What does it take for a robot to hold a conversation with a room, not just a person? That was one of the questions at the heart of my last week (20th-24th July) at the Imperial Robotics Summer School, hosted at Imperial College, London; a week that sharpened my thinking and pushed me to look at robotics problems from angles I don't usually get to in my day-to-day work. The summer school brought together emerging researchers, academics, and industry professionals from across the robotics community for an intensive, hands-on programme. I came away having learned a huge amount, from expert-led lectures on robot kinematics, dynamics, sensing and control, and robot learning, through to specialised sessions on aerial robotics, robot intelligence, surgical robot vision, bio-inspired sensing and control, and personal assistive robotics. One of the standout parts of the week was getting into Imperial's robotics labs themselves, seeing research up close across adaptive and intelligent robotics, aerial robotics, robotic surgery, manipulation and touch, and assistive robotics.

Sarvapali (Gopal) Ramchurn is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Turing Fellow, and Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. He is the Director of the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems hub and Co-Director of the Shell-Southampton Centre for Maritime Futures. He is also a Co-CEO of Empati Ltd, an AI startup working on decentralised green hydrogen technologies. His research is about the design of Responsible Artificial Intelligence for socio-technical applications including energy systems and disaster management. Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena is Professor of Medical Robotics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College, where he leads the Mechatronics in Medicine Laboratory and the Applied Mechanics Division. He has been the Engineering Co-Director of the Hamlyn Centre, which is part of the Institute of Global Health Innovation, since July 2020.

Members of the AIRL lab at Imperial College, and authors of the reported work in this blog post. From left to right: Bryan Lim, Dr Antoine Cully (director of the AIRL lab), Manon Flageat, Luca Grillotti, Dr Simón C Smith, and Maxime Allard. Learning and finding different solutions to the same problem is commonly associated with creativity and adaptation, which are important characteristics of intelligence. In the AIRL lab at Imperial College, we believe in the importance of diversity in learning algorithms. With this focus in mind, we develop learning algorithms known as Quality-Diversity algorithms.

Agitation is one of the neuropsychiatric symptoms with high prevalence in dementia which can negatively impact the Activities of Daily Living (ADL) and the independence of individuals. Detecting agitation episodes can assist in providing People Living with Dementia (PLWD) with early and timely interventions. Analysing agitation episodes will also help identify modifiable factors such as ambient temperature and sleep as possible components causing agitation in an individual. This preliminary study presents a supervised learning model to analyse the risk of agitation in PLWD using in-home monitoring data. The in-home monitoring data includes motion sensors, physiological measurements, and the use of kitchen appliances from 46 homes of PLWD between April 2019-June 2021. We apply a recurrent deep learning model to identify agitation episodes validated and recorded by a clinical monitoring team. We present the experiments to assess the efficacy of the proposed model. The proposed model achieves an average of 79.78% recall, 27.66% precision and 37.64% F1 scores when employing the optimal parameters, suggesting a good ability to recognise agitation events. We also discuss using machine learning models for analysing the behavioural patterns using continuous monitoring data and explore clinical applicability and the choices between sensitivity and specificity in-home monitoring applications.

Artificial Intelligence has catapulted in recent years, and the advancements being made in this field make me feel as if it won't be long before we have robots walking amongst us all the time! There was a point in time when the only forms of robots that we could see were toys or vacuum cleaners, or if we were lucky an AI-enabled lawnmower in some tech-trendy individual's backyard! But we have come a long long way since then. From a basketball-playing Japanese robot at the Tokyo 2021 Olympics to a Microsoft-powered robot that cleans up littered cigarette butts on the beach – the potential and scope of robots grow exponentially day by day. The world at large is slowly moving away from the perception of robots as evil beings who want to take over the Earth, and accepting that they may have vast and undeniable utility in even our day-to-day lives.

For two weeks recently I got into a steady routine. At 10:30 each morning, I would sit at my kitchen table, strap three devices containing sensors to my right arm, and switch on a tablet computer. Then I would spend 20 minutes going through a series of exercises monitored by a man who popped up in a window on the screen. The results of my endeavours will, I hope, help millions of people like me dealing with Parkinson's disease. My daily routine was part of a medical trial run by engineers from Imperial College and a start-up company they have founded, in collaboration with a consultant neurologist at London's Charing Cross Hospital.

UK diagnostics firm Salient Bio has launched a robotics-driven COVID-19 mass testing platform after spinning out from Imperial College.The company says the technology is the fastest of its kind and can give results that are 99% accurate.There are a range of approaches to mass testing – with one group even suggesting that a breath test could be used and is planning trials of the device known as Microtox BT.Rapid tests are already being trialled at certain airports as a way of ensuring passengers boarding planes are not infected and unwittingly spreading the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes COVID-19.A mass testing programme is also being trialled in the UK city of Liverpool, which has been badly affected by the virus.London-based Salient was founded by former team members of Imperial College's London BioFoundry, which handled the spin-out and accelerates commercialisation of synthetic biology research and technology.With continuous testing vital for high human contact industries such as food preparation, factory work construction and education, Salient Bio says it allows COVID-secure environments at a quick cost effective rate.It's hoping to pick up clients in a range of sectors requiring regular human contact such as logistics, facilities management, education …

Researchers have enlisted an AI to help them uncover hidden drawings on the canvas of one of Leonardo Da Vinci most famous paintings. The project was a collaboration between the National Gallery's Dr. Catherine Higgitt and a team from the Imperial College of London, led by Pier Luigi Dragotti. Higgitt and her team at the Gallery had discovered faint sketch marks on the canvas of da Vinci's'Virgin on the Rocks,' which he had originally been commissioned to create in 1483 for a chapel in Milan. Researchers in London discovered a hidden drawing on the canvas of one of Leonard da Vinci's most famous paintings, 'Virgin on the Rocks' (pictured above) The sketchings appeared to hint at an early version of the image that differed from the finished version, which depicts the Madonna with an infant Jesus and an infant John the Baptist in a cavern. The sketches showed wings, which suggested that da Vinci might have originally planned for an angel to be in the painting, as well as a different position for the Madonna.

Tony Brooker, who has died aged 94, was a pioneer of computer programming and education. He designed and implemented the world's first high-level programming language, at Manchester University, and was later founding professor of computer science at Essex University. In 1947, when Brooker took up his first academic post, as assistant lecturer in engineering mathematics at Imperial College, University of London, computers were in the air. He joined Professor KD Tocher and another student, Sidney Michaelson, in building the Icce (Imperial College Computing Engine, pronounced "icky"). In 1949 Brooker became a research assistant at the Cambridge University mathematical laboratory and took charge of its differential analyser, a prewar analogue computer.

On March 26, at the Francis Crick Institute research centre in London, WIRED Editor Greg Williams kicked off WIRED Health 2019. The event, in its sixth edition, features talks, interviews and panel discussions with the world's most inspiring healthcare innovators, entrepreneurs, and researchers, in order to shed light on what lies ahead for the medicine and healthcare sectors. "We wanted to bring together some amazing innovators in the worlds of healthcare, pharma and technology to look at what the future looks like for health in the age of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, big data and genomics," Williams said in his opening remarks on the main stage. Over the following hours, the speakers took the floor, bringing to life an impressive collection of eye-opening stories about what it takes to make innovation happen. "Discovery research is going to create the future," said Paul Nurse, director of the Francis Crick Institute.