1. At Tampere University in Finland, a study was conducted that predicts that the interaction between robots and humans will be surprisingly smooth, e.g. human eye contact with a robot will have the same effect as eye contact between humans. It was found that in the future people will more often interact with so-called social robots. The study also predicts that humans will perceive different characteristics in robots – i.e. knowledge or sociability – depending on how robots look and/or behave. More info here.
2. The virtual patient has been created powered by artificial intelligence, which helps doctors and medics to continue their training, stopped by the pandemic situation. This technology uses natural language processing (NLP) and speech recognition to reproduce realistic clinical scenarios, provides simulation of how the patient would be likely to react, and provides reliable answers also through body language. More info here.
3. In the latest report called the State of European Tech, it was found that investments in deep tech such as AI have dropped by 13% this year. In 2019, 10.2 billion dollars were invested in European deep tech. In 2020, this value fell to 8.9 billion dollars. It is assumed that the reason for the drop is economic uncertainty – not only from COVID-19, but also trade wars, Brexit and the turbulent presidential elections in the USA. More info here.
4. The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) has published a report on the AI, in which it discussed the ethical issues to be addressed in relation to this technology. The FRA report titled Getting The Future Right begins with the presentation of several applications of the AI that already improve the life of society i.a. helping to diagnose cancer. FRA has interviewed over a hundred public administration officials, private company employees and AI experts. In the report, FRA calls on the EU to ensure i.a. that AI respects all fundamental rights, as it can affect many rights – not only privacy or data protection. It can also discriminate or hinder the operation of justice. The EU should also ensure that people can challenge decisions taken by the AI. The society need to know when and how the AI is used and how and where to complain about its decisions. The organisations using the AI must be able to explain how their systems make decisions. More info here.
5. Amsterdam is planning to disclose its archives. The total collection is about 50 km long, which corresponds to 170,000 A4 pages. The city’s archive authority has worked with READ and its Transkribus platform, which offers archivists a new way to rewrite and search their historical documents. The web platform allows users to train a computer model to recognize handwriting. Users train the model using transcriptions already existing in the system or those that are manually entered into the system. After the training, the model uses machine learning and compares handwritten documents with those already in the system. The model automatically transcribes line by line. For the technology to work, new documents must be written in the same or similar handwriting as the model saw before. Transcriptions can help researchers to better search for words or phrases among the billions of pages stored in archives across the continent. More info here.
6. Spotify patented a method that uses artificial intelligence to detect plagiarism. The Plagiarism Risk Detector And Interface technology compares new songs with those found in the Spotify database. The Artificial Intelligence would then calculate how similar a new song is and indicate which part of the song could infringe the copyright of another artist. Nowadays, as the streaming company notes, expert and legal work is used to detect plagiarism, but Spotify claims that this is impractical and requires considerable knowledge and expertise and is not suitable for use by artists and composers who are interested in detecting plagiarism during the composition process. More info here.
7. Pope Francis called Catholics to pray that the artificial intelligence would not rebel against humanity. The Pope, who made the call for prayer for November, warned against the growing inequalities that could result from advanced robotics, and instead called for the creation of an AI for all. More info here.
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