Cameras are used routinely by police across the US to identify citizens, their faces cross-matched against databases of suspects and past criminals. Yet researchers claim there is too little scrutiny of how these tools work, and have found inherent racial bias in the system. So does a sophisticated, visual analysis tool reflect human prejudice and if so, who does that effect? "Studies indicate there's racial bias in the software," said Jonathan Frankle, staff technologist at Georgetown Law School. Working with law fellow Clare Garvie, Frankle has requested public information from more than 100 police departments across the country.

In a major win for artificial intelligence, Google DeepMind's AlphaGo has beat European Go champion Fan Hui in the complex 2,500-year-old Chinese game of Go, touted the official Google blog. A victory in a Go game against a human champion has long been coveted among AI researchers, because the possible moves that a player can take can reach into the quadrillions and beyond. As a result, Go has proven a formidable challenge for artificial intelligence researchers. Microsoft and Facebook, for example, have been working on ways to win in the game over a human champion, but have had no luck to date, according to a BBC news report. Last October, Google DeepMind held a private, closed-door Go match in its London office between its AlphaGo system and Hui.

It takes a lot of work to create a good movie or TV character, and apparently much of the same work is now going into creating the characters behind AI assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa. As this piece in the Washington Post points out, creative workers like poets, fiction writers, and comedians are fast becoming the ones responsible for making these assistants seem human--coming up with everything from human-sounding filler words to jokes to a background story and small personality details. It makes sense: if you want to get people to use these software-based assistants, they should be approachable, dynamic, and have consistent personalities. Throwing in some party tricks--such as Siri's ability to beat box--doesn't hurt, either. But just because your AI assistant has a carefully curated personality doesn't mean it's going to be useful. Making AI conversational interfaces is still very, very hard (though Baidu seems to be doing pretty well with it in China), as it can misunderstand what you're requesting, or may only be able to help in specific situations.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the Messenger Platform at the F8 summit in San Francisco last year. This year he's expected to announce a "chat bot" store on Messenger. That is the question on many lips ahead of Facebook's annual software developer conference next week in San Francisco. Analysts expect Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to open up Messenger's platform to "chatbots" and launch an online store for them. TechCrunch reported Thursday that Facebook will help software developers build "chatbots."

According to observations from many of the human workers still employed by one such restaurant, the robots simply lacked the intelligence, artificial or otherwise, to effectively wait on guests. Of the three restaurants in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou that attempted the practice, only one remains open, and that eatery is now currently only using one of the robots it initially employed. One of the establishments employed as many as 10 robots at one time. The gimmick reportedly had some short-term benefit of driving customers through the door. However, those guests reportedly were just as quickly turned away by food that was generally considered "unpalatable" for guests, according to reports.

Last month, Google altered our technophobic opinions on AI by using its AlphaGo program to defeat a world champion at the ancient Chinese board game of Go. Although most of us that tuned into the YouTube livestreams of the face-off were likely puzzled by the images of a computer typing out moves to a game we'd never heard of, it was a far cry from the nightmarish depictions of AI we'd become accustomed to in film and literature. Now, China's version of Google, Alibaba, is doing its bit to further familiarize us with the technology. Instead of tasking it with a board game that boasts limitless possibilities, however, it's matching it up with a more pressing (and popular) task; predicting the winner of a TV singing contest. China's popular reality TV show I'm a Singer will be getting the AI treatment, with Alibaba hoping it can outwit the public, and judges, by guessing the winner of the popular contest's finale.

Alphabet's intent to get rid of Boston Dynamics hasn't affected its other robotics programs, from the looks of it. On Japan's New Economic Summit stage, the Google-X-subsidiary SCHAFT unveiled a new bipedal unit that's capable of climbing stairs, carrying a loaded barbell on its "head" unit, laterally stepping through a row of seats at a soccer stadium and even maintaining balance when a section of pipe is placed under its feel. IEEE Spectrum writes that this was part of Google exec Andy Rubin's keynote at the event, but that the debut wasn't part of a product announcement or "indication of a specific product roadmap."

A year ago, I published my original attempt at mapping the machine intelligence ecosystem. So much has happened since. I spent the last 12 months geeking out on every company and nibble of information I can find, chatting with hundreds of academics, entrepreneurs, and investors about machine intelligence. This year, given the explosion of activity, my focus is on highlighting areas of innovation, rather than on trying to be comprehensive. Despite the noisy hype, which sometimes distracts, machine intelligence is already being used in several valuable ways.

In the visual and aural realms, we very often interact with reproduced versions of an original -- a photograph of a scene, a recording of a concert. And as long as you know what the original looked and/or sounded like, it's easy to tell whether it's an accurate reproduction. For smells, the same does not hold true. Unlike audio or visual reproductions, it's hard to transmit a reproduction of a smell to someone. There have been a few attempts, of course, but while something visual can be mimicked using wavelength and luminance and sound is a matter of copying the tone, odors depend on the brain's perception of molecules.

A designer in Hong Kong made a robot in the form of actress Scarlett Johansson, and Margot E. Kaminski sees a host of interesting legal and ethical issues emerging from its creepy-beautiful self. To start with, who has the right to make a robot in the shape of an existing person? Is this a protected form of expression? "What if instead of making the Scarlett Johansson robot without the actress's permission," Kaminski asks, "a robot manufacturer legally licensed her face and trotted out millions upon millions of ScarJos to serve as personal assistants?"