In the past decade, the financial industry has evolved rapidly – and it's continuing to change. Transactions that were once only possible through personal visits to financial institutions can now be completed with just a few taps on a mobile phone. If, in the past, you had to personally hand over a cash or a check to pay your bills, now, you can transfer funds online, whether to a friend or to a company. But, these changes were not brought about by the industry's determined effort. Thanks to technological advancements that have changed the way the world works, the finance sector was compelled to respond and adapt to today's digital era.

Agencies spend too much time doing manual work. One of the biggest time sucks? Max Cheprasov, now an exec at the Dentsu Aegis holding company level, recognized these inefficiencies while working at Dentsu agency iProspect starting in 2011. He set out to document and standardize processes while outsourcing inefficient tasks so that employees could focus more on strategic client work. Eventually, he brought artificial intelligence into the agency's workflows, specifically natural language processing and machine learning, which helped accelerate the ability to interpret data, derive insights and generate reports.

There is an interesting link between critical theory and certain genres of literature that may be of interest to the current debate on AI ethics. While critical theory generally points out certain deficiencies in the present to criticize it, futurology and literary genres such as Cyberpunk, extrapolate our present deficits in possible dystopian futures to criticize the status quo. Given the great advance of the AI industry in recent years, an increasing number of ethical matters have been raised and debated, usually in the form of ethical guidelines and unpublished manuscripts by governments, the private sector, and academic sources. However, recent meta-analyses in the field of AI ethics have raised important questions such as: what is being omitted from published ethical guidelines? Does AI governance occur inclusively and diversely? Is this form of "ethics", based on soft rules and principles, efficient? In this study, I would like to present aspects omitted or barely mentioned in the current debate on AI ethics and defend the point that applied ethics should not be based on creating only soft versions of real legislation, but rather on criticizing the status quo for everything of value that is disregarded.

As recommender systems are being designed and deployed for an increasing number of socially-consequential applications, it has become important to consider what properties of fairness these systems exhibit. There has been considerable research on recommendation fairness. However, we argue that the previous literature has been based on simple, uniform and often uni-dimensional notions of fairness assumptions that do not recognize the real-world complexities of fairness-aware applications. In this paper, we explicitly represent the design decisions that enter into the trade-off between accuracy and fairness across multiply-defined and intersecting protected groups, supporting multiple fairness metrics. The framework also allows the recommender to adjust its performance based on the historical view of recommendations that have been delivered over a time horizon, dynamically rebalancing between fairness concerns. Within this framework, we formulate lottery-based mechanisms for choosing between fairness concerns, and demonstrate their performance in two recommendation domains.

Dealing with social tasks in robotic scenarios is difficult, as having humans in the learning loop is incompatible with most of the state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. This is the case when exploring Incremental learning models, in particular the ones involving reinforcement learning. In this work, we discuss this problem and possible solutions by analysing a previous study on adaptive convolutional encoders for a social navigation task.

An artificial intelligence (AI) processing chip developed in Ireland has been included on board a satellite that blasted off into space from French Guiana early this morning. The PhiSat-1 is the first European satellite carrying out an experiment to demonstrate how on-board deep-learning technology can speed up the rate at which observation data is processed and transmitted to Earth. The AI chip, developed by Dublin-headquartered robotics start-up Ubotica Technologies, has been installed on the satellite so decisions can be made on board more quickly than on the ground. It also helps reduce the data load sent back to Earth. Ubotica's Myriad 2 AI chip uses architecture originally developed by another Irish technology company, Movidius, acquired by Intel in a multimillion euro deal in 2016.

Amba Kak was in law school in India when the country rolled out the Aadhaar project in 2009. The national biometric ID system, conceived as a comprehensive identity program, sought to collect the fingerprints, iris scans, and photographs of all residents. It wasn't long, Kak remembers, before stories about its devastating consequences began to spread. "We were suddenly hearing reports of how manual laborers who work with their hands--how their fingerprints were failing the system, and they were then being denied access to basic necessities," she says. "We actually had starvation deaths in India that were being linked to the barriers that these biometric ID systems were creating. So it was a really crucial issue."

We propose a novel method for expediting both symmetric and asymmetric Distributed Constraint Optimization Problem (DCOP) solvers. The core idea is based on initializing DCOP solvers with greedy fast non-iterative DCOP solvers. This is contrary to existing methods where initialization is always achieved using a random value assignment. We empirically show that changing the starting conditions of existing DCOP solvers not only reduces the algorithm convergence time by up to 50\%, but also reduces the communication overhead and leads to a better solution quality. We show that this effect is due to structural improvements in the variable assignment, which is caused by the spreading pattern of DCOP algorithm activation.) /Subject (Hybrid DCOPs)

This study evaluated generative methods to potentially mitigate AI bias when diagnosing diabetic retinopathy (DR) resulting from training data imbalance, or domain generalization which occurs when deep learning systems (DLS) face concepts at test/inference time they were not initially trained on. The public domain Kaggle-EyePACS dataset (88,692 fundi and 44,346 individuals, originally diverse for ethnicity) was modified by adding clinician-annotated labels and constructing an artificial scenario of data imbalance and domain generalization by disallowing training (but not testing) exemplars for images of retinas with DR warranting referral (DR-referable) and from darker-skin individuals, who presumably have greater concentration of melanin within uveal melanocytes, on average, contributing to retinal image pigmentation. A traditional/baseline diagnostic DLS was compared against new DLSs that would use training data augmented via generative models for debiasing. Accuracy (95% confidence intervals [CI]) of the baseline diagnostics DLS for fundus images of lighter-skin individuals was 73.0% (66.9%, 79.2%) vs. darker-skin of 60.5% (53.5%, 67.3%), demonstrating bias/disparity (delta=12.5%) (Welch t-test t=2.670, P=.008) in AI performance across protected subpopulations. Using novel generative methods for addressing missing subpopulation training data (DR-referable darker-skin) achieved instead accuracy, for lighter-skin, of 72.0% (65.8%, 78.2%), and for darker-skin, of 71.5% (65.2%,77.8%), demonstrating closer parity (delta=0.5%) in accuracy across subpopulations (Welch t-test t=0.111, P=.912). Findings illustrate how data imbalance and domain generalization can lead to disparity of accuracy across subpopulations, and show that novel generative methods of synthetic fundus images may play a role for debiasing AI.

The Area Under the the Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) Curve, referred to as AUC, is a well-known performance measure in the supervised learning domain. Due to its compelling features, it has been employed in a number of studies to evaluate and compare the performance of different classifiers. In this work, we explore AUC as a performance measure in the unsupervised learning domain, more specifically, in the context of cluster analysis. In particular, we elaborate on the use of AUC as an internal/relative measure of clustering quality, which we refer to as Area Under the Curve for Clustering (AUCC). We show that the AUCC of a given candidate clustering solution has an expected value under a null model of random clustering solutions, regardless of the size of the dataset and, more importantly, regardless of the number or the (im)balance of clusters under evaluation. In addition, we demonstrate that, in the context of internal/relative clustering validation, AUCC is actually a linear transformation of the Gamma criterion from Baker and Hubert (1975), for which we also formally derive a theoretical expected value for chance clusterings. We also discuss the computational complexity of these criteria and show that, while an ordinary implementation of Gamma can be computationally prohibitive and impractical for most real applications of cluster analysis, its equivalence with AUCC actually unveils a computationally much more efficient and practical algorithmic procedure. Our theoretical findings are supported by experimental results.