The AIhub coffee corner captures the musings of AI experts over a 30-minute conversation. This edition focusses on the state of the AI research landscape amid claims from some quarters that we are on the cusp of another “AI winter”. Our seven experts discuss the historical context to these claims, their feelings about the position of AI research now, and their expectations for the near future.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has seen disruption and cancellation of a number of scientific conferences. One of the biggest casualties was the APS March meeting, the world’s largest physics conference, with organisers making the difficult decision to call the event off less than 36 hours before the scientific sessions were due to start. Elsewhere, the ICLR (International Conference on Learning Representations), scheduled for April, has made the decision to go fully virtual. Could the trial of online solutions, albeit under unfortunate circumstances, herald the start of a new conference era?

How do you integrate ethics, policy, and practicality into the design of revolutionary robotics and artificial intelligence systems? Professors Kagan Tumer and Tom Dietterich are collaborating to find out as they help lead the Oregon State Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute.

Here are a selection of tweets we have collected from February 2020.

By Virginia Dignum, Catelijne Muller and Andreas Theodorou

This week, Europe took a clear stance on AI; foster the uptake of AI technologies, underpinned by what it calls ‘an ecosystem of excellence’, while also ensuring their compliance with European ethical norms, legal requirements and social values, ‘an ecosystem of trust’. While the Whitepaper on AI of the European Commission does not propose legislation yet, it announces some bold legislative measures, that will likely materialize by the end of 2020.

Vidal Alcázar, Pat Riddle and Mike Barley received an honourable mention in the outstanding paper award category at AAAI-20 for their work “A Unifying View on Individual Bounds and Heuristic Inaccuracies in Bidirectional Search”. Here, Vidal Alcázar tells us more about the topic of heuristic searching, the main findings of their research, and plans for future work in the area.

The AIhub coffee corner captures the musings of AI experts over a 30-minute conversation. This edition focusses on AI as an inventor. This discussion was prompted by news that an artificial intelligence system was named as the inventor of two ideas in patents filed in the UK, Europe and US last summer.

Happy new year 2020! Below are the tweets about AI we have collected this month.

By Larry Medsker

AI Policy Matters is a regular column in AI Matters featuring summaries and commentary based on postings that appear twice a month in the AI Matters blog.

By Ara Darzi, Imperial College London

It is not often that one witnesses a transformational advance in medicine. But the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the early detection of disease is exactly that.