Priya Dialani maps India’s mental health terrain and discusses how artificial intelligence is breaking through traditional taboos to deliver care to those most in need in the second-most populous country.

Prof Ricardo Vinuesa reports on last year’s IEEE/Robotics Society of Japan International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems Workshop in Prague, whose main topic was the growing impact of robotics on everyone and opportunities in the context of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

With the evolving nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, along with seemingly ever-changing recommendations, restrictions, and government guidance, trying to assess one’s own personal level of risk at any given time or location can be confusing. Now, with the development of the COVID-19 calculator, people finally have a tool to cut through all the uncertainty and determine their own risk of infection accurately and flexibly.

Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies are well-known for their decentralized nature, but what if decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) were used to disrupt the healthcare industry as well, making it more distributed and personalized? This could also have implications for the sharing and storing of electronic medical records (EMR), as well as pandemic containment and prevention.

As the world is caught up in the throes of major crises, propaganda is heavily used as a way of controlling public opinion and neutralizing dissent. The propagandistic toolbox is also getting more and more sophisticated - which thus makes it harder to identify propaganda in public and social media. This article reviews the major linguistic expressions of propaganda and discusses how Natural Language Processing can be used to automatically spot it, while also noting the complexity and limitations of this task.

Existing prognostic tools such as nomograms have many advantages in predicting cancer patients’ chances of survival and ability to enjoy a good quality of life, but also tend toward inflexibility and inability to factor in new treatments, new data, and changes in patients’ conditions. AI, however, promises to remedy these shortcomings.

The threat of stagflation is increasingly worrisome, with both short-term and long-term structural factors to blame. Can the widespread implementation of AI help to offset some of these factors? And even if it can, will that be enough to avert a worst-case scenario for the global economy?

The needless gendering of AI caused by humans anthropomorphizing everything is both a threat and a small opportunity, says Satyen K. Bordoloi as he explores the bizarre phenomenon of making AI applications male or female and delves into its root causes, from bad data to AI’s depiction on the silver screen.

Single-photon emission computer tomography (SPECT) myocardial perfusion (MPI) plays a crucial role in diagnosing cardiovascular disease risk, and deep learning models can predict major adverse cardiac events (MACE) more accurately than today’s standard imaging protocols. This may treat more high-risk patients before the onset of atherosclerosis and heart attacks, achieving better outcomes with lower medical, social, and economic costs.

Agriculture and forestry have not traditionally been at the forefront of AI and other hi-tech innovations, but positive results are being achieved by combining AI capabilities with the human expertise and knowledge of farmers and foresters. Deploying fully autonomous systems is not yet feasible, but existing technology has already helped to improve productivity and reduce accidents.