Over the course of 2022, we had the pleasure of finding out more about a whole range of AI topics from researchers around the world. Here, we highlight some of our favourite interviews from the past 12 months. Rose Nakasi and her colleagues have developed a machine-learning method to detect malaria parasites in blood samples. We spoke to Rose about the motivation for this project, the progress so far, and what they are planning next. Paula Arguello, Jhon Lopez, Carlos Hinojosa and Henry Arguello won the best paper award at the International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) this year, for their work "Optics lens design for privacy-preserving scene captioning".

In October 2021, Cynthia Rudin was announced as the winner of the AAAI Squirrel AI award, which was formally presented during an award ceremony at AAAI 2022. Following the presentation, Cynthia delivered an invited talk about her research on interpretable machine learning.

Lanfrica is an online resource centre that catalogues, archives and links African language resources. These resources include research papers, datasets, projects, software and models that have to do with one or more African languages. The team behind Lanfrica is Chris Emezue, Handel Emezue, and Bonaventure Dossou, with contribution from Daria Yasafova. We caught up with them to find out more about the project, what inspired them to begin, and the potential that Lanfrica offers the AI community and beyond. Chris: The inspiration came while Bona and I were working as undergraduate students.

Welcome to our February 2022 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 our latest New voices in AI interview, hear from a NeurIPS award winner, and get stuck into AAAI 2022. You may have seen the launch of our new series last month. In the latest episode, Isabel Cachola talks about how she got into AI and her work on interpretability of NLP models. In this interview, Bernard Koch tells us about research that won him, and co-authors Emily Denton, Alex Hanna and Jacob Foster, a best paper prize at NeurIPS 2021.