I have been asked many times during the past month whether the heightened pressure that enterprises are now facing as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic will cause them to short-cut aspects such as responsible machine learning in order to get pilots into production more quickly. This is certainly a possibility, but in my opinion, people's memories of the actions that enterprises are taking now will run much deeper than many of the better-planned projects that came before the pandemic or have yet to start. More organisations will therefore aim to get artificial intelligence (AI) right during the crisis as well. As practitioners get going in this area, here are a few things to consider. One global bank I spoke to recently has just put in place a policy that no AI model can move into production without some interpretability and bias controls built into the lifecycle of the application.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and Squirrel AI Learning announced the establishment of a new $1M annual award for societal benefits of AI. The award will be sponsored by Squirrel AI Learning as part of its mission to promote the use of artificial intelligence with lasting positive effects for society. The new Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity was announced jointly by Derek Haoyang Li, Founder and Chairman of Squirrel AI Learning, and Yolanda Gil, President of AAAI, at the 2019 conference for AI for adaptive Education (AIAED) in Beijing. Established in 2014, Squirrel AI Learning Intelligent Adaptive Education by Yixue Group is the first artificial intelligence company in China to apply AI-powered adaptive learning technology to K12 education. Squirrel AI Learning products use a model that combines artificial intelligence and human coaches to provide students with access to individualized and affordable high-quality education. Although the focus of Squirrel AI Learning is on education, Li insisted that the award will recognize AI innovations across all disciplines. The establishment of this award aims to inspire the AI community and draw attention to AI that can benefit humanity. This new international award will recognize significant contributions in the field of artificial intelligence with profound societal impact that have generated otherwise unattainable value for humanity. The award nomination and selection process will be designed by a committee led by AAAI that will include representatives from international organizations with relevant expertise that will be designated by Squirrel AI Learning.

"We didn't learn the lesson on SARS and MERS," UK prime minister Boris Johnson said today as he faced questions from the House of Commons Liaison Committee, referencing the government's pandemic planning and a lack of capacity at Public Health England to detect outbreaks of coronavirus around the country. He also said that there would not be an official inquiry to investigate whether his senior aide Dominic Cummings broke lockdown rules. More than 40 Conservative party MPs have now called for Cummings' resignation. During the meeting, Johnson announced that England's test and trace system will be launched tomorrow. Under the new system, contact tracers will ask people who test positive for coronavirus to self-isolate for 14 days, regardless of symptoms, and to provide details of any recent close contacts. The secretary of state will have the power to "mandate" people to isolate if they do not isolate voluntarily. The government announced earlier today that localised lockdowns, ...

Only 38 per cent of people supported the UK government's change to coronavirus restrictions announced on 10 May, compared to 90 per cent of people who said they supported the lockdown measures announced on 23 March, according to a survey conducted by researchers at King's College London and Ipsos MORI. The measures brought in on 10 May largely affected England. They included a stronger emphasis on people going to work if they are unable to work from home, encouraging people to avoid public transport as much as possible, letting people exercise outside more than once a day and allowing people to meet up with one person from a household other than their own, providing the meeting takes place outside and at a distance of at least 2 metres. The poll, which surveyed 2254 people in the UK aged 16 to 75, was conducted between 20 and 22 May, before it emerged that prime ministerial aide Dominic Cummings drove more than 260 miles from home with his son and ill wife in March, at a time when the ...

Moritz Lipp is a Ph.D. candidate at Graz University of Technology, Flanders, Austria. Michael Schwarz is a postdoctoral researcher at Graz University of Technology, Flanders, Austria. Daniel Gruss is an assistant professor at Graz University of Technology, Flanders, Austria. Thomas Prescher is a chief architect at Cyberus Technology GmbH, Dresden, Germany. Werner Haas is the Chief Technology Officer at Cyberus Technology GmbH, Dresden, Germany.

Will self-driving cars be able to cope with highly dangerous roads? Let's talk about dangerous roads. In a moment, I'll provide you with a recently published list of the presumed Top Ten most dangerous roads in the world. For some of you, the odds are that you'll be happy that you've never had a cause to try and traverse these bad-to-the-bone roads, while others of you are probably going to put these alarming roads on your bucket list of places you have to go and give a whirl someday. Do you prefer roads that are calm, easy to navigate, and present little or no qualms?

The virtual International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) was held on 26-30 April and included eight keynote talks. Courtesy of the conference organisers you can watch the talks in full and see the question and answer sessions. The aim of Mihaela's research is to contribute to the transformation of healthcare by rigorous formulation and development of diverse new tools in machine learning and AI. Her group has worked on many problems in medicine and healthcare, including risk prognosis, modelling disease trajectories, adaptive clinical trials, individualised treatment, early-warning systems in hospitals, and personalised screening. They needed to develop a variety of machine learning methods to carry out this work.

The Association for Computing Machinery has announced that Carnegie Mellon University's Phillip Gibbons, professor in the Computer Science and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Departments, will receive the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award. Gibbons will share the award with Noga Alon of Princeton University and Tel Aviv University, Yossi Matias of Google and Tel Aviv University and Mario Szegedy of Rutgers University. The award recognizes them for their seminal work on the foundations of streaming algorithms and their application to large-scale analytics. In a series of papers published in the late 1990s, Gibbons and his colleagues pioneered a framework for algorithmic treatment of streaming massive datasets, the ACM said. Their algorithms remain the core approach for streaming big data and constitute an entire subarea of the field of algorithms.

The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation announced today that Maxwell Wang is one of the recipients of the 2020 Hertz Fellowship. Wang, a M.D./Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, is one of 16 researchers to receive the prestigious award, chosen from more than 800 applicants from 24 universities across the nation. Hertz Fellows receive up to five years of research funding, giving them the freedom to pursue innovative ideas. At CMU, Wang is studying machine learning and neuroscience, working with mentors Avniel Ghuman, Max G'Sell and Rob Kass. He is conducting research to understand how brain networks change during neuro-interventions, such as deep brain stimulation, and to link these changes to endpoints such as symptom improvement and adverse side-effect profiles.

UK prime minister Boris Johnson told MPs today that he is confident that the government will have recruited 25,000 coronavirus contact tracers by the start of June, which he says will provide the capacity to trace the contacts of 10,000 new coronavirus cases per day. Johnson said 24,000 contact tracers have already been recruited. In April, health secretary Matt Hancock said the government hoped to recruit 18,000 contact tracers by mid-May, to coincide with the planned release of the NHS covid-19 contact tracing app. But the widespread release of the app, currently being trialled on the Isle of Wight, has now been delayed until June. There are also ongoing concerns about privacy. In a recent report, security researchers wrote that there should be a legal requirement that all data collected by the app is deleted at the end of the coronavirus crisis, rather than being anonymised or repurposed.