News & Comment

We spoke with Mariarosaria Taddeo, an associate professor and senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute and Dstl Ethics Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute working on digital and AI ethics about two recent reports from the UK and the US on using AI in national defence and security.

Contact-tracing apps could help keep countries open before a vaccine is available. But do we have a sufficient understanding of their efficacy, and can we balance protecting public health with safeguarding civil rights? We interviewed five experts, with backgrounds in digital health ethics, internet law and social sciences.

Martial Hebert is the director of the Robotics Institute and dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. We spoke with him at the O’Reilly AI Conference in New York in April 2019, where he delivered a keynote talk, ‘AI and the robotics revolution’, and in a follow-up conversation.

Artists have always been at the forefront of experimenting with digital tools. The AI: More than Human exhibition at the Barbican Centre, London (until August 26th), features some intriguing AI-inspired installations. We spoke to four artists about their work and influences.

Effy Vayena runs a lab at ETH Zürich that studies ethics, legal and social implications of precision medicine and digital health. We asked her views on the code of conduct for using artificial intelligence (AI) systems in healthcare, recently published by the UK’s National Health Service (NHS).

David Oh was lead flight director for the Curiosity Mars rover and is now part of NASA’s mission to Psyche, a 200-km-wide metal asteroid. Our editor Yann Sweeney met with David at SIGGRAPH Asia to discuss whether advances in AI could improve autonomous robots for space exploration.