"The problem is not AI per se – but that this technology is developed in a biased context around gender, race and class. We need to build systems around the values we want our present and future societies to have." "A critical analysis of AI implies a close investigation of network structures and multiple layers of computational systems. It is our responsibility as researchers, activists and experts on digital rights to provoke awareness by reflecting on possible countermeasures that come from the technological, political, and artistic framework." Did you report on this topic?

Michael Kwet is a Visiting Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. He is the author of Digital Colonialism: US Empire and the New Imperialism in the Global South, and hosts the Tech Empire podcast. "Beggars" and "vagrants" are not welcome in Parkhurst, South Africa, a mostly white, middle-class suburb of about 5,000 on the outskirts of Johannesburg's inner city. Criminals are on the prowl, residents warn, and they threaten their neighborhood security. To combat crime, the locals came up with a solution: place CCTV surveillance cameras everywhere. However, these are not the camera networks of times past. Thanks to advancements in machine learning and AI, CCTV systems are now equipped with sophisticated video analytics that can track a wide range of behaviors, objects, and patterns, in addition to individual faces. Armed with powerful new tech, communities of color can be watched, flagged, policed, and intimidated into submission. I've spent the past several years studying the video surveillance industry in South Africa. During that time, a private corporation called Vumacam has been quietly assembling a "smart" CCTV surveillance network in the suburbs of Johannesburg. Earlier this year, the company announced it would blanket Joburg with 15,000 cameras.

It is hard to think of any area of our lives that might not one day be affected by artificial intelligence, and an exponential rise in recent years has already seen it become increasingly embedded in healthcare. After an early focus on supercharging the way in which new drugs can be discovered, AI is now empowering healthcare improvements in diagnosis and patient care. Across these themes we see many exciting technological advances that are changing our conception of how healthcare is delivered as the capabilities of smartphones and sensors continue to increase and improve. By putting a compact, portable computer in our hands, smartphones have already enabled huge changes in our lives over the last decade or so. Now, as artificial intelligence comes of age, smartphones and other mobile devices are becoming cleverer still.

Latitude 44, a conference that shone the spotlight on key players in the technology world from Estonia and Canada, took place in Toronto on November 14 and 15. "Estonia's digital transformation continues as it persists to be a free and open digital society. Estonia seeks to be a champion of the free movement of data and a supporter of the use of technology in a way that does not require significant restrictions on our rights." "We are in a period of incredible growth. I have been in the business for 30 years and I've never seen it like this." Bruce Croxon, partner at Round13 Capital and TV Host, The Disruptors, Toronto "Estonia has a very startup friendly business environment for entering into the European market. We offer e-residency so that entrepreneurs can do business remotely using Estonian e-services and we now have 65,000 new e-residents and 7,000 companies."

One of the anxieties plaguing the work force as we enter the next decade is the fear of automation replacing blue collar jobs. At the forefront of these anxieties is artificial intelligence (AI). The discussion is even such a hot-pressed issue that American Democratic candidate Andrew Yang's argument for a universal basic income policy is riding on its ability to speak to middle-American manual labour workers. However, for a lot of consumers around the world, the thought of automation can be exciting -- such as letting a Tesla drive you hands free down the freeway on a long trip. But this doesn't create an exception for those that are worried their jobs will be replaced by an automated crane or self-driven truck.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, announces that his company will draft its own set of laws to regulate the use of facial recognition. The best way to have the law on your side is to create it. Maybe that's what Jeff Bezos thought. As part of the annual event dedicated to its virtual assistant Alexa, Amazon's CEO has just announced that his company will develop a set of laws to regulate facial recognition technology. This draft legislation will then be proposed to U.S. federal legislators.

JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesian President Joko Widodo on Thursday ordered government agencies to remove two ranks of public servants in 2020 and replace their roles with artificial intelligence, in a bid to cut red tape hampering investment. Widodo made the remarks in a room full of leaders of big companies as he laid out a second-term agenda aimed at changing the structure of Southeast Asia's largest economy by reducing its reliance on natural resources. The president, whose new five-year term began last month after winning an election in April, said Indonesia should transition to higher-end manufacturing, such as electric vehicles and use raw materials like coal and bauxite in such industries, not just exports. Such transformation would require foreign investment and Widodo said he would improve the business climate by fixing dozens of overlapping rules and cutting red tape. To reduce bureaucracy, Widodo said the current top four tiers in government agencies would be flattened to two next year.

Instead, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have turned to the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence to dramatically accelerate the process of battery discovery. As described in two new papers, Argonne researchers first created a highly accurate database of roughly 133,000 small organic molecules that could form the basis of battery electrolytes. To do so, they used a computationally intensive model called G4MP2. This collection of molecules, however, represented only a small subset of 166 billion larger molecules that scientists wanted to probe for electrolyte candidates. Because using G4MP2 to resolve each of the 166 billion molecules would have required an impossible amount of computing time and power, the research team used a machine learning algorithm to relate the precisely known structures from the smaller data set to much more coarsely modeled structures from the larger data set.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning are used to power a variety of important modern software technologies. AI also powers the facial recognition software commonly used by law enforcement, landlords, and private citizens. Of all the uses for AI-powered software, facial recognition is a big deal. Security teams from large buildings that rely on video surveillance – like schools and airports – can benefit greatly from this technology. An AI algorithm has the potential to detect a known criminal or an unauthorized person on the property.

Canada has been investing in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) for longer than most of the industrialized world. Dr. Geoff Hinton of Google helped ignite the field of graphics processing unit (GPU) deep learning at the University of Toronto. Then he became chief scientific advisor to the Vector Institute, which in collaboration with the University, aims to produce the largest number of deep learning AI graduates and innovators globally. It's the home of computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, who is another pioneer of AI technology. Hundreds of AI researchers and doctoral students are concentrated at McGill University and the University of Montreal.