Why the American Civil Liberties Union is calling out Amazon's facial recognition tool, and what the ACLU found when it compared photos of members of Congress to public arrest photos. A group of Amazon shareholders is pushing the tech giant to stop selling its controversial facial recognition technology to U.S. government agencies, just days after a coalition of 85 human rights, faith, and racial justice groups demanded in an open letter that Jeff Bezos' company stop marketing surveillance technology to the feds. Over the last year, the "Rekognition" technology, which has been reportedly marketed to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has come under fire from immigrants' rights groups and privacy advocates who argue that it can be misused and ultimately lead to racially biased outcomes. A test of the technology by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) showed that 28 members of Congress, mostly people of color, were incorrectly identified as police suspects. According to media reports and the ACLU, Amazon has already sold or marketed "Rekognition" to law enforcement agencies in three states.

A group of Amazon shareholders has filed a resolution requesting the company stop selling its facial recognition technology to government agencies until a review can determine whether it has the potential to violate civil rights. Organized by the non-profit Open MIC and filed by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Brentwood, the resolution is supported by a total of five shareholder groups that hold $1.32 billion of Amazon shares. In the resolution, the shareholders express concern over current use of the technology -- called Rekognition -- and they cite statements made by Amazon in the past opposing government-conducted surveillance. They also say they have "little evidence" that Amazon is "effectively restricting the use of Rekognition to protect privacy and civil rights."

An amphibious supercar design that would allow its mega rich owners to look stylish and beat city traffic by travelling through water at high speed has been unveiled. According to its creators, the electric powered Amphi-X would reach speeds of more than 260 mph (418 km/h) on land and an average speed of over 90 mph (145 km/h) in water, the same as a modern speed boat. The car has been designed for the world's super rich to avoid congested roads of big cities, but comes with a hefty £2.5 million price tag. An amphibious supercar design that would allow its mega rich owners to look stylish and beat city traffic by travelling through water at high speed has been unveiled. The car has been designed for the world's super rich to avoid congested roads of big cities, but comes with a hefty £2.5 million price tag.

Last year, the US Department of Energy announced that the SunShot Initiative successfully met its 2020 utility-scale solar cost target of $0.06 per kilowatt hour three years earlier than expected. This milestone marks a huge step forward for the industry as it moves toward a greener future that's less reliant on fossil fuels. While 6 cents may sound cheap, it's far from the bottom. The SunShot Initiative is now working towards another lofty goal for 2030: $0.03 per KwH. This benchmark would make solar energy one of the least expensive options for new power generation, and help drive mass adoption on a national scale.

Germany Market Analysis Table 35: German Recent Past, Current & Future Analysis for Artificial Intelligence Analyzed with Annual Revenue Figures in US$ Million for Years 2015 through 2024 (includes corresponding Graph/Chart) 9.4.3 Italy Market Analysis Table 36: Italian Recent Past, Current & Future Analysis for Artificial Intelligence Analyzed with Annual Revenue Figures in US$ Million for Years 2015 through 2024 (includes corresponding Graph/Chart) 9.4.4

A new paper published on 3 December in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claims that a large number of currently unassessed plant species are likely at risk (1). The researchers also identified several geographic regions with the highest need for conservation efforts. Moreover, several of these regions are not currently recognized as areas of global concern. According to the authors, 10 per cent of plant species should be categorised as "at risk" on the Red List of Threatened Species, a comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of biological species maintained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). This equates to nearly 15,000 additional species.

Researchers have developed a computer algorithm that they say can analyze digital images of a woman's cervix and accurately identify precancerous changes that require medical attention. This artificial intelligence approach, called automated visual evaluation, has the potential to revolutionize cervical cancer screening, particularly in low-resource settings. Led by investigators from the National Institutes of Health and humanitarian tech investment fund Global Good, the researchers used comprehensive datasets to "train" a machine-learning algorithm to recognize patterns in complex visual inputs, such as medical images. The findings were confirmed independently by experts at the National Library of Medicine. The results appeared in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (NCI).

A significant step on the road towards the UK becoming "an inevitable dystopian hellscape", is how one article characterised the National Data Analytics Solution (NDAS) project being run by the West Midlands Police. Another headline claimed that it marks a "descent into state surveillance". One publication asked whether "Minority Report is now a reality", while another site described the scheme as "Minority Report-lite", and yet another called NDAS "the real Minority Report". Style magazine Dazed at least mixed things up a bit in terms of its cinematic references, suggesting that the project had "Robocop vibes". Even the website of celebrity conspiracy theorist David Icke was moved to post about the programme, labelling UK law enforcement as "the thought police".

A Deloitte article says government agencies seeking to generate insights from unstructured data to facilitate the decision-making process and policy analysis could use artificial intelligence in the form of natural language processing. NLP has seven technical capabilities that could help agencies identify patterns, analyze public opinion and categorize topics, according to the article published Wednesday. Those capabilities are topic modeling; text categorization; text clustering; information extraction; named entity resolution; relationship extraction; and sentiment analysis. NLP could help address several issues across defense and national security, health care, energy and financial services domains and those issues include analyzing public feedback and improving regulatory compliance and predictions. The article cited how the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency uses NLP in the Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text program to glean insights from data.

Huawei has stated that a dispute with T-Mobile was settled in 2017 after a report said US authorities had opened a criminal investigation into the Chinese telecommunications company. The US justice department (DoJ) was, according to the Wall Street Journal which cited anonymous sources, in the "advanced" stages of a criminal inquiry that could result in an indictment of Huawei. The newspaper said the DoJ was looking into allegations of theft of trade secrets from Huawei's US business partners, including a T-Mobile robotic device used to test smartphones. Huawei and the DoJ declined to comment directly on the report. Huawei said: "Huawei and T-Mobile settled their disputes in 2017 following a US jury verdict finding neither damage, unjust enrichment nor wilful and malicious conduct by Huawei in T-Mobile's trade secret claim."