A Dutch court has ordered the immediate halt of an automated surveillance system for detecting welfare fraud because it violates human rights, in a judgment likely to resonate well beyond the Netherlands. The case was seen as an important legal challenge to the controversial but growing use by governments around the world of artificial intelligence (AI) and risk modelling in administering welfare benefits and other core services. Campaigners say such "digital welfare states" – developed often without consultation, and operated secretively and without adequate oversight – amount to spying on the poor, breaching privacy and human rights norms and unfairly penalising the most vulnerable. The UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, applauded the verdict and said it was "a clear victory for all those who are justifiably concerned about the serious threats digital welfare systems pose for human rights". The decision "sets a strong legal precedent for other courts to follow", he added.

Among the many issues being raised in the course of the recent Wuhan coronavirus outbreak is the ability of charities to respond to crises and to fulfil their fiduciary and moral duty to apply donations effectively and for the purposes intended. The Wuhan coronavirus versus the Red Cross: better solutions via blockchain and artificial intelligence', available here, it is argued that the present crisis should be seen as a call to arms for the tech industry, which has the relevant know-how and resources to radically change the landscape of crisis response and the management of donations through the implementation and use of blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI), both of which are already in common commercial use. Beijing has ordered all public donations for the Wuhan crisis to be funnelled to five government-backed charity organisations. This is a throwback to pre-2016 China, before the Charity Law of China was introduced to enable the establishment of private charities. The Charity Law was intended to develop the charity field and protect the interests of relevant stakeholders.

Gula Tech Adventures, the investment firm started by Tenable cofounders Ron and Cyndi Gula, is planning to hold a cyber pitch competition this spring with national reach. CyberQuest 2020 will award a $150,000 investment from Gula Tech Adventures to one company. Applications are open to entrepreneurs from anywhere in the U.S. through March 20. The final event is scheduled for April 21 in Columbia. Along with cybersecurity, the firm is accepting pitches from companies in artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, cloud, virtual reality and automation.

The AI service will help Encompass customers to "quickly and accurately" find risk-relevant information on their own customers, organisations and investments. Sturgeon said: "Encompass is one of a number of international companies that has chosen to locate and steadily expand its operation, making Scotland an attractive place to grow its business. "From its Glasgow base, the company has access to markets, a supportive business environment and has been able to identify local talent from Scottish professionals in the engineering and software development sector. "Backed by almost £2 million of R&D investment from Scottish Enterprise, Encompass will be able to develop artificial intelligence software tools that will assist companies in the financial sector to reduce operational risks associated with meeting compliance and regulatory standards." Encompass's work in Glasgow has primarily been focused on its Know Your Customer product, where it uses data analytics to ensure clients do not unknowingly trade with organised crime or the proceeds of crime.

In the sci-fi world crafted by Douglas Adams in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," you'd just slap a bright yellow Babel fish in your ear and simply be able to understand any mix of languages around you. While we aren't quite there yet, language is becoming less of a barrier than in generations past. "Understanding is going to become the new normal," says Dave Limp, Amazon's senior vice president of devices and services. Kids "will never grow up in world where they aren't able to hear any language. To that end, today's technology is helping to interpret and translate the world around us in ways that are nearing seamless and in real time. From apps on your phone to increasingly multilingual virtual personal assistants, communicating as a tourist or with clients, friends and family who don't speak the same language is less of a challenge. Yet for all the authentique gains achieved in translation over the past several years, don't count on your phone, smart speaker, PC or ear device ...

An algorithm deployed across the United States is now known to underestimate the health needs of black patients1. The algorithm uses health-care costs as a proxy for health needs. But black patients' health-care costs have historically been lower because systemic racism has impeded their access to treatment -- not because they are healthier. This example illustrates how machine learning and artificial intelligence can maintain and amplify inequity. Most algorithms exploit crude correlations in data.

The U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) published an interim final rule on 6 January 2020 imposing licensing requirements on certain artificial intelligence software specially designed to automate the analysis of geospatial imagery. Effective immediately, licenses are required for exports and re-exports of such software to all countries, except Canada. The deadline for submitting comments to BIS regarding the rule is 6 March 2020. Read More: U.S. imposes strict export controls on certain artificial intelligence software for automating the analysis of geospatial imagery

Japanese authorities are introducing a variety of measures to prevent the wrongful use of drones, which has been increasing due to many people being unfamiliar with regulations, especially tourists from abroad. Under the civil aeronautics law, a drone of 200 grams or more cannot be operated in airspace around airports or residential areas without permission from the government. In addition, the law regulating the use of drones bans flights in airspace near designated important places such as the Prime Minister's Office, the Imperial Palace and nuclear power plants. Foreign tourists and others unfamiliar with the laws continue to violate them. In 2019, 14 foreign nationals had their cases sent to prosecutors, as of Nov. 20.

Facing growing pressure to fight disinformation ahead of the 2020 presidential election, Twitter said it would label or remove tweets sharing doctored videos and photos, sometimes referred to as deepfakes, that seek to mislead users. Under the new policy, Twitter users cannot "deceptively" share altered videos and photos that are "likely to cause harm," the company said Tuesday. "We've seen people try to distort conversations with altered media or fabricated media, not just on Twitter, but across the internet," Del Harvey, Twitter's vice president of trust and safety, said. "We want to make sure we can address any instance where media has been altered or fabricated and shared on Twitter." Video clips deceptively altered to discredit or embarrass political figures, such as those targeting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, would be labeled, the company said Tuesday.

Technology development efforts in autonomy and cyber-defense have been evolving independently of each other, over the past decade. In this paper, we report our ongoing effort to integrate these two presently distinct areas into a single framework. To this end, we propose the two-player partially observable stochastic game formalism to capture both high-level autonomous mission planning under uncertainty and adversarial decision making subject to imperfect information. We show that synthesizing sub-optimal strategies for such games is possible under finite-memory assumptions for both the autonomous decision maker and the cyber-adversary. We then describe an experimental testbed to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed framework.