Scientists are using AI to tackle a pressing, worldwide challenges, including an often-overlooked but very serious problem – treating mental health. Backed by sobering statistics, the world is more aware of the importance of maintaining mental health than ever: the National Institute of Mental Health says that one in five American adults battles mental illness; meanwhile 15.5 percent of the world is afflicted in some way.Treatment is expensive when available; specialized treatment often moreso. AI offers a solution, enhancing the capabilities of human mental health professionals while filling in gaps in treatment.

The word ‘agriculture’ connotes certain images: workers toiling under the sun, vast fields of crops, tractors, and plows.Now gleaming computers and dusty fields are merging – and potentially changing agriculture as we know it. A team of researchers from MIT Media Lab’s Open Agriculture Initiative published a paper detailing a recent study where machine learning algorithms were used to optimize growing conditions for basil plants (with an eye on more expansive future use cases).

Now recent strides have opened that new frontier, introducing a whole new level of accuracy, realism, to the mix – as well as potential problems. One of the most exciting developments is an algorithm from members of Google’s DeepMind AI team.But backed by the computational resources of one of the world’s biggest companies, BigGAN could learn from a giant database of 14 million images in various categories at one time.