As artificial intelligence moves into the courtroom, much has been written about sentencing algorithms with hidden biases. Daniel L. Chen, a researcher at both the Toulouse School of Economics and University of Toulouse Faculty of Law, has a different idea: using AI to help correct the biased decisions of human judges. Chen, who holds both a law degree and a doctorate in economics, has spent years collecting data on judges and US courts. "One thing that's been particularly nagging my mind is how to understand all of the behavioral biases that we've found," he says. For example, human biases that can tip the scales when making a decision.

The world's most gifted poker player, Libratus, is ditching the deck to join the US Army, after its daddy, Tuomas Sandholm, signed a two-year deal with the Pentagon worth $10m. You sit at a table with other human beings with the sole purpose of taking everything that they have in front of them, in their pockets, and the pockets of their nearby friends. So focused are you on sliding your gun into their mouths you will even loan them money, and then do everything in your power to take that too. Poker is war, and one of its brightest proponents is joining the army. Last year, I asked Dominik Nitsche for his views on the best poker player in the world.

The proliferation of fake news on social media has opened up new directions of research for timely identification and containment of fake news, and mitigation of its widespread impact on public opinion. While much of the earlier research was focused on identification of fake news based on its contents or by exploiting users' engagements with the news on social media, there has been a rising interest in proactive intervention strategies to counter the spread of misinformation and its impact on society. In this survey, we describe the modern-day problem of fake news and, in particular, highlight the technical challenges associated with it. We discuss existing methods and techniques applicable to both identification and mitigation, with a focus on the significant advances in each method and their advantages and limitations. In addition, research has often been limited by the quality of existing datasets and their specific application contexts. To alleviate this problem, we comprehensively compile and summarize characteristic features of available datasets. Furthermore, we outline new directions of research to facilitate future development of effective and interdisciplinary solutions.

Visitors to Columbus, Ohio, have a new way to see the city's downtown attractions. The pilot project, which began in mid-December, belongs to a larger statewide effort to improve road safety and mobility in this car-dependent capital. "What we're looking at is, how do we apply technology to improve people's lives in a transportation context?" says Jordan Davis, director of Smart Columbus, which spearheads the fleet project. "We want to keep stretching the technology of self-driving vehicles to solve real use cases in our communities." Smart Columbus, launched in 2016 after the city bested 77 mid-sized U.S. cities for a pool of "smart transportation" funding.

Technology company owner John Gauger told The Wall Street Journal that Cohen promised him $50,000 for work including using computers to enter fake votes for Trump in a 2014 CNBC poll asking people to identify top business leaders and a 2015 poll of potential presidential candidates. Gauger says Cohen paid him about a quarter of the money in cash, then stiffed him on the rest.

Researchers using artificial intelligence and "big data" plan to develop new algorithms that they say will enable them to identify, locate – and eventually predict – crimes committed in the world's oceans, from illegal fishing off the Patagonia shelf to drug smuggling in Central America to slave labor and human trafficking in the Indian Ocean. The perpetrators of these illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) activities collectively use vessels called "the dark fleet," not just because of their criminal activity, but because they try to hide their location by turning off their GPS tracking systems and navigating between legally operating and visible boats. "IUUs include all kinds of terrible things," said James Watson, a marine scientist expert at Oregon State University, and a principal investigator on the project. "We came into this thinking primarily about illegal fishing, but that turns out to be just the tip of the iceberg. It is much, much bigger."

Cybersecurity professionals have a hard job. Not only are they tasked with developing solutions to constantly changing risks, but they cannot know what those attacks will consist of until after they've already been launched. Though cybersecurity experts can certainly offer insights into what digital dangers may come next, these predictions are limited and make proactive solution development challenging. Luckily, by increasing the use of machine learning, cybersecurity groups are able to take advantage of advanced pattern recognition technologies to better determine what attacks are on the horizon. On the surface, it seems like cybersecurity professionals would be focused on designing stronger barriers to attack and establishing firmer encryption standards, but at its core, the field is driven by data.

The Health and Human Services Department's Program Support Center on Jan. 10 released a request for proposals for an artificial intelligence multiple-award contract. It's another piece of evidence that the agency has prioritized AI and is likely to spend more on the emerging technology in the next few years. None of HHS's information technology strategies mention artificial intelligence. Yet the way the agency is spending money and planning to obligate future funds tells another story. HHS plans to use automation, machine learning, supervised learning, and machine vision to reduce backlogs, predict fraudulent transactions, identify suspects through facial recognition, and more.

Amazon investors are turning up the heat on CEO Jeff Bezos with a new letter demanding he stop selling the company's controversial facial recognition technology to police. The shareholder proposal calls for Amazon to stop offering the product, called Rekognition, to government agencies until it undergoes a civil and human rights review. It follow similar criticisms voiced by 450 Amazon employees, as well as civil liberties groups and members of Congress, over the past several months. 'Rekognition contradicts Amazon's opposition to facilitating surveillance,' the letter states. '...Shareholders have little evidence our company is effectively restricting the use of Rekognition to protect privacy and civil rights.

The U.S. healthcare industry is looking less like a special case, a large segment of the U.S. economy with its own unique quirks, and is beginning to behave like other industries, according to "Top health industry issues of 2019: The New Health Economy comes of age," the 13th annual healthcare report from consulting giant PwC. So for PwC Health Research Institute's latest report, rather than focusing on issues only U.S. health organizations face, it for the first time is examining how healthcare is adapting to factors common to all industries: deals, business and tax strategy, risk and regulatory issues, workforce trends and digital transformation. The details may be specific to healthcare, but the business issues are shared with many other parts of the economy. In 2019, new entrants and biopharmaceutical and medical device companies will bring to market new digital therapies and connected health services that can help patients make behavioral changes, give providers real-time therapeutic insights, and give insurers and employers new tools to more effectively manage beneficiaries' health, the PwC report said. "The arrival of digital therapeutics – an emerging health discipline that uses technology to augment or even replace active drugs in disease treatment – is reshaping the landscape for new medicines, product reimbursement and regulatory oversight," PwC said. "This means that new data sharing processes and payment models will be established to integrate these products into the broader treatment arsenal and regulatory structure for drug and device approvals." As digital therapeutics and connected devices have transitioned from concept to reality, investors have poured $12.5 billion into digital health ventures in 2017 and 2018, PwC reported.