Microsoft will not sell facial recognition technology to U.S. police departments until there is a national law to regulate this technology. On Thursday, Microsoft president Brad Smith said on Washington Post Live the company will cease the selling of this technology until a law "grounded in human rights" is put in place. "This is a moment in time that really calls on us to listen more to learn more and, most importantly, to do more," Smith said. The move follows Amazon's Wednesday announcement to suspend police use of its facial recognition technology, Rekognition, for one year after several studies found bias in the software that disproportionately targets people of color. Similarly, in a letter to Congress, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna also said the company would not sell facial recognition services to most customers.

This week, three of the leading developers of facial-recognition technology announced they would stop, or at least pause, selling this technology to police. The decision stems from evidence of racial bias inherent in these tools. For the researchers who first uncovered the deep-seated issues, it's a watershed moment. Will facial-recognition technology continue to grow unchecked? Or will this week's announcements result in lasting change?

Welcome to AI book reviews, a series of posts that explore the latest literature on artificial intelligence. When discussing the threats of artificial intelligence, the first thing that comes to mind are images of Skynet, The Matrix, and the robot apocalypse. The runner up is technological unemployment, the vision of a foreseeable future in which AI algorithms take over all jobs and push humans into a struggle for meaningless survival in a world where human labor is no longer needed. Whether any or both of those threats are real is hotly debated among scientists and thought leaders. But AI algorithms also pose more imminent threats that exist today, in ways that are less conspicuous and hardly understood.

IBM announced this week that it would stop selling its facial recognition technology to customers including police departments. The move prompted calls for other tech firms, like Amazon and Microsoft, to do the same. IBM announced this week that it would stop selling its facial recognition technology to customers including police departments. The move prompted calls for other tech firms, like Amazon and Microsoft, to do the same. IBM will no longer provide facial recognition technology to police departments for mass surveillance and racial profiling, Arvind Krishna, IBM's chief executive, wrote in a letter to Congress.

Researchers in Italy have melded the emerging science of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with deep learning -- a discipline within artificial intelligence -- to achieve a system of market forecasting with the potential for greater gains and fewer losses than previous attempts to use AI methods to manage stock portfolios. The team, led by Prof. Silvio Barra at the University of Cagliari, published their findings on IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica. The University of Cagliari-based team set out to create an AI-managed "buy and hold" (B&H) strategy -- a system of deciding whether to take one of three possible actions -- a long action (buying a stock and selling it before the market closes), a short action (selling a stock, then buying it back before the market closes), and a hold (deciding not to invest in a stock that day). At the heart of their proposed system is an automated cycle of analyzing layered images generated from current and past market data. Older B&H systems based their decisions on machine learning, a discipline that leans heavily on predictions based on past performance.

New AI technologies are helping scientists to sort through the wealth of COVID-19 papers -- hopefully hastening the research process.Credit: Adapted from Getty The COVID-19 literature has grown in much the same way as the disease's transmission: exponentially. But a fast-growing set of artificial-intelligence (AI) tools might help researchers and clinicians to quickly sift through the literature. Driven by a combination of factors -- including the availability of a large collection of relevant papers, advances in natural-language processing (NLP) technology and the urgency of the pandemic itself -- these tools use AI to find the studies that are most relevant to the user, and in some cases to extract specific findings from the results. Beyond the current pandemic, such tools could help to bridge fields by making it easier to identify solutions from other disciplines, says Amalie Trewartha, one of the team leads for the literature-search tool COVIDScholar, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. The tools are still in development, and their utility is largely unproven.

IBM's chief executive officer Arvind Krishna today revealed that the company is sunsetting its "general-purpose" facial recognition business. The announcement was revealed in Krishna's letter to members of Congress Monday about racial justice reform. The letter included suggestions for legislation around police reform and the responsible use of technology, such as artificial intelligence, a tool often used in facial recognition and other surveillance software. Krishna wrote that IBM "firmly opposes" the use of "any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms." He asked for a "national dialogue" on how facial recognition should be used, if at all.

In the business world, the opportunities for applying quantum technology relate to optimization: solving difficult business problems, reconfiguring complex processes, and understanding correlations between seemingly disparate data sets. The main purpose of quantum computing is to carry out computationally costly operations in a very short period of time, while at the same time accelerating business performance. Quantum computing can optimize business processes for any number of solutions, for example maximizing cost/benefit ratios or optimizing financial assets, operations and logistics, and workforce management--usually delivering immediate financial gains. Many businesses are already using (or planning to use) classic optimization algorithms. And with four international case studies, Reply has proven that a quantum approach can give better results than existing optimization techniques. Speed and computational power are key components when working with data.

Apple's Siri and Google's voice assistant have both been updated to respond to questions about Black Lives Matter, and rebuff the sentiment behind the response "All Lives Matter." As spotted by sports blogger David Gardner, when asked "Do black lives matter?", Google's Assistant will respond: "Black Lives Matter. Black people deserve the same freedoms afforded to everyone in this country, and recognising the injustice they face is the first step towards fixing it." When asked "Do all lives matter", the Assistant will respond: "Saying'Black Lives Matter' doesn't mean that all lives don't. It means Black lives are at risk in ways others are not."

Mira Robotics' Ugo is a pair of height-adjustable robotic arms mounted on wheels, operated remotely through a wireless connection with a laptop and game controller. A range-measuring laser mounted on the base helps it navigate, while a panel at the top displays eyes to give it a friendlier appearance.