The right to due process was inscribed into the US constitution with a pen. A new report from leading researchers in artificial intelligence cautions it is now being undermined by computer code. Public agencies responsible for areas such as criminal justice, health, and welfare increasingly use scoring systems and software to steer or make decisions on life-changing events like granting bail, sentencing, enforcement, and prioritizing services. The report from AI Now, a research institute at NYU that studies the social implications of artificial intelligence, says too many of those systems are opaque to the citizens they hold power over. The AI Now report calls for agencies to refrain from what it calls "black box" systems opaque to outside scrutiny. Kate Crawford, a researcher at Microsoft and cofounder of AI Now, says citizens should be able to know how systems making decisions about them operate and have been tested or validated.

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), is a division of the American Defense Department that investigates new technologies. It has for some time regarded the current generation of AI technologies as important in the future. It has been in the forefront of AI research in image recognition, speech recognition and generation, robotics, autonomous vehicles, medical diagnostic systems, and more. However, DARPA is well aware that despite the high level of problem-solving capabilities of AI programs – they lack explainability. AI deep learning algorithms use complex mathematics that is very difficult for human users to understand or comprehend.

After six years in space, China's first orbital station, the Tiangong-1 (aka the "Heavenly Palace") has finally outlived its operational limits and begun its descent back to Earth. It's expected to re-enter the atmosphere in a few months, whereupon a majority of the 9.3-ton station should burn up before reaching the surface. This is how defunct satellites are supposed to be disposed of. Unfortunately, until very recently, that hasn't often been the case. For the past 50 years, we've been filling Low Earth Orbit with defunct satellites, launch vehicle upper stages, and various bits of broken spacecraft (including frozen water, coolant and paint flecks).

Though it probably doesn't feel this way to those who spend their lives running between meetings, dealing with customers, or negotiating with suppliers, the UK isn't working hard enough. UK productivity--how much all of us produce over a year divided by how many hours we spend doing it--lags France, Germany, and the U.S. by up to 30%, according to the Office of National Statistics. And it's not just the G7's most productive three countries that outperform the UK. Irish, Spanish, Belgian, and Dutch workers all significantly outperform their UK counterparts. We should be freeing people to focus on adding value, not restricting them to transactional tasks that are better and more quickly performed by automation.

In the high-stakes contest to land Amazon's new headquarters, many consider Boston to be a serious contender competing against other big technology hubs around the United States and Canada. But it's also competing against its neighbors: Several smaller Massachusetts cities -- along with Rhode Island and southern New Hampshire -- are each submitting their own pitches to Amazon, using proximity to Boston's tech talent as a major draw. "Talent really is the unquestionable, huge priority," said Brian Dacey, president of the Cambridge Innovation Center and a former Boston economic development director who says the region could make a strong case for luring the Seattle e-commerce company. Local research strengths -- such as in artificial intelligence and robotics -- are important to Amazon's business model, he said. The Seattle company is promising $5 billion of investment and 50,000 jobs in whichever North American region it chooses to build a second headquarters.

While football fans and labor experts ponder whether Colin Kaepernick found a smoking gun to bolster his collusion case against the National Football League, the still-unemployed quarterback is pointing to a central figure in the case: President Trump. Trump, according to the text of Kaepernick's grievance complaint, "has been an organizing force" in the joint decision by the league's 32 owners to deny the quarterback even a tryout. "Owners have described the Trump administration as causing paradigm shifts in their views toward NFL players." The complaint was originally made public by ABC News. Kaepernick may have a point, since Trump injected himself personally into the case and openly denigrated NFL players who supported Kaepernick.

Canada is celebrating a technological milestone after its first official self-driving car test on public roads last week. The street test was conducted in Ottawa's west end using technology developed by Blackberry. The city of Ottawa announced a partnership with Blackberry's QNX team, the operating system arm of the company which is developing self-driving vehicle software. "With support from BlackBerry QNX and its Autonomous Vehicle Innovation Center and by working closely with all our partners, we are facilitating smart initiatives and research, and fuelling innovation and job creation in Ottawa," said the city's mayor, Jim Watson in a press release. The test was not run in real-life conditions as the roads were closed during the demonstration.

The post-disaster environment poses immense challenges for crisis response teams tasked with assessing the extent of the damage as quickly as possible, often over thousands of square miles. These teams need a sound and reliable understanding of the situation on the ground, to quickly and safely provide the right help to the people affected. Citizen scientists from around the world can play a key role in delivering this information to emergency responders on the ground. In the wake of hurricanes Irma and Maria, which swept across the Caribbean during September 2017, an ongoing collaboration between the Zooniverse (an online citizen science platform), the University of Oxford, and NGO Rescue Global, has enlisted thousands of volunteers worldwide to analyse satellite-based information. The end result is a series of maps that highlight affected areas, providing a robust source of information which helps Rescue Global and the disaster relief community to generate more detailed mapping, and conduct needs assessments, aid deliveries and evacuations on the ground. When Rescue Global began their Hurricane Irma response operation in early September, the Planetary Response Network, a collaboration between the Zooniverse and Oxford University, was activated quickly and began sourcing satellite images of the disaster-affected areas from data providers Planet, Digital Globe, NASA and ESA.

Members of the US Supreme Court pose for a group photograph at the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC. In 2007, a group of California Institute of Technology scientists working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory filed suit against the venerated space agency. Many of the scientists had worked on NASA missions and research for years as outside employees. As part of efforts to tighten security measures after 9/11, in 2004 NASA started requiring outside workers to submit to the same kind of background checks used for federal employees, including questions about drug use. The scientists, some of the nation's best and brightest, protested and resisted for years, and finally went to court to argue that the checks violated their privacy rights. The case ultimately made it to the US Supreme Court, where, in 2011, the justices unanimously sided with NASA. Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the opinion, made a central point of noting that such background checks had long been commonplace in the private sector. Alito even cited a very specific statistic: 88 percent of all private companies in the country conduct such checks, he wrote. It was a powerful claim in a decision with real consequences for American workers. Alito, it turns out, had borrowed the statistic from a brief filed in the case by the National Association of Professional Background Screeners. ProPublica asked the association for the source of its statistic. The association offered a variety of explanations, none of which proved true, and ultimately conceded it could not produce evidence that the 88 percent figure was accurate or say where it came from. The decisions of the Supreme Court are rich with argument, history, some flashes of fine writing, and, of course, legal judgments of great import for all Americans.

How do you see the world adapting/evolving in an AI environment? In terms of computer applications, we will see increasing application and adoption of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. We already see this in shopping recommendations, games, and large social networks. Voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant use ML to perform natural language processing and classification to respond appropriately. Such techniques will make interacting with devices increasingly seamless, which will ultimately make technology easier to use while making humans more efficient in finding and managing information.