Automated decision making algorithms are now used throughout industry and government, underpinning many processes from dynamic pricing to employment practices to criminal sentencing. Given that such algorithmically informed decisions have the potential for significant societal impact, the goal of this document is to help developers and product managers design and implement algorithmic systems in publicly accountable ways. Accountability in this context includes an obligation to report, explain, or justify algorithmic decision-making as well as mitigate any negative social impacts or potential harms. Algorithms and the data that drive them are designed and created by people -- There is always a human ultimately responsible for decisions made or informed by an algorithm. "The algorithm did it" is not an acceptable excuse if algorithmic systems make mistakes or have undesired consequences, including from machine-learning processes.

Amazon's new Alexa Echo Buds earphones, released yesterday in the U.S., may be hiding a'track workout' function that could be announced soon. The Echo earbuds are priced at £119 ($129.99) Among notable features, including integration with Alexa Amazon's voice assistant, tech enthusiasts now believe the buds have the capability to track fitness workouts. This may set them apart from competitors as one of the first to build the tracking technology into earbuds. The Echo Buds are voice activated, allowing users to execute several commands.

Incredible drone footage of a pod of Orcas has been captured off the coast of British Colombia, Canada, by scientists monitoring the endangered population. Heart warming scenes show the moment a baby is nuzzled by its protective mother before playfully slapping her on the head with its tail. Touchingly the footage revealed to the scientists how the loving animals made physical contact with each other far more than expected. Researchers at Hakai Institute took the videos to study the feeding behaviours of endangered resident killer whales, fearing that the Killer whales' days on the coast might be numbered. They captured the serene beasts in their undisturbed habitat, and observed the day-to-day life of an orca as they had never seen it before, including hunting habits and communication between the animals - captured with an underwater microphone.

Robots may learn more effectively from human resistance than human cooperation. That's one possible inference from the results of a recently conducted experiment at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering. A group of researchers examined how a robotic arm might learn to adapt its grip to objects of different sizes and weights. They compared the results from the robotic arm operating alone to how it would perform if there were a human present trying to pull the object out of the robot's grip. Surprisingly, the robots learned to adapt their grip much more quickly and effectively with an adversarial human in the picture than when they were left alone and had to figure things out with their own AI. The robots which had been exposed to human adversaries were also better able to generalize information about new and unfamiliar objects, researcher and co-author Stefanos Nikolaidis told Wired.

Alexa, can you hear me? Researchers have discovered a way to jam Amazon's voice assistant Alexa from responding to commands. "It was easier to exploit than we expected," says Juncheng Li at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania. He and his colleagues created an audio clip that prevents Amazon's system from responding to the "Alexa" command word if it is played as you are speaking. Li says he expects that similar attacks would work against other voice assistants too.

Here is the brief story of this evolution of self-service. Not that long-ago, shop clerks pulled merchandise for us from high shelves behind a counter. Today, we push squeaky, wheeled, metal baskets around the well-lit warehouses we call supermarkets. Innovation in retail shopping--as with all service businesses--happens through shifts in business processes and technologies. Automated self-service fuses process and technology so customers can serve themselves.

Are you an inquisitive critical thinker? Can you consider both the big picture and the small details? Those things will make you a great candidate for the position you're currently reading about, so don't stop here. The role: You will join a relatively small data science team (currently located in the USA and Russia), which is dealing with services engagement, building products and machine learning capabilities. They are putting data science into the software product which will be used by thousands of users.

A new study by Ducker Frontier revealed that Puerto Rico could create between 26 and 34 percent additional jobs with the successful implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) in the public and private sectors. On Nov. 5, during the second annual Microsoft AI Tour held at the Sheraton Hotel and Casino in San Juan's Convention District, Pablo González, director of Ducker Frontier Latin America, discussed with THE WEEKLY JOURNAL the entity's most recent analysis of Puerto Rico's advancement in adopting AI and other emerging technologies. AI, as defined by Microsoft Caribbean General Manager Herbert Lewy, is an amplification of human ingenuity, "a tool that allows humans to achieve more and improve the things we normally do." The continuous progress of this booming technology has prompted a myriad of concerns and dystopian scenarios regarding automation, such as computers rendering humans obsolete at a plethora of jobs and services, thus amplifying economic disparity. "People think that if an algorithm can do 30 percent of our tasks they will get fired from their jobs. The study intends to demystify this perception and shed light on some issues… We also wanted to measure something that is almost never measured, which is the creation of new industries and, therefore, jobs that do not exist today to reach a net effect of how it will affect job availability in Puerto Rico," González explained.

Over the next few years, digital transformation trends will be metalling in the world. Among these are the digital transformation trends which are repetitive such as cloud, edge compute, Internet-of-Things and augmented reality. But few of the trends are here to stay and few will be transformed. It seems like the same school, but the curriculum will be revised. There will be some core technological services which will dominate the discussions but it will continue to create a foundation for the future digital transformation journey. It is also highly unlikely that people abstain from the use of social media, in fact everyone avails services of social media as it has become an integral part of online marketing.

A San Francisco-based technology company called Chooch AI is trying to narrow that gap with the help of artificial intelligence, reducing the time between a fire's eruption and the moment it's spotted by people. The company, which is working with state agencies, researchers and technologists, is working to develop an AI tool that would scour hyper-detailed imagery from satellites for evidence of wildfires largely invisible to the naked eye. If successfully refined, experts believe, the tool could lead to earlier wildfire detection that would almost certainly save more people and property from destruction.