Next week, five teens from Palestine will head to Panama to compete in one of the world's largest youth robotics competitions. To win--and then teach STEM to their peers displaced by the Israel-Hamas war. For the entirety of the past year, as the teenage roboticists of Team Palestine have been working on their latest project, their homeland has been engulfed in Israel's war with Hamas . Earlier this month, that all changed. With a fragile ceasefire in place, Israeli forces began to pull back from parts of Gaza, and the teens put the final touches on the project they hope will bring them victory: a robot that can maneuver through a series of simulated challenges based on the effects of climate change.

On Sunday, the world's governments made a series of commitments to transform global governance at the United Nations Summit of the Future in New York. The ambitiously named summit was described as a "once-in-a-generation opportunity" to "forge a new global consensus on what our future should look like". Indeed, we are at a critical time when change is urgently needed. The world faces "a moment of historic danger", with increasingly imminent risks – from nuclear war to a planetary emergency, from persistent poverty and widening inequality to the unhindered advancement of artificial intelligence – threatening humanity's very existence. These are global challenges that cannot be solved purely at the national level: The people of the world need – and deserve – better coordinated global action.

The war in Ukraine, world food supply and climate change are being discussed as leaders descend of NYC. President Biden on Tuesday said the United Nations General Assembly meets "at an inflection point in history," and called for strengthened alliances while stressing that "no nation can meet the challenges of today alone." Biden, delivering his annual speech to leaders of the UN in New York City on Tuesday, addressed the United States' continued support for Ukraine against Russia's "naked aggression," the importance of denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and efforts to block Iran from nuclear proliferation; the competition between the United States and China; the climate crisis and more. Biden, upon taking the podium, stressed the importance of strengthened alliances and "standing together." U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) at the United Nations headquarters on September 19, 2023 in New York City.

Climate change, clean energy and sustainability, building low emissions technologies and developing ethical artificial intelligence are some of the challenges being tackled by CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, and the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) under a multi-million-dollar partnership. The recently established partnership between the two leading science organisations is aiming to accelerate joint research and initiatives in areas of mutual priority between Australia and the United States. CSIRO Chief Executive Larry Marshall said the two leading science organisations have already enabled a number of opportunities across the two countries in only a year, launching this month an AUD$100 million Global Centers initiative, partnering in the areas of responsible and ethical Artificial Intelligence (AI) and developing sustainable materials for global challenges. "As national science agencies, CSIRO and the NSF are working together to build international bridges for national benefit, strengthening our science and innovation to improve lives around the world," Dr Marshall said. "As the world races towards new applications for technologies like AI, it will take global collaboration to champion responsible and ethical applications that embrace the full potential of technological advances and drive healthy competitive advantages.

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly entwined with our daily lives, the potential challenges and consequences of a world where AI technology surpasses human intelligence have become critical topics of discussion. The AI Wars depict a dystopian future in which the relentless pursuit of ever more sophisticated technology has driven a wedge between humans, resulting in a society bereft of reason. We will reference a recent petition signed by notable tech leaders calling for a pause on major AI developments and discuss the importance of addressing the ethical implications of AI, fostering a dialogue to ensure a future guided by reason and empathy. AI has brought remarkable advancements to fields such as healthcare, education, and transportation. While these breakthroughs offer numerous benefits, we must also recognize our growing dependency on technology.

These are the proceedings of the 5th workshop on Machine Learning for the Developing World (ML4D), held as part of the Thirty-fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) on December 14th, 2021.

The AI Policy Forum (AIPF) is an initiative of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing to move the global conversation about the impact of artificial intelligence from principles to practical policy implementation. Formed in late 2020, AIPF brings together leaders in government, business, and academia to develop approaches to address the societal challenges posed by the rapid advances and increasing applicability of AI. The co-chairs of the AI Policy Forum are Aleksander Madry, the Cadence Design Systems Professor; Asu Ozdaglar, deputy dean of academics for the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; and Luis Videgaray, senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and director of MIT AI Policy for the World Project. Here, they discuss talk some of the key issues facing the AI policy landscape today and the challenges surrounding the deployment of AI. The three are co-organizers of the upcoming AI Policy Forum Summit on Sept. 28, which will further explore the issues discussed here. Q: Can you talk about the ongoing work of the AI Policy Forum and the AI policy landscape generally?

From October 5 to 10, 2021, the KIT Science Week will celebrate its premiere. Researchers from all over the world, actors from politics and industry, and citizens from Karlsruhe and the region are invited to immerse into the world of artificial intelligence, AI for short. This new type of event of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) will offer diverse access to AI and open rooms for discourse. KIT, for its part, will receive impetus for its research agenda. All these are learning systems that increasingly enter our lives. From October 5 to 10, 2021, the KIT Science Week will give experts from science, industry, politics, and culture, and in particular the interested public the opportunity to exchange ideas and opinions.

Congratulations to Dr Fabrizzio Horta on receiving the 2021 Monash Data Futures Institute Seed Grant - AI and Data Science for Monash Global Challenges. This $50,000 grant will help in the research collaboration between the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (Dr Fabrizzio Horta, Prof Beverley Vollenhoven) and the Department of Data Science and AI (A/Prof Hamid Rezatofhigi, Prof Jianfei Cai). "This grant will help us to support our current research, aiming to develop a clinical decision support system in IVF through deep learning algorithms. Particularly this grant aims to target one of the global challenges we are facing by introducing Artificial Intelligence technology into clinical practice. Thus, it will not just have a local impact, but a global impact in the IVF field through strong international research collaboration".

If robotics is the technology of the 21st century, rather than biotech, then we have some serious work to do. This week marks the'beginning of the end' of the coronavirus pandemic as a vaccine is deployed in the US. The Wall St Journal recently profiled the incredible effort of Pfizer and BioNTech who pioneered a novel Messenger RNA (mRNA) approach, and got it in production in a tenth to a quarter of the normal vaccine development time. It undoubtedly takes a team, but the WSJ article "How Pfizer delivered a COVID vaccine in record time" highlights the efforts of two men, CEO Albert Bourla and manufacturing chief Mike McDermott, and one woman, head of Pfizer's vaccine research Dr Kathrin Jansen, in this achievement. And the WSJ feature makes more fuss about CEO Albert Bourla's Greek heritage than about Dr Kathrin Jansen's femaleness.