Lately, AI has been an unavoidable topic in cultural, political and online conversations. There is no way around it, whether it is about new tools, Elon Musk addressing the technology and suggesting a temporary halt to its development, or Italy banning ChatGPT in the whole country. It's new, we think we understand it, but not many actually grasp it completely. Also, those who grasp it often disagree. When it comes to this kind of novel and fast-evolving subjects, indeed, regulation is often interdisciplinary.

Have you ever tried standing completely still when your favourite song comes on? It's difficult not to move your body when a catchy tune is played. Standing still to a good beat is actually so difficult that it has triggered an avalanche of research projects. One of them looks at whether music can also be used to get robots to move to a beat. "A big focus of our research is the involuntary and irresistible urge to move to a good beat," says postdoctoral fellow Alexander Szorkovszky in a press release.

In our weekly recap on Sunday, we, as editors, look back at the past seven days. We do this at the suggestion of our cartoonist Albert Jan Rasker. He chooses a subject, makes a drawing, and we take it from there. If you'd like to receive this weekly recap directly in your mailbox every Sunday morning, just subscribe here. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come to control our lives step by step.

The agricultural sector is struggling as fewer and fewer people want to work in this sector, which means that agriculture and horticulture have to consider automation. An increasing number of robots in the agricultural sector are equipped with VBTI's technology. With close to twenty years of experience under his belt, founder Albert van Breemen also helps companies in the manufacturing sector. Albert tells us more about it in this instalment of Start-up of the day. "I have been working on artificial intelligence (AI) since the early 1990s and control engineering. Once I started my studies, I soon came across what is now called Deep Learning. During my time as a business developer at ASML, there was all this hype surrounding artificial intelligence. I heard from a lot of people that we had missed the boat. Everything to do with AI was already being done in America and China. We were supposedly lagging behind with that technology. However, in my mind, we had not missed the boat at all; there's just another one on the way. At some point I received a question from a customer. That customer wanted to scale up their production, but every product had to be checked by hand. That takes an enormous amount of time, and even finding the right people to do this kind of inspection work was almost impossible. That's where Deep Learning enters the picture, for instance, with the help of smart camera systems. And that's how I came up with the idea of turning it into a business. Eventually, in 2018, I decided to start my own company in the field of Deep Learning – which is used within the High Tech Industry."

Manufacturers of products that make use of artificial intelligence are liable for any eventual damage at all times. In an effort to provide users' rights with better protection, the European Commission is tightening the AI Liability Directive. This summer, the new Meta chatbot became the target of scorn. Just days after Blenderbot 3 of Facebook's parent company launched online in the United States, the self-learning program had degenerated into a racist spreader of fake news. The same thing happened in 2016 with the Tay chatbot developed by Microsoft which was designed to engage in conversations with real people on Twitter.

Artificial intelligence that helps drivers find parking spaces in busy city centres is being developed at the University of Bath, …

Nowadays doctors define and diagnose most diseases on the basis of symptoms. However, that does not necessarily mean that the illnesses of patients with similar symptoms will have identical causes or demonstrate the same molecular changes. In biomedicine, one often speaks of the molecular mechanisms of a disease. This refers to changes in the regulation of genes, proteins or metabolic pathways at the onset of illness. The goal of stratified medicine is to classify patients into various subtypes at the molecular level in order to provide more targeted treatments, wrties the Technical University of Munich in a press release.

A study by researchers at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), part of BDSLab-ITACA group and the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics (IUMPA), has become an international benchmark for the reliable use of artificial intelligence in monitoring and managing COVID-19, writes the Technical University of Valencia in this press release. In the article, published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, the team from the UPV demonstrates the limitations that the variability or heterogeneity of data may have in reliably applying artificial intelligence when it comes from multiple sources, e.g. a range of hospitals or countries. Furthermore, the UPV team has developed new tools based on this study to help describe and classify patients with COVID-19. "The results of our study may, combined with these tools, assist in clinically assessing patients, and help with automated early classification by risk level both before and after hospital admission. They can even help to plan the allocation of resources, which is particularly beneficial for patients that will be admitted to the ICU," says Carlos Sáez, a member of the BDSLab-ITACA group research team at Universitat Politècnica de València, who coordinated the study.

People with allergy symptoms can breathe a sigh of relief – thanks to the SkinLogic diagnostic solution co-created by a team from the Faculty of Electronics and Information Technology, it will be possible to conduct skin allergy tests more efficiently and obtain more reliable results, the Warsaw University of Technology (WUT) writes in a press release. A great number of those who are allergic or suspect that they might be allergic know this pattern all too well – a visit to a specialist, puncturing with special knife fragments of the forearm on which drops of allergen have been applied, twenty minutes of waiting for the result, and finally – measuring the bubbles with a ruler. Researchers from WUT, together with a team of Prof. Jacek Stępnień (Milton Essex) and researchers from the Military Medical Institute, have come up with a solution that is supposed to help improve this pattern. From an IT point of view, SkinLogic is a data processing system. It is based on a device consisting of a tripod and two cameras: video and thermal imaging.

A team of experts in artificial intelligence and animal ecology has put forth a new, cross-disciplinary approach intended to enhance research on wildlife species and make more effective use of the vast amounts of data now being collected thanks to new technology, as announced in a press release by École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), a Swiss technology institute, which contributed to the study. The results were published in Nature Communications. The field of animal ecology has entered the era of big data and the Internet of Things. Unprecedented amounts of data are now being collected on wildlife populations, thanks to sophisticated technology such as satellites, drones and terrestrial devices like automatic cameras and sensors placed on animals or in their surroundings. These data have become so easy to acquire and share that they have shortened distances and time requirements for researchers while minimizing the disrupting presence of humans in natural habitats.