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Government must tread carefully on AI ethics

#artificialintelligence

The UK government stands to benefit from incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) and related data science techniques into its processes, but must tread carefully when it comes to accountability and transparency, according to the government's chief scientific advisor Mark Walport. Corporate E-mail Address: This email address is already registered. By submitting my Email address I confirm that I have read and accepted the Terms of Use and Declaration of Consent. Corporate E-mail Address: This email address is already registered. This email address is already registered.


Three Sentences That Will Blow Your Mind

#artificialintelligence

Facebook will "cure, prevent, or manage all diseases in our children's lifetime." A new MIT computer responds to human emotions with almost 90% accuracy. NASA and Made in Space are going to turn asteroids into spaceships." Facebook will "cure, prevent, or manage all diseases in our children's lifetime." A new MIT computer responds to human emotions with almost 90% accuracy. NASA and Made in Space are going to turn asteroids into spaceships."


Artificial Intelligence Gets On the Map: First Hearing at A Senate Committee

#artificialintelligence

In October, the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy released a report, Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence, and hosted the White House Frontiers Conference, as a culmination of a year long set of activities seeking public comment on artificial intelligence and its policy implications. Tomorrow, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation is convening a hearing on the dawn of artificial intelligence. The witness list looks august and I am looking forward to talking through the content here afterwards.


A MIT computer scientist created a Donald Trump Twitter bot -- and it's oddly realistic

#artificialintelligence

Donald Trump has mastered the art of the one-liner. The US presidential candidate now has a Twitter bot twin that tries to mimic his signature soundbites. The bot tweets Trump-like statements using an artificial intelligence algorithm based on hours of the candidate's debate speech transcripts. "Trump's language tends to be more simplistic, so I figured that, as a modeling problem, he would be the most manageable candidate to study," says Bradley Hayes, the bot's creator and a researcher at MIT's Computer Science and and Artificial Intelligence Lab, in a statement. Hayes calls the bot DeepDrumpf, which refers to John Oliver's recent segment about Trump's ancestral name. Take a look at a few of DeepTrumpf's hilarious, bizarre, and oddly poetic tweets.


You Should Have the Right to Inspect Google's Robo-Car Tests

WIRED

Driverless cars are set to improve, disrupt, and challenge the way we travel--someday. As of now, self-driving cars aren't available for widespread use, as they aren't sufficiently developed or safe to be commercially sold. It may take decades before they are able to infiltrate the market or gain enough public acceptance to be successful. Seth Birnbaum is CEO of EverQuote, the largest online auto insurance marketplace in the US. Even though autonomous vehicles haven't gone mainstream, US government regulators published their automated vehicle policy in September, and many states are working to develop regulations for autonomous cars.


Investigatory Powers Bill: Politicians exempt themselves from new wide-ranging spying laws

The Independent - Tech

Politicians have exempted themselves from Britain's new wide-ranging spying laws. The Investigatory Powers Act, which has just passed into law, brings some of the most extreme and invasive surveillance powers ever given to spies in a democratic state. But protections against those spying powers have been given to MPs. Most of the strongest powers in the new law require that those using them must be given a warrant. That applies to people wanting to see someone's full internet browsing history, for instance, which is one of the things that will be collected under the new law.


How Video Games Change Us

Slate

The release of the game Battlefield 1 last month illustrates how video games contribute to this creeping unreality. The first-person shooter is set in World War I. All wars are horrors, but this particular war, the founding trauma of the 20th century, is widely regarded as nothing else. The Great War is known 100 years later for three things: its pointlessness, its lethality (57,000 British soldiers died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme alone), and the grueling trench warfare on the western front. Battlefield 1's producer, EA DICE, takes pains to acknowledge the unrelenting bleakness of the war, presenting the game's thinly drawn characters as average people caught up in tragic global events and left haunted by them.


The Dawn of Artificial Intelligence

#artificialintelligence

WASHINGTON - U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), chairman of the Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, will convene a hearing on Wednesday, November 30, 2016, at 2:30 p.m. on "The Dawn of Artificial Intelligence." The hearing will conduct a broad overview of the state of artificial intelligence, including policy implications and effects on commerce. On October 12, 2016, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a report entitled, Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence. The report outlined opportunities for artificial intelligence, including recommendations on how the technology can be used to advance social good and improve government operations. The report also proposed 23 policy recommendations and a companion strategic plan that identified priorities for federally-funded research and development in artificial intelligence.


You will love the future economy, thanks to robots and AI

#artificialintelligence

Next time you stop for gas at a self-serve pump, say hello to the robot in front of you. Its life story can tell you a lot about the robot economy roaring toward us like an EF5 tornado on the prairie. Yeah, your automated gas pump killed a lot of jobs over the years, but its biography might give you hope that the coming wave of automation driven by artificial intelligence (AI) will turn out better for almost all of us than a lot of people seem to think. The first crude version of an automated gas-delivering robot appeared in 1964 at a station in Westminster, Colorado. Short Stop convenience store owner John Roscoe bought an electric box that let a clerk inside activate any of the pumps outside. Self-serve pumps didn't catch on until the 1970s, when pump-makers added automation that let customers pay at the pump, and over the next 30 years, stations across the nation installed these task-specific robots and fired attendants. By the 2000s, the gas attendant job had all but disappeared.


When your data science activities can send you to prison...

@machinelearnbot

Many products or published articles based on data science are heavily regulated, and illegal to perform or publish or sell without a special license, especially in US. You may be doing research and development on a topic considered as classified by the US government. Steganography (the art and science of hiding secret messages in images) Factoring the product of two large primes (cryptography application) Algorithms to reverse-engineer some systems (e.g.to check if a credit card number is valid) Distribution of encoding algorithms that can be used and customized by anyone, even offline Selling or designing home-made, backdoor-free, weapon-grade encryption products abroad or even in US Manufacturing and selling weapon-grade random numbers, for instance based on the digits of some transcendental numbers, using very fast algorithms (have you ever wondered why Excel random numbers were so poor - maybe they are very poor on purpose, not because those who designed them are ignorant) Algorithms to reverse-engineer some systems (e.g.to check if a credit card number is valid) Depending on how strong your algorithms are, it could be classified material, and you might not be aware of it until you get a letter from the NSA (after all, if you don't have access to classified information, there's no way for you to know whether what you do is classified or not). Designing algorithms, trained on data, to beat the IRS, using legal techniques only Publishing a list of prices for medical procedures (with price range), broken down per hospital, based on data collected online from patients, with their consent Gambling or bets that involve guessing econometric indicators, such as stock prices or indices. While this is different from a lottery in the sense that winning is based on good data science rather than pure luck (lottery is another business that is great for a data scientist, although universally illegal), it might still be illegal depending on your jurisdiction.