In this penultimate interview in the series of Meet the Team Leaders from the CLAIRE COVID-19 Initiative, we hear from Marco Aldinucci, Computer Science Department, University of Torino. Marco Aldinucci is the leader of the Image analysis (CT scans, X-ray) topic group in the CLAIRE COVID-19 Initiative. In this interview you can find out about the group he leads, how AI methods can be used to help analyse medical images, and the challenges the team faced. To find out more about this series, read our recent post and watch the first video with Emanuela Girardi. You can also watch interviews with Davide Bacciu, Ann Nowé, Jose Sousa, Marco Maratea and Manlio De Domenico.

In December 2020 we announced the launch of our focus series AI for Good: UN sustainable development goals (SDGs). Each month we pick a different sustainable development goal (SDG) and highlight work in that area. Following a terrific response to our first focus on "good health and well-being", we bring you the first of our monthly summary articles where we provide a brief overview of the topic and some highlights from the series. With the COVID-19 pandemic dominating our lives at the moment, research relating to the disease has rightly received considerable coverage in our focus series. In partnership with CLAIRE's COVID-19 taskforce initiative we have brought you articles covering the formation of the taskforce, and about some of the research from the participants.

CLAIRE, the Confederation of Laboratories for AI Research in Europe, launched its COVID-19 Initiative in March 2020 as the first wave of the pandemic hit the continent. Its objective was to coordinate volunteer efforts from its members to contribute to tackling the effects of the disease. The taskforce was able to quickly gather a group of about 150 researchers, scientists and experts in AI organized into seven topic groups: epidemiological data analysis, mobility data analysis, bioinformatics, medical imaging, social dynamics monitoring, robotics, and scheduling and resource management. We brought you a comprehensive article about the activities of this initiative in one of last month's AI for Good series posts. You can read more about the outcomes and experience of this bottom-up approach in the article: The CLAIRE COVID-19 Initiative: a bottom-up effort from the European AI community.