When Hima Patel was in her third year of computer science engineering at Sardar Patel University in Gujarat, a professor of hers gave her a book on artificial neural networks. "I was a good student. The book was not part of our curriculum, but the professor thought I might like it," recollects Hima. It took time to fully understand the book. But at the end of it, she loved it.

Object recognition algorithms sold by tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, perform worse when asked to identify items from lower-income countries. These are the findings of a new study conducted by Facebook's AI lab, which shows that AI bias can not only reproduce inequalities within countries, but also between them. In the study (which we spotted via Jack Clark's Import AI newsletter), researchers tested five popular off-the-shelf object recognition algorithms -- Microsoft Azure, Clarifai, Google Cloud Vision, Amazon Rekognition, and IBM Watson -- to see how well each program identified household items collected from a global dataset. The dataset included 117 categories (everything from shoes to soap to sofas) and a diverse array of household incomes and geographic locations (from a family in Burundi making $27 a month to a family in Ukraine with a monthly income of $10,090). The researchers found that the object recognition algorithms made around 10 percent more errors when asked to identify items from a household with a $50 monthly income compared to those from a household making more than $3,500.

Deep fakes are "videos that have been constructed to make a person appear to say or do something that they never said or did. Many commentators worry that voters will be influenced by pure fiction: As the 2020 US election looms, we learn of the fight to stay ahead (CNN, April 26, 2019) of the "growing threat" (ABC Eyewitness News, May 7, 2019) because "The 2020 campaigns aren't ready for deepfakes" (Axios/HBO, June 4, 2019). We Can No Longer Believe What We See, the New York Times warned yesterday. Under the right set of circumstances, deepfakes will be very influential. They don't even have to be particularly good to potentially swing the outcome of an election. As with so much in elections, deepfakes are a numbers game. While the presence of tampering in all but the most sophisticated deepfakes can be quickly identified, not everyone who views them will get that message. More fundamentally, not everyone wants to get that message. As can occur with other forms of online ...

Highlighting the company's rapid progress in the radiology space, Israeli startup Aidoc has received its third FDA clearance for its AI-based algorithm to help highlight potential instances of cervical spinal fractures. The regulatory decision comes just a few weeks after the FDA cleared the company's pulmonary embolism product. Aidoc also has approval for its algorithm for the detection of intracranial hemorrhages through CT scans. The company's cervical spinal fracture product already received approval from European regulators. Delayed diagnosis of cervical spinal fracture is a common problem in emergency rooms and can lead to potential major neurological issues including quadriplegia.

Doctors can perfect their craft playing Level Ex medical video games, and even earn continuing education credits towards maintaining their licenses. Can playing video games be a prescription for good health? Two to three times a week, the UCSF/Stanford-trained internist and founder of the Turntable Health primary care clinic, is on his smartphone playing video games. "People who are good at video games are actually good at some aspects of clinical medicine." Instead, ZDoggMD, as he's known by his pseudonym as a producer of healthcare videos and live shows, is among the 400,000 medical professionals practicing the craft of medicine through a series of games from Level Ex, a Chicago videogames developer whose titles are specially designed for doctors, med students and other healthcare providers.

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Humans aren't the only species whose mental state is affected when they lose their lover. Female cichlids, a type of monogamous fish that primarily dwells in South America, become depressed and lovesick when their mate is removed and they're placed with a non-preferred male partner, a new study has found. Researchers came to this conclusion after the female fish took longer to investigate boxes that either contained food or were empty, demonstrating symptoms of apathy. Female cichlids, a type of fish that primarily dwells in South America, become depressed and lovesick when their mate is removed and they're placed with a non-preferred male partner In what's believed to be a first-of-its-kind study, researchers say they've determined fish can form attachments to sexual partners. Through a series of cognitive tests, they found that female fish were more likely to take on a'glass half-full' mental state when they remained with their chosen partners.

Two artists and an advertising company created a deepfake of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg saying things he never said, and uploaded it to Instagram. The video, created by artists Bill Posters and Daniel Howe in partnership with advertising company Canny, shows Mark Zuckerberg sitting at a desk, seemingly giving a sinister speech about Facebook's power. The video is framed with broadcast chyrons that say "We're increasing transparency on ads," to make it look like it's part of a news segment. "Imagine this for a second: One man, with total control of billions of people's stolen data, all their secrets, their lives, their futures," Zuckerberg's likeness says, in the video. "I owe it all to Spectre. Spectre showed me that whoever controls the data, controls the future."

A couple of artists teamed up with an advertising company to make the deepfake video of Mark Zuckerberg. The video on Instagram shows what appears to be Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg giving a brief speech about the power of big data. "Imagine this for a second: One man, with total control of billions of people's stolen data, all their secrets, their lives, their futures. I owe it all to Spectre. Spectre showed me that whoever controls the data, controls the future."

AI is rapidly changing everything. It is transforming society, the very way we live and act as social creatures, how we behave, how we do business, and even the very fabric of our own human identity. Cities are managed by machine driven big data gathered by sensors, constructing together what we known as the Internet of Things. An escalating digital transformation is transforming our vast amounts of paper ledgers into digital records, from traffic to finance to medical records. These, which convey most of the data gathered about us, are now processed in the cloud and augmented with machine learning artificial intelligence's multiple tools, which are stored in blockchain distributed ledgers.