SEATTLE – Microsoft, which has come under fire for a U.S. government contract that was said to involve facial recognition software, said it will more carefully consider contracts in this area and urged lawmakers to regulate the use of such artificial intelligence to prevent abuse. The company, one of the key makers of software capable of recognizing individual faces, said it will take steps to make those systems less prone to bias, develop new public principles to govern the technology and move more deliberately to sell its software and expertise in the area. While Microsoft noted that the tech industry bears responsibility for its products, the company argued that government action is also needed. "The only effective way to manage the use of technology by a government is for the government proactively to manage this use itself," Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith said Friday in a blog post. "And if there are concerns about how a technology will be deployed more broadly across society, the only way to regulate this broad use is for the government to do so. This, in fact, is what we believe is needed today -- a government initiative to regulate the proper use of facial recognition technology, informed first by a bipartisan and expert commission."

Microsoft has called for facial recognition technology to be regulated by government, with for laws governing its acceptable uses. In a blog post on the company's website on Friday, Microsoft president Brad Smith called for a congressional bipartisan "expert commission" to look into regulating the technology in the US. "It seems especially important to pursue thoughtful government regulation of facial recognition technology, given its broad societal ramifications and potential for abuse," he wrote. "Without a thoughtful approach, public authorities may rely on flawed or biased technological approaches to decide who to track, investigate or even arrest for a crime." Microsoft is the first big tech company to raise serious alarms about an increasingly sought-after technology for recognising a person's face from a photo or through a camera.

When a legal team needs to find the facts behind fraud and corruption allegations in a government investigation, technology can drive substantial new efficiencies. Technology-assisted data analysis can provide the diligence and reliable quality control needed to provide the government with conclusions that can be trusted. This update explains how the process of gathering, sorting and evaluating enormous volumes of data has changed, and why skilled human intelligence is likely to remain a required component of an accurate analysis. When conducting investigations, the goal is to determine the facts. In most cases, a vague allegation will have been made – usually through an internal whistleblower hotline or a subpoena from the government.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. In preparation for Sunday's World Cup final between France and Croatia, ETH Zurich and ANYbotics decided to teach their quadruped robots some soccer moves, which included head shots, bicycle kicks, and the required fake injury (0:07): Alphabet's advanced tech division X has graduated a couple of flying robot projects recently: Loon and Wing. We posted earlier this week about Toyota AI Ventures' call for mobile manipulation startups, and here's a follow-up video with a bit more detail than was in the press release.

Scientists test new chemical compounds on animals because we still don't completely understand the world around us. But an artificial intelligence system published in the research journal Toxicological Sciences shows that it might be possible to automate some tests using the knowledge about chemical interactions we already have. The AI was trained to predict how toxic tens of thousands of unknown chemicals could be, based on previous animal tests, and the algorithm's results were shown to be as accurate as live animal tests. The algorithm can predict results from nine different tests, from skin corrosion to eye irritation, which authors say comprised 57% of all animal testing done in the EU in 2011. This isn't the first computer system to try to predict whether a chemical will be toxic, but the scale of data that the system is able to use is novel.

In April 2018, the Nobel Prize Inspiration Initiative and 3M hosted the lecture, Climate Change: Science and Policy with Dr. Mario Molina. Molina won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his scientific discovery of the chemistry of the stratospheric ozone layer and its susceptibility to human-made activities. He co-authored research in 1974 in Nature magazine on the threat to the ozone layer from chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gasses being used in spray cans. Molina has also served on the United States President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology from 1994 to 2000 and again in 2010-2016. "Science doesn't tell you what to do. Science isn't either good or bad so you can not give Nobel prizes in science to good people, you do that in principle for the science," said Molina.

Congress is finally turning its attention to Silicon Valley. And it's not hard to understand why: Technology impinges upon every part of our civic sphere. We've got police using AI to determine which neighborhoods to patrol, Facebook filtering the news, and automation eroding the job market. Smart policy could help society adapt. But to tackle these issues, congressfolk will first have to understand them.

All tools can be used for good or ill. Even a broom can be used to sweep the floor or hit someone over the head. The more powerful the tool, the greater the benefit or damage it can cause. The last few months have brought this into stark relief when it comes to computer-assisted facial recognition – the ability of a computer to recognize people's faces from a photo or through a camera. This technology can catalog your photos, help reunite families or potentially be misused and abused by private companies and public authorities alike. Facial recognition technology raises issues that go to the heart of fundamental human rights protections like privacy and freedom of expression. These issues heighten responsibility for tech companies that create these products.

Microsoft Corp., which has come under fire for a U.S. government contract that was said to involve facial recognition software, said it will more carefully consider contracts in this area and urged lawmakers to regulate the use of such artificial intelligence to prevent abuse. The company, one of the key makers of software capable of recognizing individual faces, said it will take steps to make those systems less prone to bias; develop new public principles to govern the technology; and will move more deliberately to sell its software and expertise in the area. While Microsoft noted that the tech industry bears responsibility for its products, the company argued that government action is also needed. "The only effective way to manage the use of technology by a government is for the government proactively to manage this use itself," Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith said Friday in a blog post. "And if there are concerns about how a technology will be deployed more broadly across society, the only way to regulate this broad use is for the government to do so. This in fact is what we believe is needed today -- a government initiative to regulate the proper use of facial recognition technology, informed first by a bipartisan and expert commission."

We are seemingly joined by Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan (their brand ambassador) during our visit to the BigBasket Offices to interview Subramaniam Mani, their Analytics Head. He believes that the major difference between the software and AI waves is that although India was slow to adopt software service as compared to America, this time around with the AI wave, adoption will be much faster and only slightly behind the leading countries. "This is the second wave. The software wave was 30 years ago. Folks in India realized that they've been able to scale software and I think AI / ML is an extension of software development." While software was often taught through books and in classrooms exclusively, many of the latest artificial intelligence approaches are available to learn online – along with huge suites of open-source tools (from scikit-learn to TensorFlow and beyond). Going in, we knew that one of the key advantages for India would, in fact, be the very IT and ITeS sectors which will make it easy for Indian tech providers to transition into AI services, given that well-developed ecosystems have evolved over the past 25 years in cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad.