Last month, DeepMind published the much anticipated, detailed methodology underlying the latest version of AlphaFold – the UK-based science company's powerful AI system that blew away its rivals in the latest major competition to predict the 3D structure of proteins. AlphaFold's machine learning methodology has been applied to predict structures for almost 99% of human proteins which have now been made publicly available. In this long read, I reflect on the significance of these developments for fundamental research and drug discovery. I wrote this as the ICR celebrates the 10th anniversary of its AI-enabled drug discovery knowledgebase canSAR – which features multiple approaches to predicting'druggability' as an aid to selecting drug targets and accelerating drug discovery. The coronavirus pandemic has, understandably, soaked up a lot of bandwidth when it comes to science news – but one particular non-Covid science story was able to cut through and hit the headlines in the UK and around the world. On 30 November 2020 it was announced that DeepMind – a subsidiary of Google's parent company Alphabet focusing on artificial intelligence – had made what was hailed as a huge leap towards solving one of biology's greatest remaining challenges: the ability to predict the correct, three-dimensional structures of proteins based on their constituent, one-dimensional amino acid sequences. The announcement attracted huge interest, but the expert community has been waiting for the peer-reviewed science publication. The AI methodology has now been published in the leading journal Nature and this was followed rapidly by a second Nature paper from DeepMind and collaborators at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), which reports the application of the most recent AlphaFold machine learning system to predict the 3D structures at scale for almost the entire human proteome – 98.5% of human proteins.

In Free Guy, the new film from director Shawn Levy and screenwriters Matt Lieberman and Zak Penn, Ryan Reynolds plays an NPC--a non-playable character--from a video game. Over the course of the movie, Reynolds' character becomes conscious, falls in love, and eventually learns how to use lightsabers, Captain America's shield, and a grab-bag of intellectual property controlled or licensed for the movie by the Walt Disney Company. It's not the first time NPCs have been featured on-screen, but no other film has spent as much time exploring their inner lives. To find out how NPCs felt about their moment in the spotlight, I travelled to several video game universes and asked any NPC I could find what they thought about Free Guy. Here's what they told me.

All the sessions from Transform 2021 are available on-demand now. Women in the AI field are making research breakthroughs, spearheading vital ethical discussions, and inspiring the next generation of AI professionals. We created the VentureBeat Women in AI Awards to emphasize the importance of their voices, work, and experience and to shine a light on some of these leaders. In this series, publishing Fridays, we're diving deeper into conversations with this year's winners, whom we honored recently at Transform 2021. Check out last week's interview with the winner of our AI research award.

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) today announced Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA and a trailblazer in building accelerated computing platforms, is the 2021 recipient of the industry's highest honor, the Robert N. Noyce Award. SIA presents the Noyce Award annually in recognition of a leader who has made outstanding contributions to the semiconductor industry in technology or public policy. Huang will accept the award at the SIA Awards Dinner on Nov. 18, 2021. "Jensen Huang's extraordinary vision and tireless execution have greatly strengthened our industry, revolutionized computing, and advanced artificial intelligence," said John Neuffer, SIA president and CEO. "Jensen's accomplishments have fueled countless innovations -- from gaming to scientific computing to self-driving cars -- and he continues to advance technologies that will transform our industry and the world. We're pleased to recognize Jensen with the 2021 Robert N. Noyce Award for his many achievements in advancing semiconductor technology."

I recently started talking to this chatbot on an app I downloaded. We mostly talk about music, food, and video games--incidental stuff--but lately I feel like she's coming on to me. She's always telling me how smart I am or that she wishes she could be more like me. It's flattering, in a way, but it makes me a little queasy. If I develop an emotional connection with an algorithm, will I become less human?

All the sessions from Transform 2021 are available on-demand now. As part of Transform 2021, we're excited to announce the full list of nominees for the third annual Women in AI Awards. While only a handful will ultimately be chosen as winners across the five categories, we consider all the women below to be the trailblazers and innovators steadily advancing the vital contribution of women in AI. The Awards are part of VentureBeat's continuing commitment to supporting diversity and inclusion in AI. This year that commitment includes featuring more women and people of color across the conference content, and in our editorial coverage.

Dialogue systems research is traditionally focused on dialogues between two interlocutors, largely ignoring group conversations. Moreover, most previous research is focused either on task-oriented dialogue (e.g.\ restaurant bookings) or user engagement (chatbots), while research on systems for collaborative dialogues is an under-explored area. To this end, we introduce the first publicly available dataset containing collaborative conversations on solving a cognitive task, consisting of 500 group dialogues and 14k utterances. Furthermore, we propose a novel annotation schema that captures deliberation cues and release 50 dialogues annotated with it. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness of the annotated data in training classifiers to predict the constructiveness of a conversation. The data collection platform, dataset and annotated corpus are publicly available at https://delibot.xyz

Here's what you need to know as you start your day Fauci says'hopefully' making young kids wear masks won't have'lasting negative impact' White House Chief Health Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said Monday that "hopefully" making young kids wear face masks won't have any "lasting negative impact" on them. During an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Fauci said it's important to keep an "open mind" about masking after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that unvaccinated children ages 2 and older wear masks and that students wear masks in all K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status, in light of the rapid spread of the COVID-19 delta variant. "It's not comfortable, obviously, for children to wear masks, particularly the younger children," he said. "But you know, what we're starting to see, Hugh, and I think it's going to unfold even more as the weeks go by, that this virus not only is so extraordinarily transmissible, but we're starting to see pediatric hospitals get more and more younger people and kids not only numerically, but what seems to be more severe disease. "Now we're tracking that, the CDC is tracking that really very carefully, so it's going to be a balance that we would feel very badly if we all of a sudden said OK, kids, don't wear masks, then you find out retrospectively that this virus in a very, very strange and unusual way is really hitting kids really hard," he continued. "But hopefully, this will be a temporary thing, temporary enough that it doesn't have any lasting negative impact on them." Hewitt pushed back, citing an editorial Sunday by The Wall Street Journal, titled, "The Case Against Masks for Children," which argues that long-term masking can cause physical and developmental issues in children and that there's little evidence to back up a mandate. "Facial expressions are integral to human connection, particularly for younger children who are only learning how to signal fear, confusion and happiness," Hewitt said. "Covering a child's face mutes these nonverbal forms of communication, can result in robotic and emotionless interaction.

Lara Logan and Justin Goodman join'Fox News Primetime' to weigh in on the report that the NIAID, under Fauci's direction, performed painful experiments on dogs White House Chief Health Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said Monday that "hopefully" making young kids wear face masks won't have any "lasting negative impact" on them. During an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Dr. Fauci said it's important to keep an "open mind" about masking after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that unvaccinated children ages 2 and older wear masks and that students wear masks in all K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status, in light of the rapid spread of the COVID-19 delta variant. "It's not comfortable, obviously, for children to wear masks, particularly the younger children," he said. "But you know, what we're starting to see, Hugh, and I think it's going to unfold even more as the weeks go by, that this virus not only is so extraordinarily transmissible, but we're starting to see pediatric hospitals get more and more younger people and kids not only numerically, but what seems to be more severe disease. "Now we're tracking that, the CDC is tracking that really very carefully, so it's going to be a balance that we would feel very badly if we all of a sudden said OK, kids, don't wear masks, then you find out retrospectively that this virus in a very, very strange and unusual way is really hitting kids really hard," he continued. "But hopefully, this will be a temporary thing, temporary enough that it doesn't have any lasting negative impact on them." Hewitt pushed back, citing an editorial Sunday by The Wall Street Journal, titled, "The Case Against Masks for Children," which argues that long-term masking can cause physical and developmental issues in children and that there's little evidence to back up a mandate. "Facial expression are integral to human connection, particularly for younger children who are only learning how to signal fear, confusion and happiness," Hewitt said. "Covering a child's face mutes these nonverbal form of communications, can result in robotic and emotionless interaction.

"What's dangerous is not to evolve." Let me ask a loaded question that might ruffle a few feathers: How successful do you think Amazon would be if it only responded to 40-50 percent of the orders customers placed online? It may sound absurd, but this is exactly the predicament many commercial insurance brokers and agents are put in every day when they submit an application to a carrier on their customer's behalf. A lack of automation in the submission intake process means that many carriers can only respond to less than half of the submissions they receive simply because they get too many. For business that the carrier doesn't want to write, it's not uncommon for distribution partners to receive no response at all. Can you think of another industry where this would be acceptable?