Welcome to our May 2022 monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, get the low-down on recent events, and much more. This month, we chat to our latest new voice in AI, interview an award winner, hear about the RoboCup virtual humanoid competition, and check out a music video created with the help of AI. In our latest episode of New voices in AI, we caught up with Nicolo' Brandizzi who told us about his work on human-AI collaboration. You can find all episodes in the series here. We're pleased to announce that we will be giving a tutorial on Science communication for AI researchers at IJCAI-ECAI 2022.

The thirty-fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021) will be held from Monday 6 December to Tuesday 14 December. This week, the awards committees announced the winners of the outstanding paper award, the test of time award and – for the first time – the best paper award in the new datasets and benchmarks track. Six articles received outstanding paper awards this year. A Universal Law of Robustness via Isoperimetry Sébastien Bubeck and Mark Sellke The authors propose a theoretical model to explain why many state-of-the-art deep networks require many more parameters than are necessary to smoothly fit the training data. On the Expressivity of Markov Reward David Abel, Will Dabney, Anna Harutyunyan, Mark K. Ho, Michael Littman, Doina Precup and Satinder Singh This paper provides a clear exposition of when Markov rewards are, or are not, sufficient to enable a system designer to specify a task, in terms of their preference for a particular behaviour, preferences over behaviours, or preferences over state and action sequences.

Video surveillance has long been a necessary tool for law enforcement to keep communities safe and reduce crime. Yet sifting through hundreds of hours of footage can be time-consuming and slow down investigations. Video content analytics make this footage significantly more valuable by extracting, identifying and classifying video metadata, making the footage searchable, actionable and quantifiable. The ability to efficiently review, analyze, and respond to events captured by video surveillance has revolutionized law enforcement operations. Video analytics help these agencies accelerate investigations, attain situational awareness, and derive operational intelligence.

This article is part of the VB Lab / NVIDIA GTC insight series. "The story of GTC is in many ways the story of NVIDIA, and it's also the story of what's happening in technology," says Greg Estes, VP of corporate marketing and developer programs at NVIDIA. Twelve years ago, GTC began as a conference focused squarely on GPUs, and at that time, that meant primarily graphics and gaming. "But then people figured out that GPUs are the perfect architecture for AI," says Estes. GTC is now billed as the conference for AI innovators, developers, technologists, startups and creatives, and this year it will offer over 1,500 sessions covering breakthroughs in AI, data center, accelerated computing, autonomous vehicles, health care, intelligent networking, game development, and more.

It was only a year ago that we convened in southern California for AIMed19 with over 600 of us in attendance, and not one of us would have predicted that it was to be the last such gathering for most of us for a long while. This year, in the spirit of celebrating artificial intelligence during the COVID-19 pandemic, we launched the AIMed AI Champions Awards in several categories during the week-long virtual sessions focused on the hot topics of this year of artificial intelligence in healthcare. The first topic of the week was Education of AI in Healthcare. This session had an inspiring gathering of clinicians at all levels of education of artificial intelligence. The winner of the AI Champion Rising Star award, Dr. Addison Gearhart, eloquently stated that she did not allow her lack of formal artificial intelligence education to be a deterrent in creatively using it as a resource for completing projects and building programs.

Ionut Schiopu and Adrian Munteanu received a Top Viewed Special Session Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP 2020) for their paper "A study of prediction methods based on machine learning techniques for lossless image coding". Here, Ionut Schiopu tells us more about their work. The research topic of our paper is to introduce a more efficient algorithm for lossless image compression based on Machine Learning (ML) techniques, where the main objective is to minimize the amount of data required to represent the input image without any information loss. In recent years, a new research strategy for coding has emerged by exploring the advances brought by modern ML techniques by proposing novel hybrid coding solutions where specific modules in conventional coding frameworks are replaced with more efficient modules based on ML techniques. The paper follows this research strategy and uses a deep neural network to replace the prediction module in the conventional coding framework.

Eight technologies developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers, either wholly or in collaboration with researchers from other organizations, were among the winners of the 2020 R&D 100 Awards. Annually since 1963, these international R&D awards recognize 100 technologies that a panel of expert judges selects as the most revolutionary of the past year. Six of the laboratory's winning technologies are software systems, a number of which take advantage of artificial intelligence techniques. The software technologies are solutions to difficulties inherent in analyzing large volumes of data and to problems in maintaining cybersecurity. Another technology is a process designed to assure secure fabrication of integrated circuits, and the eighth winner is an optical communications technology that may enable future space missions to transmit error-free data to Earth at significantly higher rates than currently possible.

Visual 1st, the annual Silicon-Valley imaging conference for industry leaders and upstarts, once again brought together a worldwide audience for a day-and-a-half executive conference. The event, held Oct. 2-3 at the Golden Gate Club in San Francisco, addresses topics as far-reaching as artificial intelligence and as every day as printing. As with most conferences, the real meat of the event is the hallway discussions and informal meetings over a beer or wine at the reception. Below are some photos from the conference, courtesy of sponsor, Sweet Escapes. Each year, a panel of high-powered industry experts presented the four Visual 1st Awards to the most outstanding among 30 products competing in this year's show-and-tell demo sessions.

IAAI has been held annually since 1989 and has been collocated with the national (or international) AI conference since 1991. The proceedings were published in book form through 1992. Since 1993, a conference proceedings volume has been published, and selected papers have been republished as articles in AI Magazine. This introduction briefly discusses the 1995 IAAI award winners and presents goals and plans for next year's conference. IAAI features real, deployed AI applications, selected for their innovation.

The European Robotics League (ERL) announced the winners of ERL Emergency Robots 2017 major tournament, during the awards ceremony held on Saturday, 23rd September at Giardini Pro Patria, in Piombino, Italy. The ERL Emergency Robots 2017 competition consisted of four scenarios, inspired by the nuclear accident of Fukushima (Japan, 2011) and designed specifically for multi-domain human-robot teams. The first scenario is The Grand Challenge made up of three domains – sea, air, land, and the other three scenarios are made of only two domains. The Awards, given for each scenario to the best performing teams, were introduced by Alan Winfield from Bristol Robotics Laboratory and ERL Emergency Coordinator. "The energy, enthusiasm and spirit of cooperation among the teams competing in ERL Emergency was amazing. We witnessed not only great performances from the teams and their robots, but also the drama and excitement of last minute field repairs and workarounds to the robots", said Alan Winfield.