MIT Technology Review's senior editor for AI shares what he's been thinking about lately. My daughter introduced me to El Estepario Siberiano's YouTube channel a few months back, and I have been obsessed ever since. The Spanish drummer (real name: Jorge Garrido) posts videos of himself playing supercharged cover versions of popular tracks, hitting his drums with such jaw-dropping speed and technique that he makes other pro drummers shake their heads in disbelief. The dozens of reaction videos posted by other musicians are a joy in themselves. Garrido is up-front about the countless hours that it took to get this good. He says he sat behind his kit almost all day, every day for years.

Automatically analyzing dialogue can help understand and guide behavior in domains such as counseling, where interactions are largely mediated by conversation. In this paper, we study modeling behavioral codes used to asses a psychotherapy treatment style called Motivational Interviewing (MI), which is effective for addressing substance abuse and related problems. Specifically, we address the problem of providing real-time guidance to therapists with a dialogue observer that (1) categorizes therapist and client MI behavioral codes and, (2) forecasts codes for upcoming utterances to help guide the conversation and potentially alert the therapist. For both tasks, we define neural network models that build upon recent successes in dialogue modeling. Our experiments demonstrate that our models can outperform several baselines for both tasks. We also report the results of a careful analysis that reveals the impact of the various network design tradeoffs for modeling therapy dialogue.

AI will listen in to doctors' appointments and automatically generate patient notes in a bid to improve productivity in the NHS. Health Secretary Victoria Atkins said the plans will cut the time medics spend on admin so they are free to see more patients. But privacy campaigners today described the move as'creepy', while patient groups warned people could come to harm as they will be too embarrassed to discuss medical issues freely while being recorded. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt yesterday announced a 3.4billion investment in NHS productivity through things such as expanding the use of AI, reducing paperwork for medics and improving access for patients. In a major keynote speech at the Nuffield Trust think tank's annual summit, Ms Atkins today said the'enormous amount of money' would be transformative.

In the innovative world of startups, a good idea can lead to a great one. A few years ago, Australian sisters Naomi Vowels and Frances Atkins created a children's book with a difference. They invited customers to go online and input a child's name so that child could be made part of the story in a printed personalized copy. The model was monetizable and scalable. And, best of all, everyone loved the books – including the kids.

In late November the U.S. Federal Drug Administration approved Benevolent AI's recommended arthritis drug Baricitnib as a COVID-19 treatment, just nine-months after the hypothesis was developed. The correlation between the properties of this existing Eli Lilly drug and a potential treatment for seriously ill COVID-19 patients, was made with the help of knowledge graphs, which represent data in context, in a manner that humans and machines can readily understand. Knowledge graphs apply semantics to give context and relationships to data, providing a framework for data integration, unification, analytics and sharing. Think of them as a flexible means of discovering facts and relationships between people, processes, applications and data, in ways that give companies new insights into their businesses, create new services and improve R&D research. Benevolent AI, a six-year-old London-based company which has developed a platform of computational and experimental technologies and processes that can draw on vast quantities of biomedical data to advance drug development, built-in the use of knowledge graphs from day one.

"I say this to everyone in the media world who I talk to," says Darren Atkins, wrapping up our phone interview: "Please, absolutely do not portray this as a hidden agenda to get rid of staff." Atkins is the Chief Technology Office for AI automation at East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust – group of hospitals employing more than 10,000 staff, who serve a quarter of a million people in the South East of England. "If this technology is applied in the wrong way, it can be very threatening," Atkins says. "Our main priority is to free up time for staff to do the work that they should be doing, rather than the work that has no value." Just over a year ago, Atkins led the deployment of virtual workers across his group of NHS hospitals – and according to him, it's been an unqualified success. Patients are missing fewer appointments and staff are happier.

Public healthcare organisations across the UK have teamed up with the vendor Thoughtonomy to launch the first National Health Service (NHS) marketplace for robotic process automations (RPAs). The project is the brainchild of Darren Atkins, CTO at East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust (ESNEFT). Atkins spent 18 months working with Thoughtonomy to develop a cloud-based platform that any NHS trust can use to share their existing bots and collaborate on new ones, automating tasks from GP referrals to patient appointment reminders. Read next: How an NHS Trust adopted'virtual workers' to process GP referrals Atkins says this approach allows automated processes to be quickly deployed and will cut costly consultancy companies and other third parties out of the implementation process. All the content on the marketplace is owned by the NHS and can only be used by healthcare organisations for no commercial gain.

Researchers have unveiled an octocopter that attaches asphalt shingles to roofs using a nail gun and'virtual switch'. This robotic carpenter's software measures the force needed to compress the point of the nail gun and a human operator activates a virtual switch when the robotic carpenter is in place. Researchers have unveiled its roofing octocopter that attaches asphalt shingles to roofs using a nail gun and'virtual switch' The roofing octocopter is the brain child of researchers at the University of Michigan, which is part of the movement to shift humans from'dull, dirty and dangerous job' into'cleaner, safer and more interesting jobs'. 'For me, the biggest excitement of this work is in recognizing that autonomous, useful, physical interaction and construction tasks are possible with drones,' said Ella Atkins, a professor of aerospace engineering and robotics. The team used a system of markers and stationary cameras to enable the drone to precisely locate itself in space and the system was also used to tell it where to place the nails.

Domino's Pizza Enterprises built a proof-of-concept using machine learning to personalise vouchers and deals for customers in Australia. The master franchise, which operates in nine countries, is an early tester of an AWS service called Personalize, which was only made publicly available last month. Speaking at the recent AWS Summit in Sydney, Domino's lead data scientist Thomas Atkins said the pizza maker wanted to find a way to scale its ability to personalise deals using a wider array of "variants", such as time of day, pickup or delivery, price, and type of pizza. "Making communication via SMS and all our marketing channels personalised is a real challenge because of scale," Atkins said. "To get from segmented marketing to personalised marketing requires a really deep level of automation. "With the typical level of automation that we have, we can do campaigns with four to six variants relatively easily, but there are a number of manual steps that make this a little bit cumbersome.

Anyone who uses Facebook can't have failed to notice that in recent years it has become rather good at recognising faces – it is as if the social network has been scrolling through photos of your friends for years and is now as familiar with them as you are. You may find this unsettling or remarkable, but the reality is that this is only the most visible manifestation of the rapid improvements in artificial intelligence under way across the globe – improvements that have, for example, led the US government to announce it is trialling facial recognition systems as a security measure at the White House, and sparked protests – on ethical and privacy grounds – against e-commerce giant Amazon for selling such technology. "The exciting part is that the results produced are free from bias, which improves confidence and relationships between clients and contractors" The artificial intelligence (AI) technologies behind facial recognition are machine learning, in which computers use algorithms to analyse data and learn without assistance, and deep learning – a similar but more advanced system based on "recurrent neural networks" – that replicate some of the ways the brain works, for example making decisions based on an ability to differentiate between pieces of information. This is smart stuff, but it's tech that the construction industry has been somewhat sluggish to seize on and apply to its own processes. But now it seems construction is waking up to the potential of AI.