"Policies for the future" and a promise to lead the next generation were among the electoral pledges the artificially intelligent candidate, who went by the name Michihito Matsuda, said it would implement. "Artificial intelligence will change Tama City," Matsuda's campaign slogan read and the claim clearly struck a chord with many residents as the robot garnered 4,000 votes in the race. However, Matsuda finished in third place in the election, which was comfortably won by the incumbent Hiroyuki Abe, NHK reports. Matsuda was the face of the campaign but the human brains behind the operation were high powered Japanese businessmen Tetsuzo Matsumoto, the vice president of Softbank, and Norio Murakami, former Google Japan representative, Otaquest reports. Despite these tech-savvy connections a robot identical to Matsuda's is still available for purchase online and the candidate's official website was pretty poorly designed and contained apparent coding errors.

Microsoft India's president, Anant Maheshwari shares his views on the impact of adoption of new technologies by medium and large sized companies. This is based on a survey by IDC Asia/Pacific survey in partnership with his company.

It is a set of preliminary recommendations, and not as detailed as perhaps the subject demanded or even some of the other task force committee reports on other subjects. It focuses specifically on three policy questions: 1) What are the areas the government should play a role? It could perhaps have tackled a couple of other exceedingly important questions. For example, what are the policies needed to turn India into an AI research powerhouse, and not merely an user of AI solutions? Or for that matter, how does one guard against the dark side of AI, a topic which is being debated by many of the world's technology titans as well as researchers.

Good afternoon and welcome to this hearing convened by the European Political Strategy Centre on a European Union Strategy for Artificial Intelligence. My name is Ann Mettler and I'm the Head of the European Political Strategy Centre, the EPSC, which is the European Commission's in-house think tank. I'm joined on my left by Mario Mariniello, Digital Adviser at the EPSC. This hearing is organised in order to contribute to the European Commission's internal reflection on Artificial Intelligence. There will be a communication on Artificial Intelligence, which will be published in April, and it will also be among the topics that EU leaders will discuss at an informal summit in Sofia, Bulgaria, in May.

Facebook will face a class action law suit in the wake of its privacy scandal, a US federal judge has ruled. Allegations of privacy violations emerged when it was revealed the app used a photo-scanning tool on users' images without their explicit consent. The facial recognition tool, launched in 2010, suggests names for people it identifies in photos uploaded by users. Under Illinois state law, the company could be fined $1,000 to $5,000 (£700 - £3,500) each time a person's image was used without consent. The technology was suspended for users in Europe in 2012 over privacy fears but is still live in the US and other regions worldwide.

During his presentation, Dr. Lupashin of ETH Zurich attached a dog leash to an aerial drone while declaring to the audience, "there has to be another way" of flying robots safely around people. Lupashin's creativity eventually led to the invention of Fotokite and one of the most successful Indiegogo campaigns. Since Lupashin's demo, there are now close to a hundred providers of drones on leashes from innovative startups to aftermarket solutions in order to restrain unmanned flying vehicles. Probably the best known enterprise solution is CyPhy Works which has raised more than $30 million. Last August, during President Trump's visit to his Golf Course in New Jersey, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deployed CyPhy's tethered drones to patrol the permitter. In a statement by DHS about their "spy in the sky program," the agency explained: "The Proof of Concept will help determine the potential future use of tethered Unmanned Aircraft System (sUAS) in supporting the Agency's protective mission.

Secret surveillance software created by a former Israeli intelligence officer is harvesting Facebook photos. The firm behind it is taking profile images from the social network, YouTube and other sites to build a huge facial recognition database. Its creators say the software could lead to the identification of terror suspects, captured in promotional and other material posted online. News of the controversial service is causing alarm among privacy activists as Facebook scrambles to deal with its ongoing data scandal. Secret surveillance software created by a former Israeli intelligence officer is harvesting Facebook photos. It was revealed last month the company shared the private data of up to 87 million users with the political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica. Face-Int is now owned by analytics firm Verint, who acquired it in 2017 from creators Terrogence, a surveillance company founded by onetime Israeli secret agent Shai Arbel. Both companies have reportedly supplied the US government and its security agencies, including the NSA, with cutting edge spy technologies. The facial recognition database is said to contain the facial profiles of thousands of terror suspects'harvested from such online sources as YouTube, Facebook and open and closed forums all over the globe', according to Terrogence's website. Experts are concerned that the company's efforts extend beyond this remit, however, and into the political realm. 'It raises the stakes of face recognition - it intensifies the potential negative consequences,' Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Forbes.

Cardboard cutouts of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg stand outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington as he testified before a Senate panel last week. Cardboard cutouts of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg stand outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington as he testified before a Senate panel last week. A federal judge in California has ruled that Facebook can be sued in a class-action lawsuit brought by users in Illinois who say the social network improperly used facial recognition technology on their uploaded photographs. The plaintiffs are three Illinois Facebook users who sued under a state law that says a private entity such as Facebook can't collect and store a person's biometric facial information without their written consent. The law, known as the Biometric Information Privacy Act, also says that information that uniquely identifies an individual is, in essence, their property.

The need for diverse development teams and truly representational data-sets to avoid biases being baked into AI algorithms is one of the core recommendations in a lengthy Lords committee report looking into the economic, ethical and social implications of artificial intelligence, and published today by the upper House of the UK parliament. "The main ways to address these kinds of biases are to ensure that developers are drawn from diverse gender, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds, and are aware of, and adhere to, ethical codes of conduct," the committee writes, chiming with plenty of extant commentary around algorithmic accountability. "It is essential that ethics take centre stage in AI's development and use," adds committee chairman, Lord Clement-Jones, in a statement. "The UK has a unique opportunity to shape AI positively for the public's benefit and to lead the international community in AI's ethical development, rather than passively accept its consequences." The report also calls for the government to take urgent steps to help foster "the creation of authoritative tools and systems for auditing and testing training datasets to ensure they are representative of diverse populations, and to ensure that when used to train AI systems they are unlikely to lead to prejudicial decisions" -- recommending a publicly funded challenge to incentivize the development of technologies that can audit and interrogate AIs.

IBM today announced the launch of its Adversarial Robustness Toolbox for AI developers. The open-source kit contains everything a machine learning programmer needs to attack their own deep learning neural networks (DNN) to ensure they're able to withstand real-world conditions. The toolbox comes in the form of a code library which includes attack agents, defense utilities, and benchmarking tools that allow developers to integrate baked-in resilience to adversarial attacks. The company says it's the first of its kind. One of the biggest challenges with some of the existing models to defend against adversarial AI is they are very platform specific.