This blog post is adapted from our June 10 response to the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) request for information (RFI) 2019-08818: Developing a Federal AI Standards Engagement Plan. This RFI was released in response to an Executive Order directing NIST to create a plan for the development of a set of standards for the acceptable use of AI technologies. Given the wide adoption of AI technologies and the lag in commensurate laws and regulations, this post aims to help NIST by highlighting the current state, plans, challenges, and opportunities in ethics and AI. In 2016 the European Union (EU) created the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that would expand protections around EU citizens' personal data beginning in 2018. Meanwhile, China has extensively integrated AI technologies into their government and social structure via the China Social Credit System.

Leading to 2020 several European countries have launched their national AI strategies, the European Commission put forward a European approach to Artificial Intelligence, a Coordinated Plan on Artificial Intelligence "Made in Europe", laid out the path for Building Trust in Human Centric Artificial Intelligence and set up a High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI HLEG) which presented their Policy and Investment Recommendations for Trustworthy AI. And in 2020, Artificial Intelligence will continue to be very much a priority for the European Union. The recent paper Artificial Intelligence: Power for Civilisation – and for Better Healthcare that I had the honor to co-author asserts that Europe's goal should be to integrate AI into health-related operations, so as to improve clinical care, drive new therapies and treatments, and make healthcare systems more efficient. Data Front and Centre Europe is currently proving that it is capable of working together and sharing as the enthusiasm resulting from what was originally named the MEGA initiative (standing for Million European Genomes Alliance and proposed by our colleagues at the European Alliance for Personalised Medicine), now renamed as European '1 Million Genomes' Initiative, has clearly demonstrated. There is an undoubted willingness on the part of many Member States, and the regions within them, to collaborate when it comes to data sharing in healthcare, and not just in genomics. We must focus on regulatory and technological options to maximize the value of health data without compromising patients' privacy.

The JAIC is working to bring critical AI detection technology to the first responders who bravely battle wildfires. Increased use of AI will reduce response timelines, increase situational awareness, and save more American lives.

Sen. Ed MarkeyEdward (Ed) John MarkeyParnas pressure grows on Senate GOP Sanders defends vote against USMCA: 'Not a single damn mention' of climate change The Hill's Morning Report -- President Trump on trial MORE (D-Mass.) on Thursday sent a series of questions to the CEO of Clearview AI after reports that the company has been selling facial recognition software with an expansive database to law enforcement. The New York Times first reported over the weekend that more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started working with Clearview, which claims to have a database of more than 3 billion photos, in the last year. "Any technology with the ability to collect and analyze individuals' biometric information has alarming potential to impinge on the public's civil liberties and privacy," Markey wrote in the letter to CEO Hoan Ton-That. "Clearview's product appears to pose particularly chilling privacy risks, and I am deeply concerned that it is capable of fundamentally dismantling Americans' expectation that they can move, assemble, or simply appear in public without being identified," he continued. According to the Times, Clearview has built its software by scraping major social media platforms and allowing users to upload photos of strangers.

For human travelers, the iconic moment of space exploration occurred a half-century ago, when Neil Armstrong planted the first human boot-print on the moon. But if you don't mind using robots as our stand-ins, the greatest era is unfolding right now on Mars, where NASA's Curiosity rover is rolling across the rusty, dusty surface and leaving behind tread marks that spell out the letters "J-P-L" in Morse code. JPL stands for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the NASA center that designed and built Curiosity along with three earlier Mars rovers. Collectively, these machines have racked up 46.4 miles of travel, tremendously expanded our understanding of the Martian environment, and energized the search for life in the universe. Everywhere the rovers have gone, they have discovered unexpected complexity.

We need better ways to help people. What's the medical breakthrough that could save the most lives in the U.S. over the next ten years? In the 2020s, medical research will likely inch forward when it comes to major killers like heart disease and cancer. But the biggest potential to save lives could lie in learning to prevent suicide. The rates of reported suicides have been creeping up over the last two decades.

The value of building data-driven businesses with AI at their core is well known today, and business executives are rushing to implement the technology into their operations and gain a competitive advantage, but it's not as simple as creating a data lake and crafting AI models. A large number of AI companies attempting to implement more AI models or build AI-first businesses have experienced challenges. A December 2018 PwC survey found that only 4% of businesses have successfully implemented AI. That's why today the World Economic Forum released the AI toolkit for Boards of Directors. The AI toolkit for Boards of Directors is being released ahead of the annual WEF meeting in Davos, Switzerland where the toolkit will be formally debuted next week.

Russia on Thursday launched an unmanned rocket carrying a life-size humanoid robot that will spend 10 days learning to assist astronauts on the International Space Station. Named Fedor, short for Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research, the robot is the first ever sent up by Russia. Fedor blasted off in a Soyuz MS-14 spacecraft at 6:38 am Moscow time (0338 GMT) from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The Soyuz is set to dock with the space station on Saturday and stay till September 7. Soyuz ships are normally manned on such trips, but on Thursday no humans are travelling in order to test a new emergency rescue system. Instead of cosmonauts, Fedor, also known as Skybot F850, was strapped into a specially adapted pilot's seat, with a small Russian flag in hand.

São Paulo, January 2020 - Virtual assistants are increasingly present in people's routine, whether to help, answer questions and facilitate daily life. What they all have in common are women's names and the standard female voice, such as Lu, Siri, Alexa, Nat, Bia, etc. According to a study entitled "I'd Blush If I Could" published by UNESCO in May 2019, virtual assistants via Artificial Intelligence suffer from high levels of gender prejudice, although they usually answer with tolerant, subservient and passive phrases. Based on this context, the "Hey Update My Voice" movement was launched in partnership with UNESCO with the objective of drawing attention to cyber education and respect for virtual assistants, and ask companies to update their assistants' responses. If even virtual assistants are harassed, can you imagine how many women are victims of this kind of violence?

Will the proliferation of AI and machine learning reinforce the worldwide digital divide? It's one of the questions the Global Talent Competitiveness Index (GTCI) and Global Cities Talent Competitiveness Index (GCTCI) seek to answer by benchmarking the ability of countries and cities to compete for talent. An answer has historically proven elusive, but the 7th annual reports published by Insead, Adecco Group, and Google suggest it might instead provide "significant" opportunities despite the fact that AI skills are "scarce" and "unequally distributed" across nations. "AI is changing many facets of business and society and, if properly used and governed, has potential to foster sustainable development," said Katell Le Goulven, executive director of the Insead Hoffmann Global Institute for Business and Society. "The GTCI report argues that with multi-stakeholder cooperation the technology could help achieve some of the SDGs [the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals] such as those related to health (via personalized remote diagnosis and big data analysis to track and reduce endemic disease). But it also points to the imperative of closing the global digital skills gap to harness the potential of AI for good."