Is an AI decision ethical or legal, or even risky? Most of us do not consider such a question if your smart TV decides what movies you should see at 9 p.m. Or when you open your laptop or iPhone to Facebook only to find that there is a great advertisement popping up for that art course you were talking about to a friend just the other day. Or you might see a pop-up for a new flower to purchase online to complement the one that just arrived this morning. All of these are not just people in some marketing department trying to sell you something new. Every keystroke you make on your internet-connected phone or computer is being tracked and your data being categorized into some kind of pattern to know what you like and what you might like to purchase next.

A day after her interview for a part-time job at Target last year, Dana Anthony got an email informing her she didn't make the cut. Anthony didn't know why -- a situation common to most job seekers at one point or another. But she also had no sense at all of how the interview had gone, because her interviewer was a computer. More job-seekers, including some professionals, may soon have to accept impersonal online interviews where they never talk to another human being, or know if behind-the-scenes artificial-intelligence systems are influencing hiring decisions. Demand for online hiring services, which interview job applicants remotely via laptop or phone, mushroomed during the COVID-19 pandemic and remains high amid a perceived worker shortage as the economy opens back up.

What is the future of chatbots? As the Chief Product Officer of an AI bot-building platform, I get this question a lot, and there are many ways to answer it. As a company, I think we can only answer this question if we know where we are planning to go. Which goal are we aiming for? Chatlayer's mission is to make it possible for everyone to have a personal conversation at any time.

A team at Apple analyzed nearly 78,000 screenshots from more than 4,000 apps to improve the screen reader function on its mobile devices. The result was Screen Recognition, a tool that uses machine learning and computer vision to automatically detect and provide content readable by VoiceOver for apps that would otherwise not be accessible. Jason Wu, a Ph.D. student in Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), was part of the team, whose work, "Screen Recognition: Creating Accessibility Metadata for Mobile Applications From Pixels," won a Best Paper award at the recent Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference. His advisor, Jeffrey Bigham, an associate professor in HCII and the Language Technologies Institute and head of the Human-Centered Machine Learning Group at Apple, was also among the paper's authors. Apple's VoiceOver uses metadata supplied by ad developers that describes user interface components.

From Michael Phelps to Rebecca Adlington, the world's top swimmers are known for their streamlined movements through the water. But elite swimmers could soon go even faster, thanks to Speedo's latest innovation. Speedo has unveiled the Fastskin 4.0 – a concept it's describing as the'most intelligent swimsuit of all time.' The swimsuit has a number of futuristic innovations, including energy-harvesting fabric and a built-in AI Coach, which Speedo claims could allow swimmers to go up to four per cent faster by 2040. Such improvements could see the men's 50 metre freestyle record finally break the 20-second barrier, and see the women's 100 metre breaststroke time finally fall below 60 seconds.

Showcasing America's most promising young scientists and engineers, the Blavatnik Family Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciences today named 31 finalists for the world's largest unrestricted prize honoring early-career scientists and engineers. Three winners of the Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists – in life sciences, chemistry, and physical sciences and engineering – will be announced on July 20, each receiving $250,000 as a Blavatnik National Awards Laureate. The finalists, culled from 298 nominations by 157 United States research institutions across 38 states, have made trailblazing discoveries in wide-ranging fields, from the neuroscience of addiction to the development of gene-editing technologies, from designing next-generation battery storage to understanding the origins of photosynthesis, from making improvements in computer vision to pioneering new frontiers in polymer chemistry. Descriptions of the honorees' research are listed below. "Each day, young scientists tirelessly seek solutions to humanity's greatest challenges," said Len Blavatnik, founder and chairman of Access Industries, and head of the Blavatnik Family Foundation. "The Blavatnik Awards recognize this scientific brilliance and tenacity as we honor these 31 finalists. We congratulate them on their accomplishments and look forward to their continued, future discoveries and success." President and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences Nicholas B. Dirks said: "Each year, it is a complete joy to see the very'best of the best' of American science represented by the Blavatnik National Awards Finalists."

Former CDC Director Robert Redfield sits down for an exclusive interview with Fox News' Dr. Marc Siegel to discuss his belief that COVID-19 'evolved' from a Wuhan lab. EXCLUSIVE: Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, explained the reasoning behind his opinion that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the COVID-19 pandemic's origins, in a wide-ranging interview with Fox News. The former CDC director discussed the ongoing debate over the COVID-19 pandemic's origins during a lengthy interview this past weekend with Dr. Marc Siegel, a professor of medicine at the NYU Langone Medical Center and a Fox News contributor. While Dr. Anthony Fauci and other leading members of the science community have long argued that human contact with an infected animal started the pandemic, calls to investigate the lab leak theory have intensified in recent days. Redfield argued COVID-19's efficient human-to-human spread contradicted the behavior of other deadly coronaviruses with similar profiles, such as SARS and MERS, which first reached humans through animal contact but spread at a much slower pace.

Jenée Desmond-Harris is online weekly to chat live with readers. Here's an edited transcript of this week's chat. Q. Starcraft slump: My boyfriend is a kind, caring, loving man, and I am mostly satisfied with our relationship. His main hobby is the online game Starcraft, and he spends maybe 10 to 15 hours a week on it, usually a game each evening. The problem is that if he loses a game, it can color his mood for days. There are usually like two to three days a month where he's down in the dumps because of this.

Organizations of all sizes have accelerated the rate at which they employ AI models to advance digital business transformation initiatives. But in the absence of any clear-cut regulations, many of these organizations don't know with any certainty whether those AI models will one day run afoul of new AI regulations. Ted Kwartler, vice president of Trusted AI at DataRobot, talked with VentureBeat about why it's critical for AI models to make predictions "humbly" to make sure they don't drift or, one day, potentially run afoul of government regulations. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. VentureBeat: Why do we need AI to be humble?

Most medical articles have methods & results sections and matches in those sections are more important. I had little to no expectations entering this competition, so I wouldn't say I was surprised by anything. It was great to see so many smart and capable people all working together to try to help in whatever way they could. All of the work is driven by the Kaggle platform. The list of notebooks cover all the submissions for Round 1 and Round 2 of the CORD-19 challenge. All of the notebooks are in Python.