Many powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have been engineered with the goals of high performance and accuracy. Recently, AI algorithms have been integrated into diverse and real-world applications. It has become an important topic to explore the impact of AI on society from a people-centered perspective. Previous works in citizen science have identified methods of using AI to engage the public in research, such as sustaining participation, verifying data quality, classifying and labeling objects, predicting user interests, and explaining data patterns. These works investigated the challenges regarding how scientists design AI systems for citizens to participate in research projects at a large geographic scale in a generalizable way, such as building applications for citizens globally to participate in completing tasks. In contrast, we are interested in another area that receives significantly less attention: how scientists co-design AI systems "with" local communities to influence a particular geographical region, such as community-based participatory projects. Specifically, this article discusses the challenges of applying AI in Community Citizen Science, a framework to create social impact through community empowerment at an intensely place-based local scale. We provide insights in this under-explored area of focus to connect scientific research closely to social issues and citizen needs.

Author Neil Gaiman has admitted breaking Scotland's lockdown rules by travelling 11,000 miles from New Zealand to his holiday home on Skye. The Good Omens and American Gods writer left his wife and son in Auckland so he could "isolate" at his island retreat. He wrote on his online bog: "Hullo from Scotland, where I am in rural lockdown on my own." The science fiction and fantasy author has since been criticised for "endangering" local people". The SNP's Westminster leader Ian Blackford, who is the MP for the island, told the Sunday Times the author's journey was unacceptable. He said: "What is it about people, when they know we are in the middle of lockdown that they think they can come here from the other side of the planet, in turn endangering local people from exposure to this infection that they could have picked up at any step of the way?" Mr Gaiman - whose main family home is in Woodstock in the USA - has owned the house on Skye for more than 10 years. The English-born author wrote on his blog that until two weeks ago he had been living in New Zealand with his wife, the singer Amanda Palmer, and their four-year-old son. He said the couple agreed "that we needed to give each other some space". The 59-year-old said he flew "masked and gloved, from empty Auckland airport" to Los Angeles. He then caught a British Airways flight to London before borrowing a friend's car and heading for Skye. "I drove north, on empty motorways and then on empty roads, and got in about midnight, and I've been here ever since," he said. "I needed to be somewhere I could talk to people in the UK while they and I were awake, not just before breakfast and after dinner.

Ecosia, a German startup with an internet search engine, today, has brought in enough revenues to enable it to plant 50 million trees. This equates to the removal of 2.5 million tonnes of Co2 from the atmosphere, according to the company. Ecosia has used the profits from advertisements on its search engine to plant trees in Kenya, Brazil, Indonesia, Spain, Tanzania, Madagascar, Colombia, Peru, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Haiti, Morocco, Ethiopia, Uganda, Ghana and Nicaragua. Ecosia has partnered with Bing, Microsoft's search engine, to get results for users, but receives a majority portion of any revenues. After covering its internal costs, everything left goes towards planting trees; Ecosia is a non-profit organization.