Facebook expanded a system of vision, language, and speech models designed to open the social network to users who are visually impaired. A Facebook service that describes photos in a synthesized voice now recognizes 1,200 visual concepts — 10 times more than the previous version.

U.S. regulators for the first time allowed commercial operators of autonomous aerial vehicles to fly out of operators’ sight. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration authorized drone maker American Robotics to fly without requirement.

An algorithm is helping cities locate pipes that could release highly toxic lead into drinking water. BlueConduit, a startup that focuses on water safety, is working with dozens of North American municipal governments to locate lead water lines so they can be replaced.

Face recognition is being used to identify people involved in last week’s assault on the U.S. Capitol. It’s also being misused to support their cause.

A pair of neural networks is helping to prioritize Covid-19 cases for contact tracing. The public health department of California’s Contra Costa County is using deep learning to sort Covid-19 cases reported via the pre-internet technology known as fax.

Two new models show a surprisingly sharp sense of the relationship between words and images. OpenAI, the for-profit research lab, announced a pair of models that have produced impressive results in multimodal learning: DALL·E.

Can social media posts reveal early signs of mental illness? A new machine learning model shows promising results. Researchers developed a model that analyzes messages and images posted by Facebook users for indicators of psychological problems.

U.S. lawmakers authorized a slew of national programs that promote artificial intelligence research, development, and deployment, and support efforts to make sure the results are ethical and trustworthy.

Neural networks for natural language processing got bigger, more prolific, and more fun to play with. Language models, which already had grown to gargantuan size, continued to swell, yielding chatbots that mimic AI luminaries and have very strange ideas about horses.

Institutional hurdles to AI for medicine began to fall, setting the stage for widespread clinical use of deep learning in medical devices and treatments. DeepMind’s AlphaFold model determined the three-dimensional shape of a protein in just hours.

The worldwide pandemic and a contentious U.S. election whipped up a storm of automated disinformation, and some big AI companies reaped the whirlwind.

Some of deep learning’s bedrock datasets came under scrutiny as researchers combed them for built-in biases. Researchers found that popular datasets impart biases against socially marginalized groups to trained models due to the ways the datasets were compiled, labeled, and used.

While generative adversarial networks were infiltrating cultural, social, and scientific spheres, they quietly transformed the web into a bottomless well of synthetic images of . . . well, you name it.

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.