The AI Now Institute, People Power Media, and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project today launched Landlord Tech Watch, a crowdsourced map examining where surveillance and AI technologies are being used by landlords to potentially disempower tenants and community members. The site invites tenants to self-report the types of tech that are being installed in their residences and neighborhoods, and it aims to serve as a resource to help educate about the widespread use and harms of these technologies. Owners and landlords typically purchase and install tech products and platforms without notifying or discussing potential harms with their tenants, and sometimes without even letting them know. For instance, in New York City, rent-stabilized tenants at the Atlantic Plaza Towers in Brownsville were subjected to a facial recognition security system from a third-party vendor. Elsewhere in the city, an elderly tenant in Hell's Kitchen charged that a keyless system installed by his landlord was too complicated, and feared that his movements would be tracked through the technology.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is helping to improve our society, enhance Australia's wellbeing, improve environmental sustainability and create a more equitable, inclusive and fair society. But as we work to reshape government delivery with AI, are we asking the right questions? The role of AI, including policy implications and the nature of industry in society, is being discussed today in a live-stream event co-hosted by the Institute of Public Administration Australia (IPAA) and the Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA). ACOLA CEO Ryan Winn said the event will feature a keynote presentation by Australia's Chief Scientist, Dr Alan Finkel AO and a panel discussion with ACOLA's AI Expert Group and key Government officials leading AI implementation. "The event will give rise to further discussion on the future opportunities and challenges of AI in industry and Government operations and service delivery, and what implications this will have on society for 2030," Mr Winn said.

Microsoft's new Flight Simulator is a technological marvel that sets a new standard for the genre. But to recreate a world that feels real and alive and contains billions of buildings all in the right spots, Microsoft and Asobo Studios relied on the work of multiple partners. One of those is the small Austrian startup Blackshark.ai from Graz that, with a team of only about 50 people, recreated every city and town around the world with the help of AI and massive computing resources in the cloud. Ahead of the launch of the new Flight Simulator, we sat down with Blackshark co-founder and CEO Michael Putz to talk about working with Microsoft and the company's broader vision. Blackshark is actually a spin-off of game studio Bongfish, the maker of World of Tanks: Frontline, Motocross Madness and the Stoked snowboarding game series.

An investigation by industry watchdog Tech Inquiry has revealed that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency paid $224,000 to Clearview AI for licenses to biometric facial recognition services on August 12, 2020. Clearview CEO Hoan Ton-That confirmed the contract, though says it is with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) in an email to The Verge, saying the technology is used by ICE's "Child Exploitation Unit and ongoing criminal investigations. Ton-That claims the company's technology has enabled the unit to rescue children from sexual abuse. The contracting office named in a document obtained by Tech Inquiry is "DHS: ICE; mission support dallas [sic]." Federal records indicate Clearview entered into a $50,000 contract with the U.S. Air Force last December.

While artificial intelligence (AI) is often associated with the spawning of robots that will take our jobs, Terminator's Skynet, or the unblinking red eyes of Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, its true and immediate effects are best seen by simply observing the innovations -- ones that prove that software can do a variety of tasks better than humans can. If one thing is clear, it's that artificial intelligence has the potential to disrupt every industry, which leads to a big question that should matter to all of us: To what extent can a powerful technology like artificial intelligence be used to help us tackle climate change? To learn more about how we can leverage artificial intelligence to tackle climate change, I had to chat with Priya Donti, who's completing a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, focused on the role machine learning can play in climate change mitigation solutions. Donti is also a co-chair of Climate Change AI, an organization that unites "volunteers from academia and industry who believe in using machine learning, where it is relevant, to help tackle the climate crisis." Our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, discusses the risks, the rewards, and the limitations of using artificial intelligence to combat climate change.

China has a national plan for it. Russia says it will determine the "ruler of the world." The United States is investing heavily to develop it. The race is on to create, control and weaponize artificial intelligence. In Michael Kanaan's book "T-Minus AI: Humanity's Countdown to Artificial Intelligence and the New Pursuit of Global Power," set for release Aug. 25, the realities of AI from a human-oriented perspective are laid out for the reader. Such technology, often shrouded in mystery and misunderstood, is made easy to comprehend through a discussion on the global implications of developing AI.

The United States Army is developing a conversational intelligence platform that will let soldiers give voice commands to robotic vehicles using natural language. Instead of requiring formal commands, the Joint Understanding and Dialogue Interface, JUDI, will be able to understand and interpret intent in its orders, clarifying them with questions as needed. The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory is building JUDI in a partnership with the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies. Their goal for JUDI is to combine an understanding of informal language with data from its sensors to grasp the context of its orders. In the robots used for testing right now, basically very advanced miniature cars JUDI will theoretically be able to take a single command like, "go to the top of the hill" and combine camera data identifying a nearby hill with its natural language processing to work out its goal and how to achieve it, with follow-up questions to the operator as needed.

The United States government is one of the largest buyers in the world, if not the largest, spending over $4.1 Trillion annually overall with hundreds of billions spent on technology. As part of all this, the General Services Administration (GSA), a key agency in the US federal government is responsible for managing many of the operations of the federal system including many aspects of procurement. Increasingly the GSA is leveraging AI and machine learning to help optimize, manage, and advance procurement functions. AI and ML are providing key ability to optimize procurement processes, provide visibility into key metrics, and generate insights and forecasts to procurement trends. In this article, Keith Nakasone, Deputy Assistant Commissioner, Acquisition, Office IT Category at the GSA shares insights on how AI is impacting federal government procurement as a follow-up to a recent podcast interview on this topic.

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Civil rights campaigners in the UK have won a legal challenge to South Wales Police's (SWP) use of facial recognition technology. The win on appeal is being hailed as a "world-first" victory in the fight against the use of an "oppressive surveillance tool", as human rights group Liberty puts it. However the police force does not intend to appeal the ruling -- and has said it remains committed to "careful" use of the tech. The back story here is SWP has been trialing automated facial recognition (AFR) technology since 2017, deploying a system known as AFR Locate on around 50 occasions between May 2017 and April 2019 at a variety of public events in Wales. The force has used the technology in conjunction with watchlists of between 400-800 people -- which included persons wanted on warrants; persons who had escaped from custody; persons suspected of having committed crimes; persons who may be in need of protection; vulnerable persons; persons of possible interest to it for intelligence purposes; and persons whose presence at a particular event causes particular concern, per a press summary issued by the appeals court.