Ride-sharing giant Uber, already in the midst of controversy over behavior by some of its drivers, filed for a patent that is sure to raise eyebrows. The patent, which was filed in December 2016 and published last Thursday, described a feature for the app that would detect when customers are drunk. The original filing, which can be read in full courtesy of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, essentially would use artificial intelligence to determine whether or not an Uber user is impaired based on how they use the app, CNN reported. If the customer is having a hard time typing, tapping buttons on their screen or is walking slowly, the app would flag them as potentially drunk. Uber wants to patent a way to use artificial intelligence to identify drunk passengers https://t.co/NtoXM8pcZv

Nick Loui had never been asked about neural networks from a man wearing a violet leotard before. But the CEO and founder of CivicFeed didn't bat an eyelid as he thoughtfully answered the question. Given the context -- a panel at Lightning In A Bottle -- the dress code was A-OK. The question was part of a broader discussion that Loui was having with Dr. Nathan Walworth about the ethics of artificial intelligence and how engineers hold responsibility for coding a bias-free world. Using AI for social good is something Loui, a former web-dev and marketer, feels passionately about.

Artificial intelligence startup Eigen Technologies has raised £13 million from Goldman Sachs Principal Strategic Investments and Singapore's state investment fund Temasek. London-based Eigen uses artificial intelligence technology to read legal and financial documents, making it easier for lawyers and bankers to analyse complex contracts -- everything from derivatives to land deeds -- and find specific clauses. Goldman Sachs is a customer, as are Linklaters, Evercore, and ING. Eigen's cofounder and CEO Dr. Lewis Z. Liu, who was featured on Business Insider's UK Fintech 35 under 35, said in a statement: "Three and a half years ago we set out to be a truly unique AI company, one that allows our clients to harness the power of their qualitative data to make better decisions. This Series A round underlines our ambitions and is the next major step in our expansion plan.

As AI and robotics develop side by side, the medium-term future will see infant-like robots that can learn for themselves and crow-like machine intelligences that can teach themselves to use tools, claims a leading AI researcher. But their progress will go far beyond there. In 2018, most people are worried that AI and robotics might automate their jobs and leave them scrabbling in the gig economy for a regular wage. But one AI expert believes that the technologies' ambitions are much bigger than that: in the centuries ahead, AI and robots will "emigrate" from Earth and communicate with each other across the universe, he says. But long before then, general artificial intelligences will emerge that can be taught like human children, and which can teach themselves about how the world works through "power play" and "artificial curiosity", he said.

India's information technology sector is facing disruption from cloud, automation and artificial intelligence, as "self-healing" codes ride over hand-written ones, bots replace humans and software engineers compete with behavioural analysts for jobs, Rostow Ravanan, CEO and managing director of Mindtree said. "Today we are rolling out products to customers with self-healing code. Once you write the code and deliver it, you don't need to maintain it, test it, as the code takes care of itself," Mr. Ravanan said in an interview. When the company makes software "I don't need to provision a new environment. Software script itself has a code that spins up an environment, runs the programme, runs analytics and the moment it finishes, it shuts down the environment."

A factory in China that manufactures Amazon Kindle e-readers and Echo Dot smart speakers is under investigation over alleged mistreatment of workers, following a nine-month investigation into working conditions. US-based advocacy group China Labour Watch published a string of allegations regarding working conditions at the Hengyang factory of Foxconn, one of the online retail giant's suppliers. Its report claimed workers were required to work more than 100 hours of monthly overtime during periods of peak production, and found one instance of people working 14 straight days without a day off. "All workers are subject to long hours and low wages," the report claimed. "As wages are low, workers must rely on overtime hours to earn enough to maintain a decent standard of living."

Remark Holdings (MARK) is what one would call a contested company. It has long supporters with strong conviction, but there has also been some kind of a short drive, and the present short count is almost 16% of the nearly 25M float. That short count is far from the highest we've seen, a company like Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI) still has 78% of the float shorted (at least according to the latest figures) but it seems to have done major damage already. Who to believe, the conviction longs or the shorts who put out a troubling report. Questions like these are very difficult to solve, especially if you're not a forensic accountant. Since we're no forensic accountants ourselves, we'll try to gather some stylized facts and see what these add up to, and whether there is some chance for the longs to recoup some of their losses. This company was one of two highest conviction longs for SA contributor Yale Bock, who is the President of Y H & C Investments (see here).

Regulators are beginning to teach robots who's the boss. After spending billions of dollars on cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies, Europe's banks and insurers face tougher scrutiny of the tools they use to help root out fraud, check borrowers' creditworthiness and automate claims decisions. European Union rules starting this week will stress human oversight and consumer protection, which may hamper companies trying to build the tools of the future. "Companies developing AI technologies will have to consider and embed the data protection issues into the design process," David Martin, senior legal officer at Brussels-based consumer advocate BEUC, said in an interview. "It's not something where they can just tick a box at the end."

IMAGE: This is the Rice University's PlinyCompute team includes (from left) Shangyu Luo, Sourav Sikdar, Jia Zou, Tania Lorido, Binhang Yuan, Jessica Yu, Chris Jermaine, Carlos Monroy, Dimitrije Jankov and Matt... view more HOUSTON -- (June 11, 2018) -- Computer scientists from Rice University's DARPA-funded Pliny Project believe they have the answer for every stressed-out systems programmer who has struggled to implement complex objects and workflows on'big data' platforms like Spark and thought: "Isn't there a better way?" Rice's PlinyCompute will be unveiled here Thursday at the 2018 ACM SIGMOD conference. In a peer-reviewed conference paper, the team describes PlinyCompute as "a system purely for developing high-performance, big data codes." Like Spark, PlinyCompute aims for ease of use and broad versatility, said Chris Jermaine, the Rice computer science professor leading the platform's development. Unlike Spark, PlinyCompute is designed to support the intense kinds of computation that have only previously been possible with supercomputers, or high-performance computers (HPC). "With machine learning, and especially deep learning, people have seen what complex analytics algorithms can do when they're applied to big data," Jermaine said.

KUALA LUMPUR, 1 JUNE 2018 – Celcom Axiata Berhad, in its ongoing journey to create awesome moments and experiences for its customers, today announced its latest channel to serve customers -- a state-of-the-art Intelligent Virtual Agent service. Celcom's Intelligent Virtual Agent service brings together cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning technology, giving birth to two personas – Clive and Emma – with their own personalities that will interact with customers 24 7 with regard to their inquiries and transactions. The combination of technology, transaction capability and personality is the first of its kind in Asia. Both Clive and Emma are powered with Microsoft's AI & machine learning technology and will have the opportunity to initiate conversations with consumers with a personal and humanised touch, providing an awesome customer experience anywhere and at any time. Microsoft's Machine Learning feature will allow Clive and Emma to auto-learn questions variations via a knowledge-based system that improves their effectiveness over time.