UK launches taskforce to'break down barriers' for women in technology The government has launched a new taskforce it says will help women enter, stay and lead in the UK tech sector. Led by technology secretary Liz Kendall, it will see female leaders from tech companies and organisations advise the government on how to boost diversity and economic growth in the industry. BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, recently suggested women accounted for only 22% of those working in IT specialist roles in the UK. Ms Kendall said the Women in Tech group would break down the barriers that still hold too many people back. When women are inspired to take on a role in tech and have a seat at the table, the sector can make more representative decisions, build products that serve everyone, she said.

The US government on Thursday outlawed robocalls that use voices generated by artificial intelligence, a decision that sends a clear message that exploiting the technology to scam people and mislead voters won't be tolerated. The unanimous ruling by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) targets robocalls made with AI voice-cloning tools under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, a 1991 law restricting junk calls that use artificial and prerecorded voice messages. The announcement comes as New Hampshire authorities are advancing their investigation into AI-generated robocalls that mimicked President Joe Biden's voice to discourage people from voting in the state's first-in-the-nation primary last month. Effective immediately, the regulation empowers the FCC to fine companies that use AI voices in their calls or block the service providers that carry them. It also opens the door for call recipients to file lawsuits and gives state attorneys general a new mechanism to crack down on violators, according to the FCC.

Rishi Sunak's advisers are trying to thrash out an agreement among world leaders on a statement warning about the risks of artificial intelligence as they finalise the agenda for the AI safety summit next month. Downing Street officials have been touring the world talking to their counterparts from China to the EU and the US as they work to agree on words to be used in a communique at the two-day conference. But they are unlikely to agree a new international organisation to scrutinise cutting-edge AI, despite interest from the UK in giving the government's AI taskforce a global role. Sunak's AI summit will produce a communique on the risks of AI models, provide an update on White House-brokered safety guidelines and end with "like-minded" countries debating how national security agencies can scrutinise the most dangerous versions of the technology. The possibility of some form of international cooperation on cutting-edge AI that can pose a threat to human life will also be discussed on the final day of the summit on 1 and 2 November at Bletchley Park, according to a draft agenda seen by the Guardian.

Artificial intelligence is either going to save humanity or finish it off, depending on who you speak to. Either way, every week there are new developments and breakthroughs. "Just accept the tech, architects!" Oliver Wainwright, our architecture and design critic, looks at whether AI will wipe out architects. Teaser: it can quickly show you what mosques in Abu Dhabi could look like, summarises local planning policies and allows the public to experiment with projects. If architects want to explore the endless world of AI, they can start by viewing AI as their perfectly on-time, organised and eager studio assistant.

Artificial intelligence is either going to save humanity or finish it off, depending on who you speak to. Either way, every week there are new developments and breakthroughs. The Wimbledon tennis tournament revealed it will be introducing AI-generated audio and text commentary in its online highlights this year. The All England Club has teamed up with the tech group IBM to provide automatically created voiceovers and captions for its footage. The move, which is separate to the BBC's coverage of the tournament, follows use of the cloned voice of a British athletics commentator, Hannah England, for online coverage of the European Athletics Championships.

At twilight on New Year's Eve, 2020, Placido Montoya, 35, a plumber from Fort Morgan, Colorado, was driving to work. Ahead of him he noticed blinking lights in the sky. He'd heard rumours of mysterious drones, whispers in his local community, but now he was seeing them with his own eyes. In the early morning gloom, it was hard to make out how big the lights were and how many were hovering above him. But one thing was clear to Montoya: he needed to give chase.

CLAIRE, the Confederation of Laboratories for AI Research in Europe, launched its COVID-19 Initiative in March 2020 as the first wave of the pandemic hit the continent. Its objective was to coordinate volunteer efforts from its members to contribute to tackling the effects of the disease. The taskforce was able to quickly gather a group of about 150 researchers, scientists and experts in AI organized into seven topic groups: epidemiological data analysis, mobility data analysis, bioinformatics, medical imaging, social dynamics monitoring, robotics, and scheduling and resource management. We brought you a comprehensive article about the activities of this initiative in one of last month's AI for Good series posts. You can read more about the outcomes and experience of this bottom-up approach in the article: The CLAIRE COVID-19 Initiative: a bottom-up effort from the European AI community.

The Confederation of Laboratories for Artificial Intelligence Research in Europe (CLAIRE) taskforce on AI & COVID-19 supported the creation of a research group focused on AI-assisted diagnosis of COVID-19 pneumonia. The first results demonstrate the great potential of AI-assisted diagnostic imaging. Furthermore, the impact of the taskforce work is much larger, and it embraces the cross-fertilisation of artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC): a partnership with rocketing potential for many scientific domains. Through several initiatives aimed at improving the knowledge of COVID-19, containing its diffusion, and limiting its effects, CLAIRE's COVID-19 taskforce was able to organise 150 volunteer scientists, divided into seven groups covering different aspects of how AI could be used to tackle the pandemic. Emanuela Girardi, the co-coordinator of the CLAIRE taskforce on AI & COVID-19, supported the setup of a novel European group to study the diagnosis of COVID-19 pneumonia assisted by artificial intelligence.

As part of its second anniversary activities, CLAIRE hosted a webinar presenting the progress and future plans of its COVID-19 taskforce. Entitled, "CLAIRE taskforce for AI and COVID-19: results and next steps", the webinar was conducted on 15 July 2020 with a focus on the three-month research outcomes in the areas of AI for bioinformatics, drug repurposing, and medical image analysis. "When the pandemic hit Europe, we immediately thought that we have to do something to support the European government and health institutions, with CLAIRE being the biggest community of AI experts in the world," said Emanuela Girardi, co-coordinator of CLAIRE COVID-19 taskforce in her introductory note during the event. Following the launch of CLAIRE's COVID-19 taskforce on 20 March 2020, more than 150 AI researchers throughout Europe collected and curated resources which aimed to leverage AI techniques in the context of COVID-19 and to support the development of new projects in several application areas. Under this taskforce, seven major groups were formed working on mobility and monitoring data analysis; bioinformatics; medical image analysis; social dynamics and networks monitoring; robotics; and scheduling & resource management.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has called on the UK government to create "a new pro-competition regulatory regime" that can control Facebook, Google and other technology companies that are primarily funded by digital advertising. The non-ministerial department has completed a study announced last July and concluded that "existing laws are not suitable for effective regulation." To combat the problem, it's recommending that a new Digital Markets Unit be set up with major oversight and powers. The Unit was first proposed in a report published by the Digital Competition Expert Panel (DCEP) -- a group chaired by Professor Jason Furman, a former chief economist when Barack Obama was president -- in March 2019. The CMA believes it should have a code of conduct that ensures Facebook and Google don't veer into "exploitative or exclusionary practices," or do anything that is likely to reduce public trust and transparency.