite their transformative potential. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is awarding Chethan Pandarinath the 2021 Director's New Innovator Award, an honor that recognizes exceptionally creative early career investigators. Pandarinath, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (Coulter BME), is using artificial intelligence to build brain-machine interfaces to assist people with paralysis, specifically those with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). Part of the NIH's High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, Pandarinath's $2.4 million award grant will support his team's launch of a clinical trial this fall, implanting sensors into the brains of paralyzed people with ALS.

Encompass Corporation, the provider of intelligently automated Know Your Customer (KYC) solutions, today announces its expansion into North America, with office headquarters based in New York. The expansion will allow Encompass to better serve the needs of existing global clients with a presence in North America, as well as secure new clients and partnerships in the region, in a marked effort to become the undisputed lead platform for automated, corporate KYC due diligence worldwide. Alex Ford has been appointed President, North America, overseeing all aspects of the GTM, driving business growth and working with customers, partners and the Encompass team to transform KYC with automation in financial institutions and other regulated entities. Encompass has received various notable awards recognition, including'Best Solution' category for Customer Onboarding - Regulation Asia Awards for Excellence, shortlisted in the British Bank Awards, winner of Red Herring's Top 100 Europe Award and regional winner at this year's Barclays Scale Up Entrepreneur of the Year. Joining in 2012, Alex has held Executive responsibility for several business functions at Encompass Corporation including Customer Success, Operations, Marketing, Product and Delivery.

While the world impatiently awaited Kanye West's new album, "DONDA", to drop, Wesam Jawich, a software engineer at Google, had an idea. What if we could just ask the outspoken artist when the album was dropping? So the idea was born to create an AI that would simulate a text conversation with Ye. The first step was to create a dataset of Kanye West dialogue to train GPT-J on. The dataset used was a compilation of Kanye interview transcripts, tweets, lyrics, and manufactured conversations.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) recently announced the names of 83 scientists who have been selected for their 2021 Early Career Research Program. The list includes four faculty members from MIT: Riccardo Comin of the Department of Physics; Netta Engelhardt of the Department of Physics and Center for Theoretical Physics; Philip Harris of the Department of Physics and Laboratory for Nuclear Science; and Mingda Li of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. Each year, the DoE selects researchers for significant funding the "nation's scientific workforce by providing support to exceptional researchers during crucial early career years, when many scientists do their most formative work." The quantum technologies of tomorrow –– more powerful computing, better navigation systems, and more precise imaging and magnetic sensing devices –– rely on understanding the properties of quantum materials. Quantum materials contain unique physical characteristics, and can lead to phenomena like superconductivity.