Welcome to our July 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 report on IJCAI-ECAI, ICML and RoboCup, listen to the first episode of the GRACE podcast, and find out who won the AI Song Contest. Back as an in-person event for the first time since 2019, Bangkok played host to RoboCup2022, where around 1500 participants, from 39 different countries took part in competitions and a symposium. You can see the programme of events here, and there are links to the recordings of the competitions for some of the leagues here. If you are interested in reading our interviews from last year with members of the different leagues, these can be found here.

Eurovision 2020 was unsurprisingly cancelled due to the pandemic, but AI has stepped in to fill its glittery shoes. Dutch broadcaster VPRO has just wrapped up a Eurovision-inspired AI Song Contest, with 13 teams from Europe and Australia training algorithms to become budding pop stars while experts judge their output. As BBC and Bloomberg point out, the results are a mix of surprisingly well-done and frighteningly dystopic tunes... a bit like the real thing, really. The winning entry came from Australian team Uncanny Valley, whose song "Beautiful the World" was built by an AI trained on a mix of Eurovision hits and local animals affected by wildfires, including koalas, kookaburras and Tasmanian devils. It has the same catchy dance pop riffs you'd expect to get the full douze points from a Eurovision vote, just with nonsensical lyrics.