AI accelerated the search for a coronavirus vaccine, detected Covid-19 cases, and otherwise softened the pandemic’s blow. Machine learning researchers worldwide scrambled to harness the technology against the coronavirus.

The secrets of history are locked in troves of handwritten documents. Now a machine learning platform is making them amenable to digital search. Transkribus is transcribing centuries-old records en masse and making them available to scholars worldwide.

Helium balloons that beam internet service to hard-to-serve areas are using AI to navigate amid high-altitude winds. Loon, the Alphabet division that provides wireless internet via polyethylene blimps.

A new consortium of companies, schools, and research labs is building open tools for next-generation machine learning. MLCommons aims to foster innovation in machine learning by developing new benchmarks, datasets, and best practices.

Labor unions aim to give workers more protection against the automated systems that increasingly rule the workplace. The Trades Union Congress (TUC) launched a task force to lobby for collective bargaining, increased transparency, and legal protections related to AI in the workplace.

A computer vision system is helping to keep runners with impaired vision on track.What’s new: A prototype smartphone app developed by Google translates camera images into audio signals.

A fighter pilot battled a true-to-life virtual enemy in midair. In the skies over southern California, an airman pitted his dogfighting skills against an AI-controlled opponent that was projected onto his augmented-reality visor.

A new database tracks failures of automated systems including machine learning models. The Partnership on AI, a nonprofit consortium of businesses and institutions, launched the AI Incident Database, a searchable collection of reports on the technology’s missteps.

The U.S. government’s effort to take advantage of AI has not lived up to its promise, according to a new report. Implementations of machine learning systems by federal agencies are “uneven at best, and problematic and perhaps dangerous at worst".

A new summarization model boils down AI research papers to a single sentence. TLDR from Allen Institute for AI creates at-a-glance summaries of scientific research papers. It’s up and running at Semantic Scholar, a research database, where searches now return its pithy precis.

Social biases are well documented in decisions made by supervised models trained on ImageNet’s labels. But they also crept into the output of unsupervised models pretrained on the same dataset.

A new study used AI to track the explosive growth of AI innovation. Researchers from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office deployed natural language processing to track AI’s increasing presence in four decades of patent data.

Major polling organizations took a drubbing in the press after they failed to predict the outcome in last week’s U.S. elections. At least one AI-powered model fared much better.

In Argentina, a municipal face recognition system could misidentify children as suspected lawbreakers. Authorities in Buenos Aires are scanning subway riders’ faces to find offenders in a database of suspects but the system mixes criminal records with personal information about minors.

Private citizens are using AI-driven surveillance to turn the tables on law enforcement. Activists are using face recognition to identify abusive cops, according to The New York Times.