The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is pressing forward with a lawsuit involving the facial recognition software offered by Amazon and Microsoft to government clients. In a complaint filed in a Massachusetts federal court, the ACLU asked for a variety of different records from the government, including inquiries to companies, meetings about the piloting or testing of facial recognition, voice recognition, and gait recognition technology, requests for proposals, and licensing agreements. At the heart of the lawsuit are Amazon's Rekognition and Microsoft's Face API, both facial recognition products that are available for customers of the companies' cloud platforms. The ACLU has also asked for more details on the US government's use of voice recognition and gait recognition, which is the automated process of comparing images of the way a person walks in order to identify them. Police in Shanghai and Beijing are already using gait-analysis tools to identify people.

The symptoms of angina--the pain that occurs in coronary artery disease--do not differ substantially between men and women, according to the results of an unusual new clinical trial led by MIT researchers. The findings could help overturn the prevailing notion that men and women experience angina differently, with men experiencing "typical angina"--pain-type sensations in the chest, for instance--and women experiencing "atypical angina" symptoms such as shortness of breath and pain-type sensations in the non-chest areas such as the arms, back, and shoulders. Instead, it appears that men and women's symptoms are largely the same, say Karthik Dinakar, a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab, and Catherine Kreatsoulas of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dinakar and his colleagues presented the results of their HERMES angina trial at the European Society of Cardiology's annual congress in September. Their research is one of the first clinical trials accepted at the prestigious conference to use machine learning techniques, which were used to characterize the full range of symptoms experienced by individual patients and to capture nuances in how they described their symptoms in a natural language exchange. The trial included 637 patients in the United States and Canada who had been referred for their first coronary angiogram, the gold-standard test to diagnose coronary artery disease.

China is imposing curfews and regulations on video game playing minors. China is imposing curfews and regulations on video game playing minors. Chinese officials are cracking down on youth online gaming, which they say negatively affects the health and learning of minors. Official guidelines released Tuesday outline a new curfew and time restrictions for gamers under 18. Six measures were outlined in the guidelines, aimed at preventing minors "from indulging in online games."

In the spring of last year, cybersecurity researcher Takeshi Sugawara walked into the lab of Kevin Fu, a professor he was visiting at the University of Michigan. He wanted to show off a strange trick he'd discovered. Sugawara pointed a high-powered laser at the microphone of his iPad--all inside of a black metal box, to avoid burning or blinding anyone--and had Fu put on a pair of earbuds to listen to the sound the iPad's mic picked up. As Sugawara varied the laser's intensity over time in the shape of a sine wave, fluctuating at about 1,000 times a second, Fu picked up a distinct high-pitched tone. The iPad's microphone had inexplicably converted the laser's light into an electrical signal, just as it would with sound.

AI is quickly revolutionizing the security camera industry. Several manufacturers sell cameras which use deep learning to detect cars, people, and other events. These smart cameras are generally expensive though, compared to their "dumb" counterparts. The data for the events would then be published to an MQTT topic, along with some metadata such as confidence level. OpenCV is generally how these pipelines start, but [Martin's] camera wouldn't send RTSP images over TCP the way OpenCV requires, only RTSP over UDP.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are integral components of any modern organization's IT stack but these data-harvesting tools can have a dark side if appropriate risk management and planning protocols aren't in place. There's no denying the power and possibilities created by AI and machine learning. With this astounding power to build models designed to improve the efficiency and performance of everything from marketing and supply chain to sales and human resources comes considerable responsibility. A recent McKinsey report sheds some light on how companies in every industry should be wary of assuming that these relatively new and remarkably complex tools will always deliver the desired outcome as they're integrated with other applications and processes. These tools are just like every other tool that's ever existed: they're only as good as the people designing and using them.

A new batch of Machine Translation tools driven by Artificial Intelligence is already translating tens of millions of messages per day. Proprietary ML translation solutions from Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are in daily use. Facebook takes its road with open-source approaches. What works best for translating software, documentation, and natural language content? And where is the automation of AI-driven neural networks driving? William Mamane, Head of Digital Marketing at Tomedes, a professional language services agency, had been a skeptic of machine translation.

Sometimes when you are on the brink of a rebellion, it's hard to see what's happening around you. Chandler, Arizona, has become a hot bed of attacks on autonomous vehicles (AVs). Over the past three years, people have assaulted self-driving cars in the city nearly two dozen times, pelting them with rocks, trying to run them off the road, challenging them to games of chicken, and slashing their tires. One man even threatened an AV with a .22-caliber But police chief Sean Duggan says Chandler is "absolutely not" at the forefront of a rebellion between humans and machines.

Until recently, artificial intelligence has struggled to gain a foothold on Wall Street. In the last few years, large investment banks like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have hired artificial intelligence specialists away from academia and put them in charge of their internal AI divisions. Financial technology start-ups have begun using machine-learning algorithms to model credit ratings and detect fraud. And hedge funds and high-frequency traders are using AI to make investment decisions. Politicians are starting to take notice.

Being virtually hooked up to a human could help robots respond to disasters or other situations that would put human responders' lives at risks. The researchers say that a system like this could be used to help in robotic clean-up operations such as the one after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster in Japan in 2011. Humans could have guided robots to navigate around the site more accurately, from a safe distance. And while there's currently no machine learning involved in the process, Ramos believes the data captured from the system could be used to help train autonomous robots.