Science journalism refers to the task of reporting technical findings of a scientific paper as a less technical news article to the general public audience. We aim to design an automated system to support this real-world task (i.e., automatic science journalism) by 1) introducing a newly-constructed and real-world dataset (SciTechNews), with tuples of a publicly-available scientific paper, its corresponding news article, and an expert-written short summary snippet; 2) proposing a novel technical framework that integrates a paper's discourse structure with its metadata to guide generation; and, 3) demonstrating with extensive automatic and human experiments that our framework outperforms other baseline methods (e.g. Alpaca and ChatGPT) in elaborating a content plan meaningful for the target audience, simplifying the information selected, and producing a coherent final report in a layman's style.

Hosted by the Alan Turing Institute, AI UK is a two day conference that showcases artificial intelligence and data science research, development, and policy in the UK. This year, the event took place on 21 and 22 March, and the theme was the use of data science and AI to solve real-world challenges. Given AIhub's mission to connect the AI community to the general public, and to report the breadth of AI research without the hype, the panel session on science journalism particularly piqued my interest. Chaired by science journalist Anjana Ahuja, "Impacting technology through quality science journalism" drew on the opinions of Research Fellow Mhairi Aitken, science reporter Melissa Heikkilä, and writer, presenter and comedian Timandra Harkness. The speakers talked about the role that journalism has to play in understanding AI systems and their implementation in wider society.

People have myths because that is one kind of response to the unknown. If you take away their myths, you may leave them with nothing. That's why a very well-intentioned, thoughtful effort of scholars over at the Mozilla dot org foundation to debunk nonsense about artificial intelligence is bound to fail. The new website, AI Myths, purports to debunk pernicious lies and mischaracterizations about artificial intelligence, such as the notion that AI has agency, or that "superintelligence is coming soon." What the very astute authors have failed to confront is that people have no idea what AI is.

The QUEST project is designing new AI tools that will help science journalists contextualise their stories and tailor them to different types of news audiences. Artificial intelligence – or AI for short – is now ubiquitous. When I write'ubiquitous', I don't mean that AI software is present in most if not all aspects of our lives. Even if this presence might happen more soon than we think. No, what I mean that is AI is ubiquitous in today's ether – our conversations, our news and our politics.