Cameras are used routinely by police across the US to identify citizens, their faces cross-matched against databases of suspects and past criminals. Yet researchers claim there is too little scrutiny of how these tools work, and have found inherent racial bias in the system. So does a sophisticated, visual analysis tool reflect human prejudice and if so, who does that effect? "Studies indicate there's racial bias in the software," said Jonathan Frankle, staff technologist at Georgetown Law School. Working with law fellow Clare Garvie, Frankle has requested public information from more than 100 police departments across the country.

Until recently, Robyn Ewing was a writer in Hollywood, developing TV scripts and pitching pilots to film studios. Now, she is applying her creative talents toward building the personality of a different type of character - a virtual assistant, animated by artificial intelligence, that interacts with sick patients. Ewing works with engineers on the software program, called Sophie, which can be downloaded to a smartphone. The virtual nurse gently reminds users to check their medication, asks them how they are feeling or if they are in pain, then sends the data to a real doctor. As tech behemoths and a wave of startups double down on virtual assistants that can chat with human beings, writing for AI is becoming a hot job in Silicon Valley.

In a major win for artificial intelligence, Google DeepMind's AlphaGo has beat European Go champion Fan Hui in the complex 2,500-year-old Chinese game of Go, touted the official Google blog. A victory in a Go game against a human champion has long been coveted among AI researchers, because the possible moves that a player can take can reach into the quadrillions and beyond. As a result, Go has proven a formidable challenge for artificial intelligence researchers. Microsoft and Facebook, for example, have been working on ways to win in the game over a human champion, but have had no luck to date, according to a BBC news report. Last October, Google DeepMind held a private, closed-door Go match in its London office between its AlphaGo system and Hui.

It takes a lot of work to create a good movie or TV character, and apparently much of the same work is now going into creating the characters behind AI assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa. As this piece in the Washington Post points out, creative workers like poets, fiction writers, and comedians are fast becoming the ones responsible for making these assistants seem human--coming up with everything from human-sounding filler words to jokes to a background story and small personality details. It makes sense: if you want to get people to use these software-based assistants, they should be approachable, dynamic, and have consistent personalities. Throwing in some party tricks--such as Siri's ability to beat box--doesn't hurt, either. But just because your AI assistant has a carefully curated personality doesn't mean it's going to be useful. Making AI conversational interfaces is still very, very hard (though Baidu seems to be doing pretty well with it in China), as it can misunderstand what you're requesting, or may only be able to help in specific situations.

A Falcon 9 rocket took off from Cape Canaveral, carrying more supplies to the International Space Station. SpaceX was able to land its rocket on a barge April 8, 2016, about 200 miles off the shore of Cape Canaveral, Fla. (Photo: SpaceX) CAPE CANAVERAL -- SpaceX successfully returned its Dragon spacecraft to flight Friday and landed the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket almost on target on a barge about 200 miles offshore. Flying for the first time since a launch failure June, the Dragon and its nearly 7,000 pounds of cargo are headed for a Sunday morning rendezvous with the International Space Station. The booster landing -- not exactly in the center of the platform but enough to keep the equipment from getting wet in the Atlantic Ocean -- bolsters SpaceX's confidence that it can regularly recover rockets that could be flown again, lowering launch costs. The experiment was SpaceX's first successful ocean landing.

Recently found a post by Ali Syed on topic; "Europeans unconvinced by big data in general". This study was conducted for the Vodafone Institute for Society and Communications by Kantar-owned market researchers TNS Infratest. It analyses over 8,000 individuals across eight European countries and offers valuable insight into people's perceptions of big data and analytics Still there are people or groups don't believe that we are living in the age of Big Data. Other way round we can say they think Big Data is just a hype created by technology people. To me the concept of Big Data is not new.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the Messenger Platform at the F8 summit in San Francisco last year. This year he's expected to announce a "chat bot" store on Messenger. That is the question on many lips ahead of Facebook's annual software developer conference next week in San Francisco. Analysts expect Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to open up Messenger's platform to "chatbots" and launch an online store for them. TechCrunch reported Thursday that Facebook will help software developers build "chatbots."

It's a tantalizing thought: Log onto Facebook, order a pizza from a chat bot, ask another to look for vacation packages while you ask a third to make a restaurant reservation. Facebook's annual F8 developer's conference kicks off next week -- and analysts expect the social network could announce a plan for integrating chat bots onto the site. Chat bots are virtual agents able to mimic human conversation using artificial intelligence. "It's this notion of conversations as a service," Patrick Moorhead, an analysts at Moor Insights & Strategy, told ABC News. "The whole element of bots are we can use them exactly like we chat today -- over SMS [text messages] or Messenger. Imagine connecting with a company where it automatically is either a real human or uses AI to know exactly what you want."

According to observations from many of the human workers still employed by one such restaurant, the robots simply lacked the intelligence, artificial or otherwise, to effectively wait on guests. Of the three restaurants in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou that attempted the practice, only one remains open, and that eatery is now currently only using one of the robots it initially employed. One of the establishments employed as many as 10 robots at one time. The gimmick reportedly had some short-term benefit of driving customers through the door. However, those guests reportedly were just as quickly turned away by food that was generally considered "unpalatable" for guests, according to reports.

A day after Microsoft launched its "AI teen girl Twitter chatbot," Twitter taught her to be racist. The thing is, this was all very much preventable. I talked to some creators of Twitter bots about @TayandYou, and the consensus was that Microsoft had fallen far below the baseline of ethical botmaking. "The makers of @TayandYou absolutely 10000 percent should have known better," thricedotted, a veteran Twitter botmaker and natural language processing researcher, told me via email. "It seems like the makers of @TayandYou attempted to account for a few specific mishaps, but sorely underestimated the vast potential for people to be assholes on the internet."