Imagine being scared to breathe the air around you. An unusual concept for us here in the UK, but it is a genuine concern for communities all over the world with air pollution killing an estimated seven million people every year. A team of Loughborough University computer scientists are hoping to help eradicate this fear with a new artificial intelligence (AI) system they have developed that can predict air pollution levels hours in advance. The technology is novel for a number of reasons, one being that it has the potential to provide new insight into the environmental factors that have significant impacts on air pollution levels. Professor Qinggang Meng and Dr. Baihua Li are leading the project which is focused on using AI to predict PM2.5--particulate matter of less than 2.5 microns (10-6 m) in diameter--that is often characterized as reduced visibility in cities and hazy-looking air when levels are high.

BOSTON: Scientists are developing an artificial intelligence system that can get virtual agents to complete simple household chores in a simulated environment, paving the way for future robots to learn such tasks. The team from University of Toronto in Canada and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US trained the system called VirtualHome using nearly 3,000 programmes of various activities, which are further broken down into subtasks for the computer to understand. A simple task like "making coffee," for example, would also include the step "grabbing a cup." The researchers demonstrated VirtualHome in a 3D world inspired by Sims - a life-simulation video game. The team's AI agent can execute 1,000 of these interactions in the Sims-style world, with eight different scenes including a living room, kitchen, dining room, bedroom, and home office.