As 2021 draws to a close, we look back on some of the AI research, news, policy developments and awards that have piqued our interest. We start our round-up with awards, with many prestigious prizes being presented this year. Launched last year, the AAAI Squirrel AI Award recognises positive impacts of artificial intelligence to protect, enhance, and improve human life in meaningful ways with long-lived effects. The winner of the 2021 award was Cynthia Rudin for work in interpretable and transparent AI systems in real-world deployments. The 2021/2022 ACM Athena Lecturer Award went to Ayanna Howard, who was recognised for fundamental contributions to the development of accessible human-robotic systems and AI, and for her efforts to broaden participation in computing through entrepreneurial and mentoring.

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, in collaboration with 14 other government departments, revealed how it will continue to grow the country's robotics industry in its 14th five-year plan. China's five-year plans are a series of social and economic development initiatives that have been issued by the Chinese government since 1953. The document lays out several smaller goals for the Chinese robotics industry before 2025, but the overarching goal is to make China a key source of global robotics innovation. The government also expects the average annual growth rate of operating income in the robotics industry to exceed 20%. A study by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology published in November 2021 found that China is the global leader in the total number of robotics patents issued.

Like many other science fiction writers in the 1940s and 1950s, Asimov was greatly influenced by ideas from hard science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein about what future societies might look like. Heinlein's "Future History" series described a set of laws that were supposed to guide the behavior of citizen-soldiers in his future society. In Asimov's books, he explained that the Three Laws that were incorporated into virtually all robots within the fictional universe, so much so that breaking the law was viewed as an unthinkable violation of one's programming. In many cases, a robot found guilty of having broken the Laws would be dismantled for disposal. In essence, these three principles allow for a reliable set of guidelines for robots but do not prevent them from having significant impact on society -- which is what Asimov intended all along.

From the Mars Ingenuity helicopter's first powered flight on another world to the launch of the James Webb telescope that will peer into the earliest epoch of the Universe, 2021 was a huge year for humanity's space endeavors. Beyond the science milestones, billionaires battled to reach the final frontier first, an all-civilian crew went into orbit, and Star Trek's William Shatner waxed profound about what it meant to see the Earth from the cosmos, as space tourism finally came into its own. Star Trek's William Shatner waxed profound about what it meant to see the Earth from the cosmos, as space tourism finally came into its own Photo: AFP / Patrick T. FALLON NASA's Perseverance Rover survived its "seven minutes of terror," a time when the craft relies on its automated systems for descent and landing, to touch down flawlessly on Mars' Jezero Crater in February. Since then, the car-sized robot has been taking photos and drilling for samples for its mission: determining whether the Red Planet might have hosted ancient microbial life forms. A rock sample return mission is planned for sometime in the 2030s.

With New York City's passage of one of the toughest U.S. laws regulating the use of artificial intelligence tools in the workplace, federal officials are signaling that they too want to scrutinize how that new technology is being used to sift through a growing job applicant pool without running afoul of civil rights laws and baking in discrimination. The use of that new technology in hiring and other employment decisions is growing, but its volume remains hard to quantify, and the regulations aimed at combating bias in its application may be difficult to implement, academics and employment attorneys say. "Basically, these are largely untested technologies with virtually no oversight," said Lisa Kresge, research and policy associate at the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center, who studies the intersection of technological change and inequality. We have rules about pesticides or safety on the shop floor. We have these digital technologies, and in virtual space, and that ...

Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division (NSWC Crane), Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the NavalX Midwest Tech Bridge (MTB) recently announced the winners of the Artificial Intelligence for Small Unit Maneuvers (AISUM) Prize Challenge. EpiSys Science, Inc. (Episci) took first place and Draper, Inc. (Draper) took second place. According to their website, Episci is "a multidisciplinary innovation company that develops next-generation autonomous technologies for defense, aerospace, and commercial applications." Draper's website says the organization "serves our nation's interests and security needs; advances technologies at the intersection of government, academia, and industry; cultivates the next generation of innovators; and solves the most complex challenges." "The overall goal of this challenge was to move the technology needle," said Amy Ross, Program Manager for the AISUM Prize Challenge.

Enterprises continued to accelerate the adoption of AI and machine learning to solve product and business challenges and improve revenues in 2021. Meanwhile, AI startups have experienced significant growth, roping in major investments to improve their product offerings and meet the growing demand for AI solutions across sectors. In fact, data from CB Insights Research shows that while the number of equity funding deals in the global AI space this year is just slightly less than the last (2,384 deals in 2021 versus 2,450 in 2020), the amount of capital invested has almost doubled to $68 billion. As we head into 2022, here's a quick look back at the milestones that shaped the AI space over the past 12 months. To start the year, OpenAI announced DALL-E, a multimodal AI system that generated images from text.

The People's Republic of China recently published a "position paper" detailing the nation's views on military AI regulation. Having thoroughly perused it, we've come to the following conclusion: it's gibberish. Up front: The first thing you want to know when a global superpower releases official government documentation detailing its views on the use of artificial intelligence for military applications is whether the signatory intends to develop lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS). China's position paper makes absolutely no mention of restricting the use of machines capable of choosing and firing on targets autonomously. Tickets to TNW 2022 are available now!

Rhetorical Frames in AI can be thought of as expressions that describe AI development as a competition between two or more actors, such as governments or companies. Examples of such Frames include robotic arms race, AI rivalry, technological supremacy, cyberwarfare dominance and 5G race. Detection of Rhetorical Frames from open sources can help us track the attitudes of governments or companies towards AI, specifically whether attitudes are becoming more cooperative or competitive over time. Given the rapidly increasing volumes of open sources (online news media, twitter, blogs), it is difficult for subject matter experts to identify Rhetorical Frames in (near) real-time. Moreover, these sources are in general unstructured (noisy) and therefore, detecting Frames from these sources will require state-of-the-art text classification techniques. In this paper, we develop RheFrameDetect, a text classification system for (near) real-time capture of Rhetorical Frames from open sources. Given an input document, RheFrameDetect employs text classification techniques at multiple levels (document level and paragraph level) to identify all occurrences of Frames used in the discussion of AI. We performed extensive evaluation of the text classification techniques used in RheFrameDetect against human annotated Frames from multiple news sources. To further demonstrate the effectiveness of RheFrameDetect, we show multiple case studies depicting the Frames identified by RheFrameDetect compared against human annotated Frames.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is considering a wide range of options, including new rules and guidelines, to tackle data privacy concerns and algorithmic discrimination. FTC s Chair Lina Khan, in a letter to Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), outlined her goals to "protect Americans from unfair or deceptive practices online" and in particular, Khan said that the FTC is considering rulemaking to address "lax security practices, data privacy abuses and algorithmic decision-making that may result in unlawful discrimination." The FTC s letter comes in response to a letter from several lawmakers, including Senator Blumenthal, who urged the FTC to start a rulemaking process that would "protect consumer privacy, promote civil rights and set clear safeguards on the collection and use of data in the digital economy." "Rulemaking may prove a useful tool to address the breadth of challenges that can result from commercial surveillance and other data practices […] and could establish clear market-wide requirements," Khan wrote. The FTC can resort to its rulemaking authority to address unfair or deceptive practices that occur commonly, instead of relying on actions against individual companies.