As an accounting professional, your clients expect you to help them navigate a fast-changing business environment so they can continue to grow and prosper. The advice many accounting practices provide today include compliance, current tax laws, and how to keep cost structures in line. However, it is also critical to keep up with the current technologies that can transform both your client's business and your practice. There are three core technologies – artificial intelligence, blockchain, and the cloud– that have an impact in virtually every market. The challenge is, even though your clients are aware of these technologies, most are not yet prepared to invest in them.

The ability to understand and trust the fairness of model predictions, particularly when considering the outcomes of unprivileged groups, is critical to the deployment and adoption of machine learning systems. SHAP values provide a unified framework for interpreting model predictions and feature attribution but do not address the problem of fairness directly. In this work, we propose a new definition of fairness that emphasises the role of an external auditor and model explicability. To satisfy this definition, we develop a framework for mitigating model bias using regularizations constructed from the SHAP values of an adversarial surrogate model. We focus on the binary classification task with a single unprivileged group and link our fairness explicability constraints to classical statistical fairness metrics. We demonstrate our approaches using gradient and adaptive boosting on: a synthetic dataset, the UCI Adult (Census) dataset and a real-world credit scoring dataset. The models produced were fairer and performant.

There are 40 million people in slavery today. SDG 8.7 is a commitment to end modern slavery, with the ambition to reduce that number by 10,000 people every day. James Cockayne, Director, Centre for Policy Research, United Nations University, is confident that we are "nowhere near" that target. The reasons for this systemic and enduring failure are the result of the "mispricing" of labour, where true social costs are not quantified. Worse still, companies are rewarded for driving down their labour costs.

If artificial intelligence (AI) is truly our fasting moving technology, the law has been lagging far behind. Addressing the emerging legal issues requires an understanding of the technology and how it works. This column will continue to examine how AI functions and some of its legal implications.

To accommodate the diversity of infrastructures used for AI solutions, IBM has expanded support of its award-winning software beyond POWER architectures to include Intel platforms. To avoid confusion in the marketplace, IBM PowerAI Vision has been renamed IBM Visual Insights. Contact your IBM representative for the list of selected services available in your country, either as standard or customized offerings for the efficient installation, implementation, or integration of this product. IBM Support is your gateway to technical support tools and resources that are designed to help you save time and simplify support. IBM Support can help you find answers to questions, download fixes, troubleshoot, submit and track problem cases, and build skills. Learn and stay informed about the transformation of IBM Support, including new tools, new processes, and new capabilities, by going to the IBM Support Insider.

This intersectional group is disproportionately affected by instances of bias in both the design and application of AI, and they are also leading the fight to make new technologies more equitable for everyone. Intersectionality – the proposition that race, class, gender and other individual characteristics intersect in a way that impacts how a person is viewed, understood and treated – opens possibilities for deeper thinking about how injustices occur in everyday life. Kimberlé Crenshaw, a professor of law at Columbia and the University of California, Los Angeles, coined the term in 1989 in'A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics'. Crenshaw's work was rooted in Critical Race Theory – the belief that the structure of law and society are intrinsically racist – and she saw the failure to recognise the intersection of race and sex as part of that structure. In that essay, Crenshaw argues that black women, through being both black and female, suffer specific forms of discrimination that black men or white women may not.

Suppose you would like to know mortality rates for women during childbirth, by country, around the world. One option is the WomanStats Project, the website of an academic research effort investigating the links between the security and activities of nation-states, and the security of the women who live in them. The project, founded in 2001, meets a need by patching together data from around the world. Many countries are indifferent to collecting statistics about women's lives. But even where countries try harder to gather data, there are clear challenges to arriving at useful numbers -- whether it comes to women's physical security, property rights, and government participation, among many other issues.

As cities become more connected, construction companies will need to be aware of how transportation systems are evolving, requiring future municipalities to be built. This is where robotics and autonomous vehicles enter the equation, and offers big opportunities for cities. Technavio says the autonomous bus market, as an example, will grow by 2364 units during 2020 and 2024, which is a growth rate of 32%. At the end of last year, IDTechEx also predicted that that the robotaxi services will become a $2.5 trillion market by 2040. Further, if you were at CES earlier this year, then you know intelligent transportation systems and autonomous vehicles were big trends at the show and it is a topic that has been covered in depth over on Constructech TV.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a new exciting opportunity to better protect European consumers. As the European Commission calls for a human-centric AI, we see exciting developments which put the welfare of users and citizens at the heart of new AI tools. During this CERRE Breakfast Conversation, a new promising application to screen the compliance of consumer contracts with EU law will be presented. Policy-makers and stakeholders will discuss how to reinforce EU consumer protection policy with AI. This event will bring together key actors from the digital sector, regulatory authorities, policy-makers and academic experts for a morning of stimulating discussions.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Terminator" character said "I'll be back," this probably wasn't what he had in mind. The actor and former governor of California is suing a robotics company for $10 million, after the business decided to use his name and likeness. Schwarzenegger's lawsuit against the tech startup, called Promobot, alleges that the robot lookalike... "diminishes his hard-earned and well-deserved reputation as a major motion picture star," according to TMZ. The robot isn't just meant to look like Schwarzenegger, it also has his name. Promobot advertises the creation on its site as a "companion robot," one of several that emulates the appearance of world-famous celebrities.