Welcome to our December 2021 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 cover, amongst other things, NeurIPS 2021, sustainable cities and communities, and the BBC Reith Lectures. One of the main events in the AI world this month was the 35th conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS2021). We were lucky enough to attend and only scratched the surface of the vast array of talks, panels, workshops and posters on offer. You can read the first of our round-ups of the invited talks, #NeurIPS2021 invited talks round-up: part one – Duolingo, the banality of scale and estimating the mean.

Congratulations to Huy Ha and Shuran Song who have won the CoRL 2021 best system paper award! Their work, FlingBot: the unreasonable effectiveness of dynamic manipulations for cloth unfolding, was highly praised by the judging committee. "To me, this paper constitutes the most impressive account of both simulated and real-world cloth manipulation to date.", Below, the authors tell us more about their work, the methodology, and what they are planning next. In my most recent publication with my advisor, Professor Shuran Song, we studied the task of cloth unfolding.

Congratulations to Tao Chen, Jie Xu and Pulkit Agrawal who have won the CoRL 2021 best paper award! Their work, A system for general in-hand object re-orientation, was highly praised by the judging committee who commented that "the sheer scope and variation across objects tested with this method, and the range of different policy architectures and approaches tested makes this paper extremely thorough in its analysis of this reorientation task". Below, the authors tell us more about their work, the methodology, and what they are planning next. We present a system for reorienting novel objects using an anthropomorphic robotic hand with any configuration, with the hand facing both upwards and downwards. We demonstrate the capability of reorienting over 2000 geometrically different objects in both cases.