Indicators that writers will need to scramble lest they find themselves replaced by a robot in coming months or years were out in full force in Q2. Those included a warning that some big news outlets are simply dying to replace writers with robots. Says Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University: "Let me introduce you to the two most bottom line-obsessed newspaper publishers in the United States: Alden Global Capital and Gannett. "If they could, they'd unleash the algorithms to cover everything up-to-and-including city council meetings, mayoral speeches and development proposals. "And if they could figure-out how to program the robots to write human-interest stories and investigative reports, well, they'd do that too."

The last decade has seen a significant increase of interest in deep learning research, with many public successes that have demonstrated its potential. As such, these systems are now being incorporated into commercial products. With this comes an additional challenge: how can we build AI systems that solve tasks where there is not a crisp, well-defined specification? While multiple solutions have been proposed, in this competition we focus on one in particular: learning from human feedback. Rather than training AI systems using a predefined reward function or using a labeled dataset with a predefined set of categories, we instead train the AI system using a learning signal derived from some form of human feedback, which can evolve over time as the understanding of the task changes, or as the capabilities of the AI system improve. The MineRL BASALT competition aims to spur forward research on this important class of techniques. We design a suite of four tasks in Minecraft for which we expect it will be hard to write down hardcoded reward functions. These tasks are defined by a paragraph of natural language: for example, "create a waterfall and take a scenic picture of it", with additional clarifying details. Participants must train a separate agent for each task, using any method they want. Agents are then evaluated by humans who have read the task description. To help participants get started, we provide a dataset of human demonstrations on each of the four tasks, as well as an imitation learning baseline that leverages these demonstrations. Our hope is that this competition will improve our ability to build AI systems that do what their designers intend them to do, even when the intent cannot be easily formalized. Besides allowing AI to solve more tasks, this can also enable more effective regulation of AI systems, as well as making progress on the value alignment problem.

Will you lose your job because of AI? These two are some of the questions I have seen online for a long time. However, they intensified even more after GitHub released the Copilot. Thus, in this article, you will see an overview of GitHub Copilot and my thoughts about it. According to GitHub, their Copilot application is an artificial intelligence pair programmer that "helps you write code faster and with less work".

I recently started a new newsletter focus on AI education and already has over 50,000 subscribers. TheSequence is a no-BS( meaning no hype, no news etc) AI-focused newsletter that takes 5 minutes to read. The goal is to keep you up to date with machine learning projects, research papers and concepts. Recently, one of my students asked me a question as of whether DeepMind was solely working in reinforcement learning applications. The answer is obviously no but the question is still valid as it rooted in the fact that most of DeepMind's highly publicized work such as AlphaGo, MuZero or AlphaFold are based in reinforcement learning.

Electronic Health Record (EHR) has initiated the onset of transformation in healthcare by digitizing valuable patient information. Still, about 70% of human-generated data like clinical notes and audio interview transcripts, which is a part of EHR remain unused. This unstructured data, if successfully processed, could turn into an information gold mine. They carry valuable information that could potentially help healthcare providers in making the right decisions and even foresee complications that may occur during the course of a procedure. While the value of structured data in EHRs are well known, research shows that the real-world data captured in the unstructured format too holds immense value.

SCI COMMUN### COVID-19 At least a dozen countries across Africa are facing a steep rise in coronavirus infections, pushing hospitals in several countries to their limits. The highly infectious Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 is largely driving the increase; it has been documented in at least 14 African countries. Liberia, Rwanda, Namibia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo all reported record numbers of new COVID-19 cases this week, as countries across the continent were reporting more than 30,000 new cases each day, racing toward the previous peak from early January. At the same time, the continent is facing an acute shortage of vaccines, with less than 1% of the population vaccinated. Officials at the World Health Organization said 18 African countries had used more than 80% of their vaccine stocks, and eight countries had exhausted their supplies. > “It is impossible to look at these findings and not see a reflection of the systemic racism in the U.S.” > > Duke University health services researcher Lesley Curtis , to NPR, on life expectancy declines from 2018 to 2020: 3.9 years for Hispanic Americans, 3.3 for Black Americans, and 1.4 for white Americans. ### Archaeology Merchants of the Bronze Age faced a problem still familiar today: how to know you're getting what you pay for. Historians have long assumed that standard weights—used to measure and trade goods of equivalent value—were handed down from on high, first created by a king or religious authority to collect taxes or tribute. But a new study suggests that more than 3000 years ago, informal networks of merchants established a standardized weight system that started in Mesopotamia and spread across Europe. Researchers analyzed weights from previously excavated sites spanning nearly 5000 kilometers. More than 2000 of the weights—crafted over 2000 years—weighed nearly the same amount: between 8 and 10.5 grams, they report this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . They propose that as traders compared weights at each meeting, a standard emerged, forming the first known common Eurasian market. ### Astronomy Representatives from seven member nations this week gave the go-ahead to start construction later this year on the world's biggest scientific instrument: the twin telescope networks of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). Once complete in 2028, the nearly €2 billion SKA will comprise hundreds of radio dishes scattered across South Africa and thousands of wire antennas in Western Australia. Combining the signals from this vast array of detectors will give astronomers unprecedented sensitivity and resolution as they search for the universe's first stars and galaxies and seek to understand gravity and cosmic magnetism. The green light means the U.K.-based SKA Observatory can begin to award industrial contracts. ### Astrophysics Gravitational wave astronomers have twice spotted a black hole consuming a neutron star, researchers with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the United States and the Virgo Observatory in Italy announced this week. LIGO and Virgo had previously spotted dozens of pairs of black holes spiraling together and two pairs of merging neutron stars—including one that set off a spectacular explosion seen by telescopes of all kinds in 2017. Astronomers saw no similar explosions from the newly detected black hole-neutron star mergers, either because they were too far away or because the black holes swallowed the neutron stars whole, a possibility that could put a damper on hopes that such a collision might someday lay bare the innards of a neutron star. ### Research integrity Although researchers have valid reasons to reuse their text across papers—in literature reviews or methods descriptions, for example—peers often frown on this practice as “self-plagiarism.” Some oversight bodies, including the Committee on Publication Ethics, have considered the practice acceptable in some circumstances. This week, the Text Recycling Research Project, based at Duke University and funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, released new guidance on the finer points, drawing on advice from journal publishers and other specialists. The document describes when the practice is both ethical and legal and how to present reused text transparently. One aim is to ease the workload of authors who are currently forced to reword passages unnecessarily, purely to avoid the appearance of self-plagiarism, says project leader Cary Moskovitz. ### Scientific community The U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) last week expelled evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala from its ranks 3 years after he was found to have sexually harassed women colleagues. Ayala resigned from the University of California, Irvine, in 2018 after a university investigation found him guilty of sexual harassment. Ayala declined to comment on NAS's action, but has denied the allegations against him, which included making sexually suggestive comments and inviting a junior professor to sit on his lap. Women who filed complaints with the university over Ayala's behavior applauded the move, but charged that NAS's process was too slow. Ayala is the second NAS member to be ousted over sexual harassment allegations since the academy revised its bylaws 2 years ago to allow members to be removed if they violate its code of conduct. ### Public health The World Health Organization (WHO) on 30 June certified China as free of malaria, making it the 40th country—and the most populous one by far—to gain that status. In the 1940s, China had an estimated 30 million malaria cases and 300,000 deaths annually, but antimalarial drugs, insecticides, and other countermeasures brought cases to zero in 2017. Along the way, pharmaceutical chemist Tu Youyou bagged a Nobel Prize for isolating a powerful malaria drug, artemisinin, in sweet wormwood ( Artemisia annua ), a plant used in traditional Chinese medicine. “China's ability to think outside the box served the country well in its own response to malaria,” Pedro Alonso, director of WHO's Global Malaria Programme, said in a statement this week. The last three countries awarded WHO's malaria-free status were El Salvador, in February, and Algeria and Argentina, both in 2019. ### Publishing The controversial journal impact factor will be supplemented by a new metric that allows accurate comparisons of journal citation rates in different disciplines, its creator, Clarivate Analytics, said last week. The Journal Citation Indicator (JCI), released on 30 June as part of Clarivate's 2021 update to its Journal Citation Reports database, covers a wider range of journals, measured over a longer time period, than the company's existing impact factor. The impact metric captures how many citations a journal accumulated per article published over a 2-year period; the new metric is an average that attempts to take into account the substantially different rates of publication and citation in different fields, according to Clarivate. The JCI is a step forward but has important limitations, says Henk Moed, a bibliometrician at the Sapienza University of Rome. He says that, like impact factors, the new metric will be problematic if applied to individual researchers. ### Public health In its inaugural award ceremony last week, a coalition of public, private, and philanthropic organizations known as the Trinity Challenge gave out a total of $8 million to eight projects focused on preventing the next pandemic. Launched in September 2020 with support from 42 organizations including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, GlaxoSmithKline, and Imperial College London, the challenge recognizes projects that use data and analytics to respond to health emergencies. The $1.8 million grand prize went to a project called Participatory One Health Disease Detection, which aims to help farmers in Asia and Africa identify and report sick livestock via a mobile app to prevent the spread of disease among animals and to humans. Second place prizes of $1.4 million each will support an effort to help health authorities in West Africa forecast emerging diseases and a project that uses artificial intelligence to spot infectious disease outbreaks using routine blood tests. ### Space science An expert panel at the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) is encouraging NASA to push forward with a proposed change to limits on radiation exposure that would place women astronauts on equal footing with their male counterparts. Current standards limit astronauts to a radiation level that increases their risk of exposure-induced death by 3%, a metric that varies based on age and sex. A change under consideration at NASA, endorsed in a NASEM report released last week, would limit all astronauts to 600 millisieverts of radiation over their careers. The report also proposes a color-coded system to communicate the risks of longer missions and proposes that astronauts sign a waiver if a mission is expected to exceed their radiation limit. ### Science policy The U.S. House of Representatives this week overwhelmingly approved two bills that would authorize massive spending increases at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy's Office of Science. H.R. 2225 calls for more than doubling NSF's annual budget of $8.5 billion to $17.9 billion by 2026, and H.R. 3593 would give the Office of Science a 63% boost, to $11.1 billion, over the same period. The bills represent a slimmer alternative to the sprawling and more costly one passed last month by the Senate to address the growing scientific, economic, and military threat of China. Science lobbyists generally prefer the House bills' approach to tightening research security and correcting the uneven geographic distribution of funding. Reconciling these competing visions could take months, and separate legislation will be needed to determine the 2022 budgets for each agency. 267 million —People worldwide who live on land less than 2 meters above sea level—areas at greatest flood risk from sea level rise. Researchers predict an increase to 410 million people by 2100. ( Nature Communications ) 250–350 million years —Estimated age of the universe at “cosmic dawn,” when the first stars switched on, based on new telescope observations of the most distant known galaxies. ( Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society )

Tim Strebel is no stranger to the spirit of innovation. Currently a computer programmer focusing on health informatics at the Washington DC VA Medical Center, Strebel has been recognized by VA for his ingenuity. He's a two-time winner of the VA "Shark Tank" Award, which honors innovative practices, for developing two software packages to automate the jobs of those who work in prosthetics. Both products are used at many VA medical centers. For the eyeglass tool, he also won VA's Gears of Government Award, which recognizes federal employees and teams whose dedication supports exceptional delivery of key outcomes for the American people.

The winners of three IJCAI awards have been announced. These three distinctions are: the Award for Research Excellence, the John McCarthy Award and the Computers and Thought Award. The Research Excellence award is given to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality throughout an entire career yielding several substantial results. The winner of the 2021 Award for Research Excellence is Richard Sutton (University of Alberta). Richard is recognized for his fundamental contributions to the foundation of reinforcement learning.

The Computer History Museum (CHM) in Silicon Valley has honored Raj Reddy, an Indian-American professor and researcher, as part of its 2021 Fellow Awards program to contribute to artificial intelligence and continuous voice recognition. The other three recipients for 2021 were Raymond Ozzie, Lillian F. Schwartz, and Andries van Dam. Reddy, who grew up in the Andhra Pradesh district of Chittoor, has been teaching for five decades and is the founder of The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. The AI pioneer was also a driving force behind the Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technology establishment in Nuzvid, Andhra Pradesh. "New technologies have made it easier than ever to share knowledge and information and reach new audiences in this digital world," Reddy added.

The American Dream is the national ethos of the United States - a set of ideals which includes the opportunity for prosperity, success and access to upward social mobility for individuals and their families. The last thing any of us want is to invent and deploy technologies that are barriers to this dream. Artificial intelligence (AI), configured wrongly, can become a barrier. Many companies today are now using AI to interview candidates, interpret their potential, and rank them from best to worst. How emotive a person's face muscles are, their use of the english language, and the sophistication of their vocabulary are now all being used to select or reject job candidates.