While conventional ranking systems focus solely on maximizing the utility of the ranked items to users, fairness-aware ranking systems additionally try to balance the exposure for different protected attributes such as gender or race. To achieve this type of group fairness for ranking, we derive a new ranking system based on the first principles of distributional robustness. We formulate a minimax game between a player choosing a distribution over rankings to maximize utility while satisfying fairness constraints against an adversary seeking to minimize utility while matching statistics of the training data. We show that our approach provides better utility for highly fair rankings than existing baseline methods.

Given the fact of a case, Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) involves a series of sub-tasks such as predicting violated law articles, charges and term of penalty. We propose leveraging a unified text-to-text Transformer for LJP, where the dependencies among sub-tasks can be naturally established within the auto-regressive decoder. Compared with previous works, it has three advantages: (1) it fits in the pretraining pattern of masked language models, and thereby can benefit from the semantic prompts of each sub-task rather than treating them as atomic labels, (2) it utilizes a single unified architecture, enabling full parameter sharing across all sub-tasks, and (3) it can incorporate both classification and generative sub-tasks. We show that this unified transformer, albeit pretrained on general-domain text, outperforms pretrained models tailored specifically for the legal domain. Through an extensive set of experiments, we find that the best order to capture dependencies is different from human intuitions, and the most reasonable logical order for humans can be sub-optimal for the model. We further include two more auxiliary tasks: court view generation and article content prediction, showing they can not only improve the prediction accuracy, but also provide interpretable explanations for model outputs even when an error is made. With the best configuration, our model outperforms both previous SOTA and a single-tasked version of the unified transformer by a large margin.

On Dec 13-17, 2021 the UN in Geneva will debate a legally binding outright ban on AI autonomous weapons. I am terrified that governments already have immunity under the law to use these weapons and that governments would support continued use as a strategic advantage over other nations. This is literally the genesis of SkyNet. Just like biological weapons, it would be morally absurd to allow lethal autonomous weapons in military, commercial or personal applications. We need to direct our scarce AI resources to saving lives, health care, solving climate change, housing, equity and an array of other critical issues.

Clearview's controversial facial recognition technology is getting closer to being patented by the US Patent and Trademark Office. The USPTO has given Clearview a "notice of allowance", a sign that the startup's patent application will be approved once it pays administrative costs, Politico reported. Clearview said it has scraped ten billion photos from public social media accounts. Although companies like Instagram and Twitter disapprove, Clearview has continued to download these images without permission. Now, its methods and software are may be officially patented. Clearview's application describes a "downloading by a web crawler facial images of individuals and personal information associated therewith; and storing the downloaded facial images and associated personal information in the database."

This week, the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on the future of work, a special interest group of members of parliament in the U.K., said that the monitoring of workers through algorithms is damaging to employees' mental health and needs to be regulated through legislation. This legislation, they said, could ensure that companies evaluate the effect of "performance-driven" guidelines, like queue monitoring in supermarkets, while providing employees the means to fight back against perceived violations of privacy. "Pervasive monitoring and target-setting technologies, in particular, are associated with pronounced negative impacts on mental and physical wellbeing as workers experience the extreme pressure of constant, real-time micromanagement and automated assessment," wrote the APPG members in a report. "[A new algorithms act would establish] a clear direction to ensure AI puts people first." The trend toward remote and hybrid work has prompted some companies to increase their use of monitoring technologies -- ostensibly to ensure that employees remain on task.

New York City has a new law on the books--one of the boldest measures of its kind in the country--that aims to curb hiring bias that can occur when businesses use artificial intelligence tools to screen out job candidates. Employers in the city will be banned from using automated employment decision tools to screen job candidates, unless the technology has been subject to a "bias audit" conducted a year before the use of the tool. The New York City Council passed the measure on Nov. 10. Without the signature from Mayor Bill de Blasio, it "lapses" into law after 30 days, which falls on Friday. The mayor said he supports the law.

Activision Blizzard is facing criticism for discouraging labor organizing after the video game giant wrote an email to employees imploring them to "take time to consider the consequences" of pushing ahead with an effort to unionize. Brian Bulatao, a former Trump administration official who is now the chief administrative officer at Activision Blizzard, sent an email to the company's 9,500 employees on Friday addressing a campaign led by the Communications Workers of America to organize the workplace. The company behind video games like "World of Warcraft," "Call of Duty" and "Candy Crush" has been engulfed in crisis since July, when California's civil rights agency sued over an alleged "frat boy" workplace culture where sexual harassment allegedly runs rampant. The suit also claimed women are paid less than their male counterparts. In his companywide note, Bulatao said employees' forming a union is not the most productive way to reshape workplace culture.

It may be smart, but it's not that clever. Artificial intelligence is nothing without human input. The algorithms that drive AI rely on the expertise of programmers and it's still no more than a tool – albeit a powerful one – that scientists and engineers can use to solve problems. Yet this is not to say that AI isn't the fastest-growing deep technology in the world, with the potential to transform people's lives and boost nations' economies. Facilitating AI innovation has even become a priority for the UK government, as laid out in the National AI Strategy it published in September.

Sign up for the daily Marketplace newsletter to make sense of the most important business and economic news. When a new law in New York City takes effect at the start of 2023, employers won't be allowed to use artificial intelligence to screen job candidates unless the tech has gone through an audit to check for bias. The potential for algorithmic discrimination in hiring has been the target of state laws in Illinois and Maryland. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission also recently formed a working group to study the issue. The internet has made applying for jobs easier than ever, but it's also made the process less human, said Joseph Fuller at Harvard Business School. "When you open the faucet, all of a sudden a lot of applications started coming in, and no one's gonna hit print 250 times," he said.

A ghostwriter is someone who writes songs for an artist but is behind the scenes. Discovering that your favourite artist is not actually coming up with that song by themselves is a tough reality check for many pop music fans. In the current industry where there are legal battles fought every day regarding the origins of a song and other intellectual property rights issues, this stunning statistic highlights truly how difficult it is to write a hit song completely alone. As you might expect this only drives up the demand for hiring ghostwriters. As of March 2021, an average of 60,000 songs were being uploaded to Spotify each day.