The Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity recognizes positive impacts of artificial intelligence to protect, enhance, and improve human life in meaningful ways with long-lived effects. The award will be given annually at the conference for the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in February, and is accompanied by a prize of $1,000,000 plus travel expenses to the conference. Financial support for the award is provided by Squirrel AI. The award will be given for the first time in 2021. Candidates may be individuals, groups, or organizations that are directly connected with the main contribution stated in the nomination.

Accenture today opened a new Innovation Hub in Hyderabad, where clients can co-innovate with Accenture by ideating, rapidly prototyping and then scaling disruptive products and services for the digital economy. The latest addition to Accenture's global innovation network, the Hyderabad Innovation Hub is spread over 300,000 square feet where clients can co-innovate and co-create solutions with more than 2,000 Accenture professionals with expertise across multiple industries and advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, security, extended reality, automation and blockchain. "Our research shows that organizations are struggling to achieve their innovation goals, due to the lack of an enterprise-wide strategy for technology investments and adoption," said Bhaskar Ghosh, group chief executive, Accenture Technology Services. "Through our leading advanced technology capabilities, we help clients scale their technology investments and bridge the innovation achievement gap. Our Innovation Hub in Hyderabad has the pieces our clients require to accelerate value creation through enterprise-wide, game-changing innovation."

Australia's extended and disastrous bushfire season has brought into sharp relief the high economic and personal cost of climate change. That economic impact is increasingly recognised around the world as a major business risk. In California, for instance, it led to what is now referred to as the first climate change bankruptcy: the failure of Gas and Electric. The company was brought low by litigation after its equipment was blamed for the Californian wildfires. It is not the only example.

Artificial Intelligence has already taken over our lives and transformed it for the good. The days are over when you could still debate whether AI will impact a certain industry and transform it like others. Because artificial intelligence has already penetrated every other industry that we know and continues to impact several others. It's already being used in several ways, while others are under research. There's only one question left to wonder about, how much will AI take over an existing industry and change it for the good?

The disruptive technologies these days are getting lots of attention in the global technology market. Particularly, artificial intelligence is one such technology that is making headlines every day. With new inventions and innovations, more and more companies are emerging across the industry to offer something that was never explored before. Most of all, various rising start-ups and other AI-based companies are securing hefty amounts of investment from significant investors every now and then. The beginning of new year marked the commencement of new era of innovation with several investors coming forward to contribute to the transformative journey of emerging innovators.

A Dutch court has demanded that an algorithm-based system used by the government to identify and track down potential housing and benefit cheats is dropped with immediate effect. As reported by DutchNews, on Wednesday, the District Court of The Hague ruled that the system conflicts with EU human rights and privacy protections. Dubbed System Risk Indication (SyRI), the automatic, machine-learning (ML) tool was used by local Dutch authorities to draw up profiles and lists of individuals suspected of being at high risk of conducting benefits fraud. According to the publication, SyRI creates risk profiles from individuals that committed social security fraud in the past and then scans for "similar" citizen profiles, creating leads for potential investigations into others that may also be committing fraud, or be of a high risk of doing so in the future. SyRI's pooling of citizen data, otherwise kept in separate silos, gave authorities wide-ranging powers and "has been exclusively targeted at neighborhoods with mostly low-income and minority residents," according to UN human rights and poverty rapporteur Philip Alston.

Many science and engineering applications require finding solutions to planning and optimization problems by satisfying a set of constraints. These constraint problems (CPs) are typically NP-complete and can be formalized as constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) or constraint optimization problems (COPs). Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are good solvers for optimization problems ubiquitous in various problem domains, however traditional operators for EAs are 'blind' to constraints or generally use problem dependent objective functions; as they do not exploit information from the constraints in search for solutions. A variation of EA, Intelligent constraint handling evolutionary algorithm (ICHEA), has been demonstrated to be a versatile constraints-guided EA for continuous constrained problems in our earlier works in (Sharma and Sharma, 2012) where it extracts information from constraints and exploits it in the evolutionary search to make the search more efficient. In this paper ICHEA has been demonstrated to solve benchmark exam timetabling problems, a classic COP. The presented approach demonstrates competitive results with other state-of-the-art approaches in EAs in terms of quality of solutions. ICHEA first uses its inter-marriage crossover operator to satisfy all the given constraints incrementally and then uses combination of traditional and enhanced operators to optimize the solution. Generally CPs solved by EAs are problem dependent penalty based fitness functions. We also proposed a generic preference based solution model that does not require a problem dependent fitness function, however currently it only works for mutually exclusive constraints.

Plenty of people have a pet project that they are drawn to or consider themselves particularly good at. As the leader of the data science department at Trupanion in Seattle, David Jaw's projects are actually around pets. Jaw, GeekWire's latest Geek of the Week, uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help automate medical insurance claims for pets, streamlining the process and removing the worry about what's covered and what's not. Born and raised in a suburb near Toronto, Jaw's family moved to Albuquerque, N.M., when he was 13 years old. He stayed there through college, where he studied mechanical engineering, pursuing a childhood dream of designing airplanes and spaceships.

The IEEE Standards Association has released a report calling for engineers to consider the impact their work will have on climate change, children, and society. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is one of the largest organizations for computer scientists in the world. With hundreds of thousands of members, the group undertakes initiatives to create common standards and often consults organizations like the European Commission and OECD on matters of ethics and design principles. "It is imperative to move beyond business as usual and to prioritize the well-being of our children, starting with protecting their privacy and security online. If we fail to do this, their agency, mental health, and self-actualization as humans in any culture will be reliant on forces beyond their control," reads the report titled "Measuring What Matters in the Era of Global Warming and the Age of Algorithmic Promises." The whitepaper encapsulates change already underway at the IEEE that's in line with AI ethics principles released in spring 2019 after years of work, according to John Havens, director of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous & Intelligent Systems.

Leonard Hobbs Bio: Leonard graduated from University College Cork Ireland in 1986 with a 1st class honours degree in Electrical Engineering and was awarded the title of'graduate of the year' by the college. He completed a Masters degree at the NMRC (now called Tyndall), at UCC in 1988. He has been one of Ireland's leading technologists in the ICT sector with close to 30 years of experience, mostly with Intel, spanning leading edge research to advanced manufacturing. His last role at Intel was Director of Public Affairs with responsibility for driving Intel Ireland's policy, communications, education and community agendas. Leonard is currently the Director of Research and Innovation at Trinity College Dublin where he owns the definition and implementation of the research, innovation and enterprise strategy for the University spanning research programs development, contract management, technology transfer, entrepreneurship and enterprise partnership liaison.