There is a growing body of work that proposes methods for mitigating bias in machine learning systems. These methods typically rely on access to protected attributes such as race, gender, or age. However, this raises two significant challenges: (1) protected attributes may not be available or it may not be legal to use them, and (2) it is often desirable to simultaneously consider multiple protected attributes, as well as their intersections. In the context of mitigating bias in occupation classification, we propose a method for discouraging correlation between the predicted probability of an individual's true occupation and a word embedding of their name. This method leverages the societal biases that are encoded in word embeddings, eliminating the need for access to protected attributes. Crucially, it only requires access to individuals' names at training time and not at deployment time. We evaluate two variations of our proposed method using a large-scale dataset of online biographies. We find that both variations simultaneously reduce race and gender biases, with almost no reduction in the classifier's overall true positive rate.

Question Answering has recently received high attention from artificial intelligence communities due to the advancements in learning technologies. Early question answering models used rule-based approaches and moved to the statistical approach to address the vastly available information. However, statistical approaches are shown to underperform in handling the dynamic nature and the variation of language. Therefore, learning models have shown the capability of handling the dynamic nature and variations in language. Many deep learning methods have been introduced to question answering. Most of the deep learning approaches have shown to achieve higher results compared to machine learning and statistical methods. The dynamic nature of language has profited from the nonlinear learning in deep learning. This has created prominent success and a spike in work on question answering. This paper discusses the successes and challenges in question answering question answering systems and techniques that are used in these challenges.

It was a hot February morning at Wish Farms, a large strawberry-growing operation outside Plant City, Florida. Gary Wishnatzki, the proprietor, met me at one of the farm offices. In the high season, Wish Farms picks, chills, and ships some twenty million berries--all handpicked by a seasonal workforce of six hundred and fifty farm laborers. Wishnatzki is a genial sixty-three-year-old third-generation berry man, who wears a white goatee and speaks softly, with a Southern drawl. His grandfather Harris Wishnatzki was a penniless Russian immigrant who started out peddling fruits and vegetables from a pushcart in New York's Washington Street Market in 1904.

It began, late last year, with Silver boasting about the success of his election models and Taleb shooting back that Silver doesn't "know how math works." Silver said Taleb was "consumed by anger" and hadn't had any new ideas since 2001. The argument has gotten personal, with Silver calling Taleb an "intellectual-yet-idiot" (an insult taken from Taleb's own book) and Taleb calling Silver "klueless" and "butthurt." Here is a recap of what they're fighting about so you can know who's right (Silver, mostly) and who's wrong (Taleb). The origin of Taleb's ire can be found in Silver's success since 2008--and his some-time failures. As I described in Nautilus last month, evaluating probabilistic election forecasts can be conceptually slippery, made especially difficult by the counterintuitive properties of mathematical probability.

Traffic crawls through the wind and snow on the RFK Bridge on Friday in the Queens borough of New York. So reports the Wall Street Journal which reviewed an internal email sent by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency which manages all the traffic crossing the area's bridges and tunnels. The MTA email was sent to the office of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. According to the email, the "initial period for the proof of concept testing at the (Robert F. Kennedy Bridge connecting Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens) for facial recognition has been completed and failed with no faces (0%) being detected within acceptable parameters." Besides the RFK Bridge, the MTA is testing the technology at the Throgs Neck and Whitestone bridges, as well as at the Midtown and Hugh L. Carey tunnels.

MOSCOW - The Russian Defense Ministry has deployed a surveillance drone to an artillery division stationed on a group of islands controlled by Russia but claimed by Japan, a Russian newspaper reported Monday. The drone will be used for patrolling coastal areas and surrounding waters, as well as for rescue operations, according to the newspaper, Izvestia. The artillery unit is stationed on two of the four Russian-controlled islands off the coast of Hokkaido, known in Japan as Etorofu and Kunashiri. The Orlan-10 drone, the same type as those sent by Russia to Syria, is able to operate within a 120-kilometer radius for up to 14 hours while transmitting images from a mounted camera, the Russian paper said.

The government's new proposals to try and protect people from harm on the internet could actually create a huge censorship operation, campaigners have warned. Ministers have revealed the long-awaited white paper on online harms, in an attempt to deal with the dangers posed by content being distributed on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. It recommends a wide variety of new legal changes, including imposing a duty of care on the tech firms and holding individual people at the top of those companies responsible for breaking the rules. They will force the companies to remove any offending content – from terrorist content to child abuse imagery – as quickly as they can, and within time limits. We'll tell you what's true.

How do you fix a satellite's instrument that's floating 22,000 miles above the Earth's surface? That's a question that NASA had to answer when it ran into problems with the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a satellite tasked with studying the Sun and the effects of solar activity on Earth. This is important for all sorts of reasons -- not least because solar storms can knock out GPS satellites, shut down electrical grids, and scramble communications. Unfortunately, one of the SDO's three instruments, responsible for measuring ultraviolet light, stopped working due to a fault. This data is essential to satellite operators.

IBM's Chair, CEO and President Ginni Rometty has a powerful message for workers and employers in all strata of society: The Fourth Industrial Revolution is underway and it is shaping up to be one of the most significant challenges and opportunities of our lifetime. We are already seeing jobs, policies, industries and entire economies shifting as our digital and physical worlds merge. According to the World Economic Forum, the value of digital transformations in the Fourth Industrial Revolution is estimated at $100 trillion in the next 10 years alone, across all sectors, industries and geographies. "As a result, we face an imminent and profound transformation of the workforce over the next five to 10 years as analytics and artificial intelligence change job roles at companies in all industries," Rometty said while giving a keynote address at the CNBC's At Work Talent & HR: Building the Workforce of the Future Conference in New York on Tuesday, April 2. In February, the executive was appointed to Trump's American Workforce Policy Advisory Board along with 24 other leaders. While only a minority of jobs will disappear, the majority of roles that remain will require people to work with the aid of analytics and some form of AI and this will require skills training on a large scale, Rometty said.

The European Commission will launch a pilot project this summer designed to test ethical guidelines it has developed for the use of artificial intelligence. Companies, public agencies, and other organizations can now join the European AI Alliance which will officially notify members when the pilot starts. "The ethical dimension of AI is not a luxury feature or an add-on," said Vice-President for the Digital Single Market Andrus Ansip in a statement. "It is only with trust that our society can fully benefit from technologies. Ethical AI is a win-win proposition that can become a competitive advantage for Europe: being a leader of human-centric AI that people can trust."