IBM is pulling out of the facial recognition market and is calling for "a national dialogue" on the technology's use in law enforcement. The abrupt about-face comes as technology companies are facing increased scrutiny over their contracts with police amid violent crackdowns on peaceful protest across America. In a public letter to Congress, IBM chief executive, Arvind Krishna, explained the company's decision to back out of the business, and declared an intention "to work with Congress in pursuit of justice and racial equity, focused initially in three key policy areas: police reform, responsible use of technology, and broadening skills and educational opportunities." The company, Krishna said, "no longer offers general purpose IBM facial recognition or analysis software. "IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and ...

Its use has become increasingly controversial due to privacy concerns and issues of bias. Now, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said in a letter to Congress that his company "no longer offers general purpose IBM facial recognition or analysis software." He continued, "IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms." We'll see how other business leaders and politicians respond, and whether this represents any kind of turning point in the deployment of facial recognition. After postponing its showcase last week amid widespread anti-racism protests, Sony will debut its PlayStation 5 showcase on Thursday afternoon. The company is apparently planning to show off about an hour's worth of next-gen games, although whether or not we'll see the system itself is unknown.

New AI technologies are helping scientists to sort through the wealth of COVID-19 papers -- hopefully hastening the research process.Credit: Adapted from Getty The COVID-19 literature has grown in much the same way as the disease's transmission: exponentially. But a fast-growing set of artificial-intelligence (AI) tools might help researchers and clinicians to quickly sift through the literature. Driven by a combination of factors -- including the availability of a large collection of relevant papers, advances in natural-language processing (NLP) technology and the urgency of the pandemic itself -- these tools use AI to find the studies that are most relevant to the user, and in some cases to extract specific findings from the results. Beyond the current pandemic, such tools could help to bridge fields by making it easier to identify solutions from other disciplines, says Amalie Trewartha, one of the team leads for the literature-search tool COVIDScholar, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. The tools are still in development, and their utility is largely unproven.

IBM's chief executive officer Arvind Krishna today revealed that the company is sunsetting its "general-purpose" facial recognition business. The announcement was revealed in Krishna's letter to members of Congress Monday about racial justice reform. The letter included suggestions for legislation around police reform and the responsible use of technology, such as artificial intelligence, a tool often used in facial recognition and other surveillance software. Krishna wrote that IBM "firmly opposes" the use of "any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms." He asked for a "national dialogue" on how facial recognition should be used, if at all.

This report is part of "The global AI agenda," a thought leadership program by MIT Technology Review Insights examining how organizations are using AI today and planning to do so in the future. Featuring a global survey of 1,004 AI experts conducted in January and February 2020, it explores AI adoption, leading use cases, benefits, and challenges, and seeks to understand how organizations might share data with each other to develop new business models, products, and services in the years ahead. The regional summary explores how executives in Latin America see AI: the opportunities, challenges, and the potential for data to be shared with third parties for mutual benefit.

In the business world, the opportunities for applying quantum technology relate to optimization: solving difficult business problems, reconfiguring complex processes, and understanding correlations between seemingly disparate data sets. The main purpose of quantum computing is to carry out computationally costly operations in a very short period of time, while at the same time accelerating business performance. Quantum computing can optimize business processes for any number of solutions, for example maximizing cost/benefit ratios or optimizing financial assets, operations and logistics, and workforce management--usually delivering immediate financial gains. Many businesses are already using (or planning to use) classic optimization algorithms. And with four international case studies, Reply has proven that a quantum approach can give better results than existing optimization techniques. Speed and computational power are key components when working with data.

Sonos has released a major new update for both its app and its smart speakers' operating system. The new software, known as S2, brings a range of new features including more high-quality audio. Sonos has suggested that it will also allow for further updates in the future. But it has also proved controversial because it is not being released for some of the company's older speakers. That means not only that many products are incompatible with it, but that any system using those older speakers will be incompatible too.

Dozens of scientists funded by Mark Zuckerberg have protested against his decision to leave inflammatory Donald Trump posts on the site. Mr Zuckerberg is allowing the president to use the social network to "spread both misinformation and incendiary statements", the researchers warn. Scientists, including 60 professors at leading US research institutions, wrote to the Facebook boss asking Mr Zuckerberg to "consider stricter policies on misinformation and incendiary language that harms people," especially during the current turmoil over racial injustice. The letter calls the spread of "deliberate misinformation and divisive language" contrary to the researchers' goals of using technology to prevent and eradicate disease, improve childhood education and reform the criminal justice system. Their mission "is antithetical to some of the stances that Facebook has been taking, so we're encouraging them to be more on the side of truth and on the right side of history as we've said in the letter," said Debora Marks of Harvard Medical School, one of three professors who organised it.

Artificial intelligence designed to function like a human could require periods of rest similar to those needed by biological brains. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US discovered that neural networks experienced benefits that were "the equivalent of a good night's rest" when exposed to an artificial analogue of sleep. "We were fascinated by the prospect of training a neuromorphic processor in a manner analogous to how humans and other biological systems learn from their environment during childhood development," said Yijing Watkins, a computer scientist at Los Alamos. The discovery was made by the team of researchers while working on a form of artificial intelligence designed to mimic how humans learn to see. The AI became unstable during long periods of unsupervised learning, as it attempted to classify objects using their dictionary definitions without having any prior examples to compare them to.

Apple has been granted a patent for a technology that would allow for "synthetic group selfies". The feature would let people stitch together various images so that it looks like people were all together, even if they were actually apart. The patent was filed long before the new coronavirus was ever discovered. But it was not granted to Apple until last week, when it looked very prescient. The feature would allow people to stitch together an image of a group even if they could not stand close to each other or even in the same place because of social distancing rules, for instance.