Police should be banned from using blanket facial-recognition surveillance to identify people not suspected of crimes. Certain private databases of people's faces for identification systems ought to be outlawed, too. In a vote on Wednesday, 377 MEPs backed a resolution restricting law enforcement's use of facial recognition, 248 voted against, and 62 abstained. "AI-based identification systems already misidentify minority ethnic groups, LGBTI people, seniors and women at higher rates, which is particularly concerning in the context of law enforcement and the judiciary," reads a statement from the parliament. "To ensure that fundamental rights are upheld when using these technologies, algorithms should be transparent, traceable and sufficiently documented, MEPs ask. Where possible, public authorities should use open-source software in order to be more transparent."

We introduce the novel task of detecting sustainability initiatives in company reports. Given a full report, the aim is to automatically identify mentions of practical activities that a company has performed in order to tackle specific societal issues. As a single initiative can often be described over multiples sentences, new methods for identifying continuous sentence spans needs to be developed. We release a new dataset of company reports in which the text has been manually annotated with sustainability initiatives. We also evaluate different models for initiative detection, introducing a novel aggregation and evaluation methodology. Our proposed architecture uses sequences of five consecutive sentences to account for contextual information when making classification decisions at the individual sentence level.

Merging datafiles containing information on overlapping sets of entities is a challenging task in the absence of unique identifiers, and is further complicated when some entities are duplicated in the datafiles. Most approaches to this problem have focused on linking two files assumed to be free of duplicates, or on detecting which records in a single file are duplicates. However, it is common in practice to encounter scenarios that fit somewhere in between or beyond these two settings. We propose a Bayesian approach for the general setting of multifile record linkage and duplicate detection. We use a novel partition representation to propose a structured prior for partitions that can incorporate prior information about the data collection processes of the datafiles in a flexible manner, and extend previous models for comparison data to accommodate the multifile setting. We also introduce a family of loss functions to derive Bayes estimates of partitions that allow uncertain portions of the partitions to be left unresolved. The performance of our proposed methodology is explored through extensive simulations. Code implementing the methodology is available at https://github.com/aleshing/multilink .

Artificial superintelligence (ASI) has the potential to be incredibly powerful and poses many questions as to how we appropriately manage it. Many people are worried that machines will break free from their shackles and go rogue. The Three Laws of Robotics, first introduced in Isaac Asimov's 1942 short story "Runaround," are as follows: Organizations should be required to provide their customers with information concerning the AI system's purpose, function, limitations and impact. In order to develop a comprehensible AI, public engagement and the exercise of individuals' rights should be guaranteed and encouraged. AI development should not be a secret undertaking by commercial companies.

The European Commission announced first-of-its-kind legislation regulating the use of artificial intelligence in April. This unleashed criticism that the regulations could slow AI innovation, hamstringing Europe in its competition with the U.S. and China for leadership in AI. For example, Andrew McAfee wrote an article titled "EU proposals to regulate AI are only going to hinder innovation." Anticipating this criticism and mindful of the example of GDPR, where Europe's thought-leadership position didn't necessarily translate into data-related innovation, the EC has tried to address AI innovation directly by publishing a new Coordinated Plan on AI. Released in conjunction with the proposed regulations, the plan is full of initiatives intended to help the EU become a leader in AI technology.

The European Union has taken a further step towards banning the use of artificial intelligence to carry out mass surveillance, rule on court cases or predict whether individuals will commit crimes. New legislation that would introduce strict controls on AI to prevent racial, gender or age bias in particular "high risk" areas such as law enforcement is currently working its way through the European Parliament, but a report by the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs recently proposed even …

Uber is facing further claims for compensation over racial discrimination from drivers who say they had been falsely dismissed because of malfunctioning face recognition technology. The claims have emerged after Uber introduced an automated system to check the ID of drivers operating its services in April last year. Each time a driver checks in for work, they must take a selfie picture that is then compared, using an automated system, to one on their Uber account profile. Pa Edrissa Manjang, who worked for the Uber Eats takeaway courier service in London, has launched an employment tribunal claim alleging his account was illegally deactivated. He says the automated facial-verification software wrongly decided his selfie pictures were of someone else on several occasions.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a rapidly growing part of our daily (business) life. As exciting and groundbreaking its possibilities are, the technology can also come with major risks. To protect citizens against misuse, the EU this spring proposed a draft legislation impacting basically every party that develops AI-applications. Our daily life is becoming more and more intertwined with AI, a catch-all term for a machine or system that makes decisions, based on large amounts of data, and improves itself while learning. The algorithms that recommend new information based on your search behaviour on social media, the face recognition on photos on your smartphone, or computers that select job applicants.

For decades, big tech companies have leaned on a little-known law to avoid being held responsible for some of the most controversial content on their platforms -- Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. They have invoked it repeatedly in court cases to dismiss potentially costly lawsuits over messages, videos and other content created by users. Under the law, tech companies can't be sued for trying to do the right thing, though the federal government can still sue platforms over criminal content. The original intent behind Section 230 was to nurture startups and entrepreneurs. One of its key architects, Sen. Ron Wyden, has said that without the law, "all online media would face an onslaught of bad-faith lawsuits and pressure campaigns from the powerful."

The Court of Appeal has ruled that an artificial intelligence machine cannot qualify as an "inventor" for the purposes of Sections 7 and 13 of the Patents Act because it is not a person. Further, in determining whether a person had the right to apply for a patent under Section 7(2)(b), there was no rule of law that new intangible property produced by existing tangible property was the property of the owner of the tangible property, and certainly no rule that property in an invention created by a machine was owned by the owner of the machine. This was an appeal by the owner of an artificial intelligence machine against a decision upholding the respondent Comptroller's refusal of his patent applications in respect of inventions generated by the machine.The appellant had submitted two patent applications designating an artificial intelligence machine (DABUS), as the inventor. DABUS stands for "Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience", an artificial neural system owned by Dr Thaler. The first invention was entitled "Food Container" and concerned the shape of parts of packaging for food.