Think lawsuits involving humans are tricky? Try taking an intelligent robot to court. While autonomous robots with humanlike, all-encompassing capabilities are still decades away, European lawmakers, legal experts and manufacturers are already locked in a high-stakes debate about their legal status: whether it's these machines or human beings who should bear ultimate responsibility for their actions. The battle goes back to a paragraph of text, buried deep in a European Parliament report from early 2017, which suggests that self-learning robots could be granted "electronic personalities." Such a status could allow robots to be insured individually and be held liable for damages if they go rogue and start hurting people or damaging property.

In a story Nov. 24, The Associated Press reported that an artificial intelligence program featuring a talking image of the Greek philosopher Aristotle is starting to help University of Southern California students cope with stress. The program's designers recently removed that image based on student feedback and are considering replacing it with another character.

Analytics India Magazine is dedicated to championing and promoting the analytics and AI ecosystem in India. As a part of this process, each year AIM produces and publishes numerous videos ranging from events, interviews and web-series, to explainers, deep dives and news. In this article, we list down the top 10 videos produced by Analytics India Magazine in 2019. About: Analytics India Guru: What is a Convolutional Neural Network is a Hindi explainer video which helps you understand Convolutional Neural Network by digging deeper into understanding what is CNN and how does it work. The video includes interactive visuals which help you understand the basic of CNN in an easy manner.

The University of Oxford has launched a major initiative in Ethics in AI, leading to the establishment of an Institute for Ethics in AI, to be based in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, under the aegis of the Faculty of Philosophy. The Institute will build upon the University's world-class capabilities in the humanities to lead the study of the ethical implications of artificial intelligence and other new computing technologies. The University now seeks a Director for the Institute to provide intellectual vision and to give strategic leadership to the Institute, as it establishes its research programmes and related activities. The post will be open to academics with an international reputation and wide-ranging research and leadership profile within Ethics in AI. The Director will be the public face of the Institute and will oversee its activities, playing a substantive role in developing the Institute's relations with its fellows and students; within the Humanities Division; across the collegiate University; with external bodies and the wider public; as well as the Institute's Advisory Council.

Chinese companies have exported artificial intelligence surveillance technology to more than 60 countries including Iran, Myanmar, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and others with dismal human rights records, according to a report by a U.S. think tank. With the technology involving facial recognition systems that the Communist Party uses to crack down on Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in China's far western Xinjiang region, the report calls Beijing a global driver of "authoritarian tech." The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released the report amid concerns that authoritarian regimes would use the technology to boost their power and data could be sent back to China. "Technology linked to Chinese companies -- particularly Huawei, Hikvision, Dahua and ZTE -- supply AI surveillance technology in 63 countries, 36 of which have signed onto China's Belt and Road Initiative," it said. Critics say the BRI, President Xi Jinping's signature cross-border infrastructure project, is intended to draw countries in Asia, Africa and Europe deeper into Beijing's economic orbit.

High-resolution radar and night vision cameras may help scientists protect bats from untimely deaths at wind farms, according to new research. Researchers are using these technologies to provide more specific details about the number of bats killed by wind turbines in Iowa. These details will improve scientists' understanding of bat activity and potentially save their lives, said Jian Teng, a graduate researcher at the University of Iowa who presented the work this week at the 2019 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco. This work has broad impacts, according to Teng. "The more bats you kill, the more insects you have on farms; then, farmers will put more pesticides; and then, people will eat more pesticides," he said.

In the race to develop fully autonomous vehicles, Israeli start-Up Lirhot Systems says they "see" the road ahead and assess potential hazards. While most leading industry actors have relied on and heavily invested in laser-based LiDAR (light detection and ranging) three-dimensional sensors for self-driving navigation, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been the primary – and vocal – proponent of navigation based on using inexpensive cameras and radar. While developers continue to argue among themselves regarding the pros and cons of the two systems, Rehovot-based robotic vision start-up Lirhot Systems says it has developed a third method of navigation: a camera-like sensor inspired by insect navigation. "In nature, you have bugs and insects that navigate in a specific way, and we're copying that to enable autonomous vehicles to see," Lirhot CEO Shlomi Voro, an applied physicist with dozens of patents in the field of quantum physics, told The Jerusalem Post. "We were inspired by the heads of bees, their artificial intelligence-like neural network, size, accuracy of navigation, and how they see the world through their five eyes – two for vision and three for navigation."

California's passage of their "GDPR-lite" caught people off guard. We think this is part of a trend we've studied for a long time. Much of the current analysis misses key points, so it seems worth explaining. About two years ago, we asked several thought leaders in the U.S. about the odds we'd see legislation like the E.U. GDPR provides clear rights to E.U citizens, controlling data captured on-line.

As we come to the end of 2019, we reflect on a year whose start already saw 100 machine learning papers published a day and its end looks to see a record-breaking funding year for AI. But the path getting real value from data science and AI can be a long and difficult journey. To paraphrase Eric Beinhocker from the Institute for New Economic Thinking, there are physical technologies that evolve at the pace of science, and social technologies that evolve at the pace at which humans can change -- much slower. Applied to the domain of data science and AI, the most sophisticated deep learning algorithms or the most robust and scalable real-time streaming data pipelines ('physical technology') mean little if decisions are not effectively made, organizational processes actively hinder data science and AI, and AI applications are not adopted due to lack of trust ('social technology'). With that in mind, my predictions for 2020 attempt to balance both aspects, with an emphasis on real value for companies, and not just'cool things' for data science teams.

At the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference this week in Vancouver, Canada, machine learning took center stage as 13,000 researchers explored things like neuroscience, how to interpret neural network outputs, and how AI can help solve big real-world problems. With more than 1,400 works accepted for publication, you have to choose how to prioritize your time. For Google AI chief Jeff Dean, that means giving talks at workshops about how machine learning can help confront the threat posed by climate change and how machine learning is reshaping systems and semiconductors. VentureBeat spoke with Dean Thursday about Google's early work on the use of ML to create semiconductors for machine learning, the impact of Google's BERT on conversational AI, and machine learning trends to watch in 2020. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.