Image recognition AIs that have been trained by some of the most-used research-photo collections are developing sexist biases, according to a new study. University of Virginia computer science professor Vicente Ordóñez and colleagues tested two of the largest collections of photos and data used to train these types of AIs (including one supported by Facebook and Microsoft) and discovered that sexism was rampant. He began the research after noticing a disturbing pattern of sexism in the guesses made by the image recognition software he was building. 'It would see a picture of a kitchen and more often than not associate it with women, not men,' Ordóñez told Wired, adding it also linked women with images of shopping, washing, and even kitchen objects like forks. The AI was also associating men with stereotypically masculine activities like sports, hunting, and coaching, as well as objects sch as sporting equipment.

The role of data scientists will be transformed as machine learning techniques become more widely used by businesses, according to Stephen Brobst, CTO of analytics firm Teradata. While many of the principles behind'AI' approaches are not new, interest within an enterprise setting has exploded in recent years. And as usage becomes more widespread and sophisticated, the role of data scientists will begin to evolve too, according to Brobst. He explains that data scientists have typically spent much of their time'wrangling' data to feed into predictive models. In future, more of this work will be automated and data scientists will instead be more focused on selecting which machine learning or deep learning tools to utilise for specific tasks.

Machine learning algorithms increasingly influence our decisions and interact with us in all parts of our daily lives. Therefore, just as we consider the safety of power plants, highways, and a variety of other engineered socio-technical systems, we must also take into account the safety of systems involving machine learning. Heretofore, the definition of safety has not been formalized in a machine learning context. In this paper, we do so by defining machine learning safety in terms of risk, epistemic uncertainty, and the harm incurred by unwanted outcomes. We then use this definition to examine safety in all sorts of applications in cyber-physical systems, decision sciences, and data products. We find that the foundational principle of modern statistical machine learning, empirical risk minimization, is not always a sufficient objective. Finally, we discuss how four different categories of strategies for achieving safety in engineering, including inherently safe design, safety reserves, safe fail, and procedural safeguards can be mapped to a machine learning context. We then discuss example techniques that can be adopted in each category, such as considering interpretability and causality of predictive models, objective functions beyond expected prediction accuracy, human involvement for labeling difficult or rare examples, and user experience design of software and open data.

SUBIRATS, SPAIN – Spanish police on Monday shot dead an Islamist militant who killed 13 people with a van in Barcelona last week, ending a five-day manhunt for the perpetrator of Spain's deadliest attack in over a decade. Police said they tracked 22-year-old Younes Abouyaaqoub to a rural area near Barcelona and shot him after he held up what looked like an explosives belt and shouted "Allahu Akbar" (God is Greatest). A bomb squad then used a robot to approach his body. Abouyaaqoub had been on the run since Thursday evening, after he drove at high speed into throngs of strollers along Barcelona's most famous avenue, Las Ramblas. After fleeing the scene, he hijacked a car and fatally stabbed its driver.

When I tell people that I work at an AI company, they often follow up with "So what kind of machine learning/deep learning do you do?" This isn't surprising, as most of the market attention (and hype) in and around AI has been centered around Machine Learning, and its high profile subset, Deep Learning, and around Natural Language Processing, with the rise of the chatbot and virtual assistants. But while machine learning is a core component for artificial intelligence, AI is in fact more than just ML. So what does it really mean for an application to be "intelligent"? What does it take to create a system that is "artificially intelligent?

The biggest problem facing Silicon Valley is not undervalued unicorns. Nor is it sexual harassment, diversity, the high cost of housing, the congested highways or the battle for talent. All of these issues are certainly critical to people who live and work here. Silicon Valley has been steadily killing jobs, and the worst is yet to come. Venture capitalists like to fund ideas that can scale, which means new companies will grow by adding more technology than workers.

German multinational software company SAP will participate in DigiTrans -- The Digital Transformation Forum -- scheduled for October 25-26, 2017, in Dubai, as a gold sponsor. The event, presented by MIT Sloan Management Review GCC, will focus on customer-centric experiences and operational efficiency. DigiTrans will offer actionable knowledge for strategy, organisational roadmap, and innovation-based opportunities. "Dubai is a global hub for showing best practices in using digital transformation to transform industry verticals, and the citizen and customer experiences. With digital transformation reaching a tipping point in the Middle East, DigiTrans 2017 Dubai provides the platform for SAP to exchange best practices in digital transformation. Topics such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, machine learning, and the Internet of Things will be vital for the next generation of chief digital officers to lead the digital economy," said Tayfun Topkoc, managing director, SAP UAE and Oman.

"However, Musk and the other AI debaters underestimate the biggest threat to humanity in the AI era: humans," Loup Ventures analyst Doug Clinton wrote in a Monday note. Clinton considers the human response to AI as dangerous as any hostile system. Even if AI fulfills the best intended purposes and leads to widespread prosperity, it would establish a world radically different rendering manual and some intellectual labor obsolete, divorcing human value from work and forcing a new understanding of the meaning of life. "Humans will need to find new purpose outside of work, likely in the uniquely human capabilities of creativity, community and empathy, the things that robots cannot authentically provide," Clinton wrote. The disruptions could be cataclysmic.

This astounding photo of a heart-shaped cell entangled in a blood clot has won the British Hearth Foundation's 2017 photo contest. In the image, which was captured through an electron microscope, red blood cells are trapped in the 3D mesh of fibrin fibres, which hold the clot together. The cell had remarkably been compressed into a heart shape by the contracting fibres surrounding it. Taken by Fraser Macrae, a BHF-funded researcher at the University of Leeds, this image shows a heart-shaped cell entangled in a blood clot held together by a mesh of fibrin fibres. Taken at 5,000-times magnification, this image shows a heart-shaped cell entangled in a blood clot.

Microsoft kicked off Xbox One X preorders at the annual Gamescom convention in Cologne, Germany on Sunday. But it also took the lid off a sweeping list of current and upcoming games designed to take advantage of the souped-up Xbox One's ability to render games more fluidly and at substantially higher resolutions. The company says over 100 titles will be enhanced when the Xbox One X launches for $499 on November 7. At the moment, the tally is notably higher than 100 and includes a vast range of acclaimed already-released games, like The Witcher 3, Diablo III, Resident Evil 7, Fallout 4, Dishonored 2 and Final Fantasy XV. A few of those have yet to receive enhancements on Sony's own 4K-angled PlayStation 4 Pro, which arrived last November with far fewer enhanced games, though developers have rushed to increase the number since. The Xbox One X is doubtless benefitting both from Sony getting the 4K train rolling and its own extra year in the oven.