Welcome to our August 2023 monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, peruse the latest news, find out about recent events, and more. This month, we take a whistle-stop tour around some of the big conferences, popping in to IJCAI, AIES and ICML, find out about interdisciplinary methods in computational creativity, and say goodbye to a well-loved podcast. Nadia Ady and Faun Rice are working on a research project exploring where AI researchers find inspiration and ideas about human intelligence, and what approaches they use to translate ideas from the disciplines that study human intelligence (e.g. We spoke to Nadia and Faun about the project, what they've learnt so far, and how they plan to further develop the work. The 32nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2023) took place in Macao from 19-25 August 2023. The programme included plenary talks, workshops, symposia and tutorials.

The 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) took place Honolulu, Hawai'i from 23-29 July 2023. There were four invited talks as part of the programme, and in this post we summarise the presentation by Shakir Mohamed – "Machine learning with social purpose". In a talk of three interwoven parts, Shakir's aim was to encourage the amplification and acceleration of work on machine learning with social purpose. He is passionate about using machine learning to contribute to overcoming some of the global challenges that we face, and, as well as demonstrating some of his research in this space, he provided guidance on how researchers can widen their horizons and consider the social implications of their work. Modelling of weather and climate can have a big impact on society, with such models often providing the basis for decisions taken by policy makers.

MIT Sloan Management Review and BCG have assembled an international panel of AI experts that includes academics and practitioners to help us gain insights into how responsible artificial intelligence (RAI) is being implemented in organizations worldwide. This month's question for our panelists: Should RAI be a top management agenda item at organizations across industries and geographies?1 Eighty-six percent of them (18 out of 21) agree or strongly agree that it should be. In aggregate, their replies offer a compelling rationale for top management to oversee RAI efforts. We distill and explain this rationale below. We also conducted a global survey of more than 1,000 executives that generated similar findings: Eighty-two percent of managers in companies with at least $100 million in annual revenues agree or strongly agree that RAI should be part of their company's top management agenda.

Just over fifty years ago, a French journalist, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, published his book, Le Défi Américain (aka The American Challenge, 1967). It presented the United States and Europe as engaged in a silent economic war. In that war, he wrote, Europe was being completely outclassed on all fronts in dealing with the Third Industrial Revolution (electronics, information technology, and automation). The invading industrial armies of the day--1960s giants such as General Motors and IBM--were becoming dominant in Europe because of stronger and more flexible management techniques, technological tools, and research capacity. The book became an international hit, selling an unprecedented 600,000 copies in France alone.