A clinical team at Heritage Assisted Living, located in Framingham, Mass., is the first to use the so-called Emerald device to track a COVID patient’s movement, breathing, and sleeping from afar (in a non-invasive way). Emerald, which uses AI to analyzes wireless signals and ascertain vital signs, was created by MIT professor Dina Katabi and her research group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). With permission, Heritage set up Emerald in the patient's room to monitor her and send back real-time data to a doctor at home. Some findings: the patient's breathing rate and sleep quality reportedly got better as time went on. As she recovered further, the patient walked around her home in a quicker manner than she had previously. Notably, Emerald can also detect certain respiratory problems that may go unnoticed by doctors and nurses. Ipsit Vahia, the doctor who monitored the patient and participated in the study, said the system minimizes risk for health care workers who don't have to worry about catching a disease from their patients.

In this latest episode, NPR social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam reflects on the future ways that humans could form attachments to these "artificial lovers," who are being programmed to be more empathetic and intelligent...

The respondents of the online survey — which was conducted by Canam on behalf of AI software firm Bright Pattern — listed cost savings, lower customer wait times, and customers' preference for self-service as their top reasons for using AI...

The original poster on Reddit said that they spoke to the conversational bot — who is a five-time winner of the Loebner Prize for human-like AIs — several years ago. According to the poster, the chatbot said "creepy" things...

In a blog post yesterday, Google researchers describe how the natural language processing systems benchmark can evaluate cross-lingual generalization capabilities using nine inference tasks for a dozen language families and 40 languages. While models tested on English come close to humans on most existing tasks, the performance is substantially lower for many other languages, Google Research senior software engineer Melvin Johnson and DeepMind scientist Sebastian Ruder wrote in the post. “Overall, a large gap between performance in English and other languages remains across all models and settings, which indicates that there is much potential for research on cross-lingual transfer," they noted. The goal of Xtreme, then, is to encourage more research in AI-based multilingual learning, according to Google. You can read the preprint paper on Xtreme here, while the code and examples are available on GitHub.

That's according to Drone DJ writer Sydney Butler, who describes how a province in rural South Africa is using drones to monitor its citizens and enforce lockdown rules during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Butler, the autonomous drone takes the footage, which is later run through an AI app that recognizes and tags people and objects, alerting authorities if someone isn't following the rules. (You can see the AI in action in this video tweeted out by David Chambers, Cape Town bureau chief for the Sunday Times.)

While software like this is already in use around the world, Butler notes that it's possible that one day, consumer and other commercial drones could come with recognition software that's built-in as their processing power expands. (For the record, researchers have already proposed moving object detection for drones to an off-board computing cloud.) "For now," Butler writes, "this is possibly an early example of drone use in a post-COVID world."

• "An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python (Part 1)" from Rice University is available for free on Coursera and boasts 3,180 five-star reviews. It will start on April 27.
• Harvard's CS50’s "Web Programming with Python and JavaScript" is free to audit on edX...

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Today's tweet comes from Sarah Rose Siskind, head comedy writer at Hanson Robotics, who joins Sophia the Robot for a quarantine fashion show in a video she posted online.

For background, Hanson first unveiled Sophia, a humanoid AI that's considered to be the world's first “robot citizen," in 2016. Modeled after Queen Nefertiti, Sophia is programmed to make dozens of facial expressions, "see" through image recognition, and hold conversations via speech-to-text voice recognition tech from Alphabet.

She also likes fashion shows, apparently.