Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) have developed a sensor that can be trained to sniff for cancer, with the help of artificial intelligence. Although the training doesn't work the same way one trains a police dog to sniff for explosives or drugs, the sensor has some similarity to how the nose works. The nose can detect more than a trillion different scents, even though it has just a few hundred types of olfactory receptors. The pattern of which odor molecules bind to which receptors creates a kind of molecular signature that the brain uses to recognize a scent. Like the nose, the cancer detection technology uses an array of multiple sensors to detect a molecular signature of the disease.

Federal agencies are the latest to alert companies to potential bias in AI recruiting tools. As the AP notes, the Justice Department and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) have warned employers that AI hiring and productivity systems can violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. These technologies might discriminate against people with disabilities by unfairly ruling out job candidates, applying incorrect performance monitoring, asking for illegal sensitive info or limiting pay raises and promotions. Accordingly, the government bodies have released documents (DOJ, EEOC) outlining the ADA's requirements and offering help to improve the fairness of workplace AI systems. Businesses should ensure their AI allows for reasonable accommodations.They should also consider how any of their automated tools might affect people with various disabilities.

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in various applications, from self-driving autonomous vehicles to AI-assisted medical diagnoses, has accelerated in recent years. From 2018 to 2020, there was a five-fold increase globally in the percentage of organisations deploying AI. While the adoption of AI brings numerous benefits, cybersecurity threats such as hacking pose a significant threat to AI systems, especially in applications where hackers may gain access to confidential information or cause automated systems to malfunction. Answering the call to protect the integrity of AI programmes and create trust in AI solutions, a team of NTU researchers and AI leaders has launched a new standard on AI security. Unveiled on 16 March 2022 at the Al Security Standard Launch Singapore TR 99:2021 Growth opportunities for government & industry adopting trustworthy Al, and published by Enterprise Singapore's Standards Consortium, the standard was developed from research led by NTU scientists Prof Liu Yang of NTU's School of Computer Science and Engineering, former research fellow Dr Xiaofei Xie and PhD candidate Mr David Berend.

The Biden administration announced Thursday that employers who use algorithms and artificial intelligence to make hiring decisions risk violating the Americans with Disabilities Act if applicants with disabilities are disadvantaged in the process. The majority of American employers now use the automated hiring technology -- tools such as resume scanners, chatbot interviewers, gamified personality tests, facial recognition and voice analysis. The ADA is supposed to protect people with disabilities from employment discrimination, but just 19 percent of disabled Americans were employed in 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice, which made the announcement jointly with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, told NBC News there is "no doubt" that increased use of the technologies is "fueling some of the persistent discrimination." "We hope this sends a strong message to employers that we are prepared to stand up for people with disabilities who are locked out of the job market because of increased reliance on these bias-fueled technologies," she said.

But the world of EU legislation can be complicated and opaque. Here's a quick guide to everything you need to know about the EU's AI Act. The bill is currently being amended by members of the European Parliament and EU countries. The AI Act is hugely ambitious. It would require extra checks for "high risk" uses of AI that have the most potential to harm people.

Developed by Minderoo Foundation, the'Global Plastic Watch' tool uses advanced satellite data technology and machine learning to create a near-real-time, high resolution map of plastic pollution. The tool aims to help authorities better manage plastic leakage into the marine environment, and is said to provide the largest ever open source dataset of plastic waste across dozens of countries. Global Plastic Watch uses remote sensing satellite imagery from the European Space Agency and a novel machine learning model created in collaboration with digital product agency Earthrise Media. The tool can determine the size and scale of land-based plastic waste sites, which fuel the growing issue of plastic pollution in the world's rivers and oceans. By using the data, governments, industry and communities can evaluate and monitor the risk of land-based plastic waste sites as well as prioritise investment in solutions, Minderoo Foundation said.

Observational studies are regarded as economic alternatives to randomized trials, often used in their stead to investigate and determine treatment efficacy. Due to lack of sample size, observational studies commonly combine data from multiple sources or different sites/centers. Despite the benefits of an increased sample size, a naïve combination of multicenter data may result in incongruities stemming from center-specific protocols for generating cohorts or reactions towards treatments distinct to a given center, among other things. These issues arise in a variety of other contexts, including capturing a treatment effect related to an individual's unique biological characteristics. Existing methods for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects have not adequately addressed the multicenter context, but rather treat it simply as a means to obtain sufficient sample size. Additionally, previous approaches to estimating treatment effects do not straightforwardly generalize to the multicenter design, especially when required to provide treatment insights for patients from a new, unobserved center. To address these shortcomings, we propose Multiple Domain Causal Networks (MDCN), an approach that simultaneously strengthens the information sharing between similar centers while addressing the selection bias in treatment assignment through learning of a new feature embedding. In empirical evaluations, MDCN is consistently more accurate when estimating the heterogeneous treatment effect in new centers compared to benchmarks that adjust solely based on treatment imbalance or general center differences. Finally, we justify our approach by providing theoretical analyses that demonstrate that MDCN improves on the generalization bound of the new, unobserved target center.

The technical assistance is a follow up to EEOC's announcement last fall that it would address the implications of hiring technologies for bias. In October 2021, Chair Charlotte Burrows said the agency would reach out to stakeholders as part of an initiative to learn about algorithmic tools and identify best practices around algorithmic fairness and the use of AI in employment decisions. Other EEOC members, including Commissioner Keith Sonderling, have previously spoken about the necessity of evaluating algorithm-based tools. A confluence of factors have led the agencies to address the topic, Burrows and Clarke said during Thursday's press call. One is the persistent issue of unemployment for U.S. workers with disabilities.

After months of rumors, Google announced its own smartwatch, called the Pixel Watch, will be coming this fall. Although the tech giant has supported smartwatches through its wearable operating system and completed its acquisition of Fitbit last year, this is Google's first branded smartwatch. The Pixel Watch will have a circular, domed design made with recycled stainless steel and customizable bands. Even though the watch also has plenty of features not concerned with health tracking, Rick Osterloh, Google's senior vice president of devices and services, teased the Pixel Watch's "deep integration" with Fitbit that will include heart rate and sleep tracking as well as workout metrics users can measure against their goals. Meanwhile, Google is entering a crowded market for health-tracking wearables, with competitors like Apple, Amazon, Samsung, Withings and Garmin.

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Kristen Clarke speaks at a news conference on Aug. 5, 2021. The federal government said Thursday that artificial intelligence technology to screen new job candidates or monitor their productivity can unfairly discriminate against people with disabilities. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Kristen Clarke speaks at a news conference on Aug. 5, 2021. The federal government said Thursday that artificial intelligence technology to screen new job candidates or monitor their productivity can unfairly discriminate against people with disabilities. The federal government said Thursday that artificial intelligence technology to screen new job candidates or monitor worker productivity can unfairly discriminate against people with disabilities, sending a warning to employers that the commonly used hiring tools could violate civil rights laws.