Today on the VOICES stage, BoF and Google announced a partnership designed to explore and demonstrate the potential applications of artificial intelligence in fashion, and begin a dialogue between the industry and one of the global leaders in machine learning. In its first instance, the partnership has prompted a series of experiments with data sets from BoF's Fashion Week coverage, the early fruits of which were unveiled before VOICES attendees here in Oxfordshire. Representing Google was Amit Sood, who, in 2011, founded what became the Google Cultural Institute, a non-profit arm of the company, now housed in a grand hôtel particulier in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, that has partnered with over 1,300 museums and foundations to digitise everything from the Dead Sea Scrolls to Marc Chagall's ceiling at the Opéra Garnier, making them accessible on a platform called Google Arts & Culture. The institute is now experimenting with what machine learning can enable when applied to this catalogue, with a focus on fashion as well as art. Sood showed members of the VOICES community some of the work his team of engineers have been doing and, alongside BoF's Imran Amed, shared the results of applying Google's machine learning algorithms to over 70,000 runway looks from BoF's coverage of the last fours years of shows.

The City of Espoo has initiated a unique artificial intelligence experiment in collaboration with Tieto, a Finnish software and service company. The experiment involves combining a huge amount of social and health data concerning every Espoo resident, and customer data relating to early childhood education from 2002 to 2016. The aim of analysing this mass of data is to identify new pro-active means of targeting services to citizens, for example to prevent social exclusion. All data processing includes extreme measures regarding information security. Personal data, such as names, identity numbers and addresses are concealed already during data collection.

Minecraft is to become a testing ground for artificial intelligence experiments. Microsoft, owner of the popular video game, revealed that computer scientists and amateurs will be able to evaluate and develop AI software using its virtual landscapes from July. The company says Minecraft is more "sophisticated" than existing AI research simulations and cheaper to use than building a robot. "This is the state-of-the-art," said Prof Jose Hernandez-Orallo from the Technical University of Valencia, one of a small group of academics given early access to the software. "At this moment there is nothing comparable, and this is just in its beginnings, so I see many possibilities for it."