Apple, which has made a point of its commitment to user privacy, announced that it will scan iPhones for evidence of child abuse. The tech giant will include a machine learning model on the device.

The U.S. plans to build nearly a dozen new civilian AI research labs. The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) committed $220 million to fund 11 National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes, complementing seven other AI research institutes that were established last year.

Researchers from Emory University, MIT, Purdue University, and other institutions found that deep learning systems trained to interpret x-rays and CT scans also were able to identify their subjects as Asian, Black, or White.

The U.S. government’s largest national health insurance plan will pay for hospital use of a deep learning model, building momentum for AI to become an integral part of the doctor’s toolkit.

A crime-fighting AI company altered evidence to please police, a new investigation claims — the latest in a rising chorus of criticism. ShotSpotter modified the system’s findings in some cases.

DeepMind opened access to AlphaFold, a model that finds the shapes of proteins, and to its output so far — a potential cornucopia for biomedical research. The research lab, a division of Google’s parent company Alphabet, made AlphaFold freely available.

Computer vision is keeping a close eye on athletes at the Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo. Omega Timing, a Swiss watchmaker and the Olympic Games’ official timekeeper, is providing systems that go far beyond measuring milliseconds.

Chinese researchers for the first time swept a competition to develop AI systems that monitor urban traffic. Chinese universities and companies won first and second place place in all five categories of the 2021 AI City Challenge.

A U.S. government watchdog agency called for stronger face recognition protocols for federal agencies. An audit found that, while many employ face recognition, they may not know where it came from, how it’s being used, or the hazards involved.

Some delivery drivers fired by Amazon contend that the retailer’s automated management system played an unfair role in terminating their employment. Drivers in Amazon Flex, an Uber-like program that enables independent drivers to earn money delivering the company’s packages.

An independent test found flaws in AI systems designed to evaluate job applicants. MyInterview and Curious Thing, which automate job interviews, gave a candidate who spoke only in German high marks on English proficiency, according to MIT Technology Review.

Creative engineers are combining deep learning systems to produce a groundswell of generated imagery. Researchers, hackers, and artists are producing new works by pairing CLIP, a pretrained image classifier, with a generative adversarial network (GAN).

Traffic signals controlled by AI are keeping vehicles rolling citywide. Several U.S. cities are testing systems from Israel-based startup NoTraffic that promise to cut both commute times and carbon emissions.

Many people both outside and inside the tech industry believe that AI will serve mostly to boost profits and monitor people — without regard for negative consequences.

AI is guiding admissions, grading homework, and even teaching classes on college campuses.