The precision and promise of a data-driven society has stumbled these past years, serving up some disturbing--even damning--results: facial recognition software that can't recognize Black faces, human resource software that rejects women's job applications, talking computers that spit racist vitriol. "Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it," George Santayana said. But most artificial intelligence applications and data-driven tools learn history aplenty--they just don't avoid its pitfalls. Instead, though touted as a step toward the future, these systems generally learn the past in order to replicate it in the present, repeating historical failures with ruthless, and mindless, efficiency. As Joy Buolamwini says, when it comes to algorithmic decision-making, "data is destiny."

Federated Bayesian learning offers a principled framework for the definition of collaborative training algorithms that are able to quantify epistemic uncertainty and to produce trustworthy decisions. Upon the completion of collaborative training, an agent may decide to exercise her legal "right to be forgotten", which calls for her contribution to the jointly trained model to be deleted and discarded. This paper studies federated learning and unlearning in a decentralized network within a Bayesian framework. It specifically develops federated variational inference (VI) solutions based on the decentralized solution of local free energy minimization problems within exponential-family models and on local gossip-driven communication. The proposed protocols are demonstrated to yield efficient unlearning mechanisms.

With the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and related technologies in our daily lives, fear and anxiety about their misuse as well as the hidden biases in their creation have led to a demand for regulation to address such issues. Yet blindly regulating an innovation process that is not well understood, may stifle this process and reduce benefits that society may gain from the generated technology, even under the best intentions. In this paper, starting from a baseline model that captures the fundamental dynamics of a race for domain supremacy using AI technology, we demonstrate how socially unwanted outcomes may be produced when sanctioning is applied unconditionally to risk-taking, i.e. potentially unsafe, behaviours. As an alternative to resolve the detrimental effect of over-regulation, we propose a voluntary commitment approach wherein technologists have the freedom of choice between independently pursuing their course of actions or establishing binding agreements to act safely, with sanctioning of those that do not abide to what they pledged. Overall, this work reveals for the first time how voluntary commitments, with sanctions either by peers or an institution, leads to socially beneficial outcomes in all scenarios envisageable in a short-term race towards domain supremacy through AI technology. These results are directly relevant for the design of governance and regulatory policies that aim to ensure an ethical and responsible AI technology development process.

That's part of our job, is to show people that the players on the team, even if some of them don't speak the best English and they're Korean national players, they're living here in the U.S. now. They're like you and me, they're like everybody else,

Modern enterprises are inundated with data; however, not all data is usable as is for machine learning. Though an organization may have millions of data points, it could still have data struggles that stunt machine learning. Turning to synthetic data for machine learning can boost privacy, democratize data, minimize bias in data sets and reduce costs. More broadly, real data and synthetic data tend to be used in combination. "I can't think of any project in the AI space where you wouldn't be able to get a better outcome by leveraging synthetic data," said Kjell Carlsson, principal analyst at Forrester Research.

Over the past months, federal law enforcement has used a wide variety of surveillance technologies to track down rioters who participated in the 6 January attack on the US Capitol building – demonstrating rising surveillance across the nation. Recent news coverage of the riot has largely focused on facial recognition – and how private citizens and local law enforcement officials have conducted their own facial recognition investigations in an attempt to assist the FBI with the help of social media. But charging documents reveal that the FBI has relied on a variety of other technologies, including license plate readers, police body cameras and cellphone tracking. And civil rights watchdogs like the ACLU are concerned that the same technologies used to surveil the rioters could impede protesters exercising their first amendment rights. The Capitol riot was an exceptional event – marking the first time in centuries that insurrectionists breached the center of the US federal government.

Register for free or grab a discounted VIP pass today. Tax compliance platform Blue Dot (previously VatBox) today announced it has raised $32 million, bringing its total raised to over $96 million. The firm says it will put the funds toward product R&D and expanding the size of its globlal workforce. The tax compliance burden for enterprises can be significant. In 2019, half of companies responding to an EY Americas survey indicated that their biggest compliance challenge would be staying current on legislative and regulatory developments.

Azure's machine learning capabilities enhanced Clover's company-wide digital transformation initiative and provided the company with data that uncovered major inefficiencies in inventory, transportation and distribution sectors. For example, at the company's distribution centers, Azure's machine learning and data analysis capabilities help minimize order assembly by determining what products and how much to stock in each warehouse and where best to stock products within the warehouse. Thanks to the technology, processing teams nearly tripled their efficiency.

When Michelle K. Lee, '88, SM '89, was sworn in as the director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Agency in 2015, she saw an opportunity. The agency was a bit behind on digital transformation and adopting things like cloud computing and artificial intelligence, but the organization had mountains of data -- like more than 10 million patents the office has issued since opening in 1802, and 600,000 patent applications received each year. Lee led a project to use data and analytics to modernize the agency, such as implementing AI solutions to improve patent searches and the speed and quality of patents issued. By gathering data about how patent examiners make decisions, and determining outlying behavior, the office could also pinpoint areas in which examiners would benefit from targeted training. "If the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, a 200-plus-year-old governmental agency, has a machine learning opportunity, so too does every organization," Lee said during a presentation at EmTech Digital, hosted by MIT Technology Review.

Confidence in the regulatory environment is crucial to enable responsible AI innovation and foster the social acceptance of these powerful new technologies. One notable source of uncertainty is, however, that the existing legal liability system is unable to assign responsibility where a potentially harmful conduct and/or the harm itself are unforeseeable, yet some instantiations of AI and/or the harms they may trigger are not foreseeable in the legal sense. The unpredictability of how courts would handle such cases makes the risks involved in the investment and use of AI difficult to calculate with confidence, creating an environment that is not conducive to innovation and may deprive society of some benefits AI could provide. To tackle this problem, we propose to draw insights from financial regulatory best practices and establish a system of AI guarantee schemes. We envisage the system to form part of the broader market-structuring regulatory frameworks, with the primary function to provide a readily available, clear, and transparent funding mechanism to compensate claims that are either extremely hard or impossible to realize via conventional litigation. We propose it to be at least partially industry-funded. Funding arrangements should depend on whether it would pursue other potential policy goals aimed more broadly at controlling the trajectory of AI innovation to increase economic and social welfare worldwide. Because of the global relevance of the issue, rather than focusing on any particular legal system, we trace relevant developments across multiple jurisdictions and engage in a high-level, comparative conceptual debate around the suitability of the foreseeability concept to limit legal liability. The paper also refrains from confronting the intricacies of the case law of specific jurisdictions for now and—recognizing the importance of this task—leaves this to further research in support of the legal system’s incremental adaptation to the novel challenges of present and future AI technologies. This article appears in the special track on AI and Society.