Machine learning is now being used to make crucial decisions about people's lives.

Exploring the socio - technical challenges confronting the adoption of AI in organisational settings is something that has so far been largely absent from the related literature . In particular, r esearch into requirements for trustworthy AI typically overlooks how people deal with the problems of trust in the tools that they use as part of their everyday work practices . This article presents some findings from an ongoing ethnographic study of how current tools are used in air traffic control work and what it r eveals about requirements for trustworthy AI in air traffic control and other safety - critical application domains.

A new AI weather prediction system, developed by a team of researchers from the University of Cambridge, can deliver accurate forecasts which use less computing power than current AI and physics-based forecasting systems. The system, Aardvark Weather, has been supported by the Alan Turing Institute, Microsoft Research and the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts. It provides a blueprint for a new approach to weather forecasting with the potential to improve current practices. The results are reported in the journal Nature. "Aardvark reimagines current weather prediction methods offering the potential to make weather forecasts faster, cheaper, more flexible and more accurate than ever before, helping to transform weather prediction in both developed and developing countries," said Professor Richard Turner from Cambridge's Department of Engineering, who led the research.

A single researcher with a desktop computer will be able to deliver accurate weather forecasts using a new AI weather prediction approach that is tens of times faster and uses thousands of times less computing power than conventional systems. Weather forecasts are currently generated through a complex set of stages, each taking several hours to run on bespoke supercomputers, requiring large teams of experts to develop, maintain and deploy them. Aardvark Weather provides a blueprint to replace the entire process by training an AI on raw data from weather stations, satellites, weather balloons, ships and planes from around the world to enable it to make predictions. This offers the potential for vast improvements in forecast speed, accuracy and cost, according to research published on Thursday in Nature from the University of Cambridge, the Alan Turing Institute, Microsoft Research and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). Richard Turner, a professor of machine learning at the University of Cambridge, said the approach could be used to quickly provide bespoke forecasts for specific industries or locations, for example predicting temperatures for African agriculture or wind speeds for a renewable energy company in Europe.

Machine learning is now being used to make crucial decisions about people's lives. For nearly all of these decisions there is a risk that individuals of a certain race, gender, sexual orientation, or any other subpopulation are unfairly discriminated against. Our recent method has demonstrated how to use techniques from counterfactual inference to make predictions fair across different subpopulations. This method requires that one provides the causal model that generated the data at hand. In general, validating all causal implications of the model is not possible without further assumptions.

Hosted by The Alan Turing Institute, AI UK is a yearly event that brings together representatives from government, academia and industry to showcase data science and AI research and innovation in the UK. This year, the two-day conference featured talks, panel discussions, and hands-on workshops, and participants could attend in-person or remotely. One of the sessions focussed on an on-going case study in a London borough whereby the local council is using data and AI to help inform their decision making, and to improve what they do. Tariq set the scene by describing the borough of Camden, an area that not only houses institutions such as University College London and the Francis Crick Institute, and companies such as Google, but also some of the poorest communities in Europe. The council wants to tackle inequality and sees the use of data as one potential avenue.

Artificial intelligence (AI) could take over more than eight in 10 repetitive jobs performed by civil servants, a study has found. From processing passports to registering to vote, at least 120 million tasks across government have the potential to be automated. Every minute AI helped cut per transaction would save hundreds of thousands of hours of manual work by human staff. The Alan Turing Institute, which carried out the research, said it would free up officials from never-ending bureaucracy and spend more time dealing with the public. Last month, the Deputy Prime Minister promised AI would end'timewasting, pencil-pushing, computer-saysno' frustrations of dealing with public services.