A neural network is helping credit card users continue to shop even when the lender’s credit-approval network goes down. Visa developed a deep learning system that analyzes individual cardholders’ behavior in real time to predict whether credit card transactions should be approved or denied.

The UK government abandoned a plan to use machine learning to assess students for higher education. The UK Department of Education discarded grades generated by an algorithm designed to predict performance on the annual Advanced Level qualifications, which had been canceled due to the pandemic.

Football clubs are turning to computer vision for winning insights. Acronis, a Swiss cloud storage and security company, offers AI services designed to give a boost to some of the world’s top football clubs (soccer teams, to Americans), Wired reported.

The ocean contains distinct ecosystems, but they’re much harder to see than terrestrial forests or savannas. A new model helps scientists better understand patterns of undersea life, which is threatened by pollution, invasive species, and warming temperatures.

In any training dataset, some classes may have relatively few examples. A new technique can improve a trained model’s performance on such underrepresented classes. Researchers introduced a method that synthesizes extracted features of underrepresented classes.

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are developing machine learning tools for the fossil fuel industry even as they pledge to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Researchers are drawing up blueprints for drugs to fight Covid-19. Machine learning is identifying those most likely to be effective. Covid Moonshot, an international group of scientists in academia and industry, is crowdsourcing designs for molecules with potential to thwart the coronavirus.

The pandemic has radically altered online shopping behavior, throwing a wrench into many AI systems. AI inventory trackers, recommendation algorithms, and fraud detection systems trained on pre-pandemic consumer behavior have been flummoxed by the different ways people now browse, binge, and buy.

Governments have struggled to find a tax formula that promotes prosperity without creating extremes of wealth and poverty. Can machine learning show the way?

Israeli and American hospitals are using an algorithm to flag individuals at high risk for Covid-19 complications.

Your body disturbs Wi-Fi signals as you move through them. New research takes advantage of the effect to recognize the presence of people. Yang Liu and colleagues at Syracuse University detected people in a room with a Wi-Fi router by analyzing the signal.

Robot vacuum cleaners are pretty good at navigating rooms, but they still get stuck in tight spaces. New work takes a step toward giving them the smarts they’ll need to escape the bathroom.

Researchers have rushed out a battery of AI-powered tools to combat the coronavirus, but an assessment of dozens of models is a wake-up call for machine learning engineers.

Deep learning research is harvesting better ways to manage farms. A convolutional neural network predicted corn yields in fields across the U.S. Midwest.

It’s time to stop flushing valuable data down the toilet. The Precision Health Toilet, a suite of sensors that attach to an ordinary commode, monitors human waste for input for signs of disease. It identifies individual users by scanning where the sun doesn’t shine.