A UK police force which was using an algorithm designed to help it make custody decisions has been forced to alter it amid concerns that it could discriminate against poor people. Durham Constabulary has been developing an algorithm to better predict the risk posed by offenders and to ensure that only the most "suitable" are granted police bail. But the programme has also highlighted potential social inequalities that can be maintained through the use of these big data strategies. This might seem surprising, since an apparent feature of such programmes is that they are apparently neutral: technocratic evaluations of risk based on information that is "value-free" (based on objective calculation, eschewing subjective bias). In practice, the apparent neutrality of the data is questionable.

Across the many fields artificial intelligence (AI) can be applied to, from journalism and translation to self-driving cars, AI is often seen by people as either a great solution or a terrible problem. However the truth lies somewhere in the middle, said Lisa-Maria Neudert, D.Phil. At the International Journalism Festival in Italy today (14 April), Neudert, who has been researching propaganda in the digital age, spoke on a panel that highlighted some of the ways in which AI is being used to both spread and tackle misinformation. "Propaganda now is automated, data-driven and it is also often user-generated and very easy to launch over social media, so it has become more impactful and more targeted," she said. "The spread of misinformation through social media is often very much like an oil spill: it will impact the entire information ecosystem and make it a difficult environment for people who are trying to navigate it." "Now the money is going into conversational AI to make it smart and human-like, but the problem is those technologies are often developed without anyone thinking of the social implications.

LG Electronics Inc said on Sunday that it will start global sales of the 2018 editions of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) TVs, which are equipped with its Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform DeepThinQ this week. The South Korean tech giant said the new OLED TVs would hit the US market on Monday and gradually expand to countries in Europe, South America and Asia down the road, Yonhap news agency reported. LG Electronics said it would display the OLED TVs at some 500 branches of US retailer Best Buy, showcasing the company's latest Alpha 9 processor that delivers improved resolutions by optimising colour through AI technology. The company said the global market for OLED TVs is expected to reach 2.5 million units this year, rising sharply from 1.6 million units in 2017. In response to the rising demand, LG said it plans to expand the portion of OLED TVs in its portfolio to 20 per cent in 2018, up from last year's 15 per cent.

As France's youngest president at 40 years old, Emmanuel Macron is known for his strong handshake, boyish good looks, and his controversial method of selecting a mate. Recently, he set his sights on artificial intelligence, announcing a government program to invest $1.8 billion into AI over the next four years. The cornerstone of all this spending will be in the healthcare sector, where the aim is to make predictive and personalized care a reality using AI and big data. This prompted us to take a look at the ten most funded French AI startups according to Crunchbase. Founded in 2014, Shift Technology has raised $40 million to develop an AI-based insurance fraud detection service.

As Mick Jagger famously sang, "What a drag it is getting old". Though with a net worth of about $360 million and holding court in the pantheon of rock-n-roll gods, Mick Jagger is probably greying about as well as anyone could at age 74. He certainly will have nothing to worry about when the day comes that he can no longer do the rooster strut; Jagger can afford the best elder care money can buy. Most of us probably won't have the financial means to hire a team of 20-something-year-old nurses in short, black latex skirts to take care of us when we become dirty old men. The best most of us can hope for is not to be locked in a closet and left to stew in our own feces.

The home of the future looks an increasingly attractive place to live this week, after millions of households received the unwelcome news that their energy bills were going up again. Switching supplier is one quick fix to rising bills. But in the long run, industry players say the answers may lie in a coming revolution in how we use energy in our homes, turning them into mini power stations and reducing our reliance on energy companies such as British Gas and EDF. For consumers, cost and convenience will be big factors. For energy firms, there is a chance to rebuild trust and transform themselves from mere suppliers into more profitable service companies.

A drone that took off from Syria and penetrated Israeli airspace in February was armed and on an Iranian mission to carry out an attack in Israeli territory, the Israeli military said Friday. The drone was shattered by helicopter gunships, preventing the attack, according to the military, which did not disclose the supposed target. The February episode set off a day of intense battle, escalating the conflict between Israel and Iran, one of several overlapping conflicts in the Syrian war. Israel's announcement on Friday, hours before the American-led strikes against Syria, added another element of volatility into an already tense region. The strikes launched by the United States, Britain and France against three chemical weapons storage and research facilities did little to assuage Israel's concerns about the Iranian buildup across its northern frontier, according to experts, and the announcement could be intended to bolster Israel's case for taking its own military action against Iran's presence in Syria.

Is the world ready for cows armed with artificial intelligence? No time to ruminate on that because the moment has arrived, thanks to a Dutch company that has married two technologies -- motion sensors and AI -- with the aim of bringing the barnyard into the 21st century. The company, Connecterra, has brought its IDA system, or "The Intelligent Dairy Farmer's Assistant," to the United States after having piloted it in Europe for several years. IDA uses a motion-sensing device attached to a cow's neck to transmit its movements to a program driven by AI. The sensor data, when aligned repeatedly with real-world behaviour, eventually allows IDA to tell from data alone when a cow is chewing cud, lying down, walking, drinking or eating.

European companies processing personal data may be discouraged from using artificial intelligence technologies after GDPR comes into effect. A recent report by Center of Data Innovation, a US-based group, says GDPR provisions addressing AI in the context of protecting consumer interests may slow down AI research and innovation. AI guidelines in Europe's comprehensive privacy law establish rights of data subjects which are not to be subjected to decisions based on automated processing. "By both indirectly limiting how the personal data of Europeans gets used and raising the legal risks for companies active in AI, the GDPR will negatively impact the development and use of AI by European companies," said the report. Under Article 22 of the General Data Protection Regulation, companies would need to manually look at decisions made by algorithms which may prove to be a disincentive for deploying AI in the first place.

Conformal predictors are confidence predictors that result in prediction sets for all confidence levels. Thus, Conformal Prediction (CP) is a framework that complements the predictions of machine learning algorithms with reliable measures of confidence. Transductive Conformal Prediction (TCP) works in an online transductive setting, such that learning and prediction occur simultaneously. In this sense confidence in a prediction is tailored both to the previously seen objects (whose features and labels are known) and to the features of the new object, whose label is to be predicted. By conditioning on the new objects conformal predictors take account of how difficult a particular object is to label and adjust their confidence in the prediction accordingly, as opposed to having an overall error rate for labelling all new objects Vovk et al. (2005).