It's a startling image that illustrates the deep-rooted biases of AI research. Input a low-resolution picture of Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, into an algorithm designed to generate depixelated faces, and the output is a white man. Get the same algorithm to generate high-resolution images of actress Lucy Liu or congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from low-resolution inputs, and the resulting faces look distinctly white. As one popular tweet quoting the Obama example put it: "This image speaks volumes about the dangers of bias in AI." But what's causing these outputs and what do they really tell us about AI bias?

Behavioural Strategy was founded as a management consultancy in Copenhagen in 2014 to help corporations be more valuable to both shareholders and society by using a broader range of research. The company combine behavioral economics with psychology, decision theory, game theory, economics, statistics (lots of statistics), technology and a keen understanding of commercial operations to solve difficult problems. Behavioural Strategy are a hybrid between a service and a technology company offering both traditional consultancy services as well as a suite of automated tools that help us help businesses. EPOS is an audio and video solution company developing and selling devices for business professionals and the gaming community. Based on leading and advanced technologies, the Danish founded company delivers high-end audio and video solutions with design, technology and performance as paramount parameters.

Photo credit: AI Artists Unlike other artists, Refik Anadol transforms pools of data into mesmerizing art. That's right, when Anadol comes across an interesting data sets, they're processed into swirling visualizations of how computers see the world by using artificial intelligence-powered machine learning algorithms. These techniques are used to filter and / or expand the raw material, which is then shown on large screens or projected onto walls and entire buildings. In the video above, we see Machine Hallucination, a 360-degree video installation comprised of 10-million photos of New York. These images were processed by machine learning to group photos and morph between them, resulting in flickering images of the city as recorded by many different people.

Over 1500 researchers across multiple fields have banded together to openly reject the use of technology to predict crime, arguing it would reproduce injustices and cause real harm. The Coaltition for Critical Technology wrote an open letter to Springer Verlag in Germany to express their grave concerns about a newly developed automated facial recognition software that a group of scientistts from Harrisburg Univeristy, Pennsylvania have developed. Springer's Nature Research Book Series intends to publish an article by the Harrisburg scientists named A Deep Neural Network Model to Predict Criminality Using Image Processing. The coalition wants the publication of the study - and others in similar vein - to be rescinded, arguing the paper makes claims that are based unsound scientific premises, research and methods. Developed by a New York Police Department veteran and PhD student Jonathan Korn along with professors Nathaniel Ashby and Roozbeh Sadeghian, the Harrisburg University researchers' software claims 80 per cent accuracy and no racial bias.

Conventional approaches require many sensor networks that cover the entire curvilinear surfaces of the target area. Unlike conventional wafer-based fabrication, this laser fabrication provides a new sensing paradigm for motion tracking. The research team, led by Professor Sungho Jo from the School of Computing, collaborated with Professor Seunghwan Ko from Seoul National University to design this new measuring system that extracts signals corresponding to multiple finger motions by generating cracks in metal nanoparticle films using laser technology. The sensor patch was then attached to a user's wrist to detect the movement of the fingers. The concept of this research started from the idea that pinpointing a single area would be more efficient for identifying movements than affixing sensors to every joint and muscle.

A da Vinci surgical robot system performs heart surgery in 2017 at a hospital in Hefei, China.Credit: Shutterstock In 2006, China highlighted the importance of robotics in its 15-year plan for science and technology. In 2011, the central government fleshed out these ambitions in its 12th five-year plan, specifying that robots should be used to support society in a wide range of roles, from helping emergency services during natural disasters and firefighting, to performing complex surgery and aiding in medical rehabilitation. Guang-Zhong Yang, head of the Institute of Medical Robotics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, says that China's robotics research output has been growing steadily for two decades, driven by three major factors: "The clinical utilization of robotics; increased funding levels driven by national planning needs; and advances in engineering in areas such as precision mechatronics, medical imaging, artificial intelligence and new materials for making robots." Yang points out that funding levels for medical robotics from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Ministry of Science and Technology began to increase more sharply in 2011 compared to the previous decade. The accompanying rises in research output are closely related to the introduction of specialized robotics equipment in medical-research facilities, says Yao Li, a research scientist at Stanford Robotics Laboratory in California and founder of the company Borns Medical Robotics, based in both Chengdu, China, and Silicon Valley, California.

NASA is asking people to explore Mars using images taken of the Red Planet by its Curiosity Rover and help to label rocks and other surface features. The project, known as AI4Mars, is designed to improve an artificial intelligence algorithm that will help future Martian rovers move across the planet's surface. The simulation was designed by a team from NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a way to help future rovers spot potential obstacles and avoid getting stuck. The projected is hosted on the citizen science site Zooniverse and involves volunteers labelling terrain features in thousands of pictures of the Red Planet. NASA hopes that having a more effective algorithm - similar to the ones used in self driving cars - will prevent future rovers suffering the same fate as Spirit which got stuck in a sand pit that ended its mission after seven years.

The ACLU has filed a complaint against the Detroit Police Department for what the group says is the first documented instance in the U.S. of someone being falsely arrested based on AI.

A photo of the alleged suspect in a theft case in Detroit, left, next to the driver's license photo of Robert Williams. An algorithm said Williams was the suspect, but he and his lawyers say the tool produced a false hit. A photo of the alleged suspect in a theft case in Detroit, left, next to the driver's license photo of Robert Williams. An algorithm said Williams was the suspect, but he and his lawyers say the tool produced a false hit. Police in Detroit were trying to figure out who stole five watches from a Shinola retail store.

Despite denying persistent rumors that it would exit the camera business, Olympus is doing exactly that. The company has announced that will sell its camera business to Japan Industrial Partners (JIP), the same company that purchased Sony's VAIO PC division (via The Verge). Olympus will now focus on its much larger business supplying industrial and medical imaging equipment. Olympus said it improved cost structure, focused on high-profit cameras and lenses and took other steps to "cope with the extremely severe digital camera market." Despite those efforts, however, the company said it "recorded operating losses for three consecutive fiscal years up to the term ended in March 2020."