How to protect international human rights and the commercial interests of businesses in such collaborative settings where AI tools are increasingly being installed at critical nodes in both public and private decision-making processes? Which principles should underpin the production and use of these (new) 'raw' materials?

MELVILLE, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Verint Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: VRNT), The Customer Engagement Company, today announced it has been named a leader by industry analyst firm Ovum in Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) solutions in a comparison report, Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting an Intelligent Virtual Assistant Solution, 2020-21*. Reviewing IVAs that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to provide natural, human-like interactions with consumers, the report concludes the new tools "make a massive difference to customer engagements" compared with legacy, non-intelligent IVAs. Verint Intelligent Virtual AssistantTM--part of Verint Customer Engagement Cloud portfolio--is among the best, according to the report. "The strides that leading vendors have made in IVAs in recent years are impressive," says Ovum Distinguished Analyst, Michael Azoff, author of the report. "In the vendors' customer use cases we studied, for example, it was typical to hear of million-dollar range cost savings by introducing IVAs (calculated as cost per call), bringing ROI within the first year."

Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That tells CBS correspondent Errol Barnett that the First Amendment allows his company to scrape the internet for people's photos. Google and YouTube have sent a cease-and-desist letter to Clearview AI, the facial recognition company that has been scraping billions of photos off the internet and using it to help more than 600 police departments identify people within seconds. That follows a similar action by Twitter, which sent Clearview AI a cease-and-desist letter for its data scraping in January. The letter from Google-owned YouTube was first seen by CBS News. (Note: CBS News and CNET share the same parent company, ViacomCBS.) The CEO of Clearview AI, a controversial and secretive facial recognition startup, is defending his company's massive database of searchable faces, saying in an interview on CBS This Morning Wednesday that it's his First Amendment right to collect public photos.

A Dutch court has ordered the immediate halt of an automated surveillance system for detecting welfare fraud because it violates human rights, in a judgment likely to resonate well beyond the Netherlands. The case was seen as an important legal challenge to the controversial but growing use by governments around the world of artificial intelligence (AI) and risk modelling in administering welfare benefits and other core services. Campaigners say such "digital welfare states" – developed often without consultation, and operated secretively and without adequate oversight – amount to spying on the poor, breaching privacy and human rights norms and unfairly penalising the most vulnerable. The UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, applauded the verdict and said it was "a clear victory for all those who are justifiably concerned about the serious threats digital welfare systems pose for human rights". The decision "sets a strong legal precedent for other courts to follow", he added.

Campus Queries is a series in which Daily Bruin readers and staff present science-related questions for UCLA professors and experts to answer. Q: What is artificial intelligence? A: Artificial intelligence is emulating a task on a computer that's easy for a human, said Judea Pearl, a researcher and UCLA computer science professor. Home assistants like Amazon's Alexa talk to their users the way people talk to each other, and many media portrayals of AI, like Skynet from the "Terminator" franchise, depict them as out to dominate humanity. Despite the range of intelligence displayed by AI in the real world and fiction, the larger question of what makes a computer truly intelligent remains.

An algorithm deployed across the United States is now known to underestimate the health needs of black patients1. The algorithm uses health-care costs as a proxy for health needs. But black patients' health-care costs have historically been lower because systemic racism has impeded their access to treatment -- not because they are healthier. This example illustrates how machine learning and artificial intelligence can maintain and amplify inequity. Most algorithms exploit crude correlations in data.

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Legal technology leader DISCO today announced a significant update to DISCO Analytics Suite that transforms how artificial intelligence (AI) can be leveraged across all of an organization's cases. DISCO Analytics Suite now includes cross-matter AI, which empowers legal teams to leverage all of their work product from past and ongoing matters at the start of every new case. Previously, AI models were case-specific, with learnings and predictions built on how documents were tagged in a single matter. With each new case, legal teams were forced to tag documents and build new models from scratch. With DISCO's cross-matter AI, organizations can now import AI models at the beginning of every case that are powered by the tagging decisions of previous matters.

The world's tech powers are sending giant sums of money spinning into Canada, but while many see this as a sign of success, others are worried about researchers and intellectual property being swallowed wholesale. The country is in the midst of an artificial intelligence (AI) boom, with Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Huawei and other global heavyweights spending millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars on research hubs in Quebec, Ontario and Alberta. Canadian doors are open – some fear too open. Jim Hinton, an IP lawyer and founder of the Own Innovation consultancy, reckons that more than half of all AI patents in Canada end up being owned by foreign companies. What we need to be doing is getting money out of our ideas ourselves, instead of seeing foreign talent scoop it all up," said Hinton. "Otherwise we'll never have a Canadian champion." The country is home to hundreds of fledgling AI companies, including much-talked-about start-ups like Element AI and Deep Genomics, but they remain relatively small. "They don't have a strong market position yet," Hinton says. Deep learning pioneers such as Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton (no relation to Jim) have nurtured top-notch talent in AI in Canada for years, back when AI was an emerging field. But despite Canadian inheriting this brilliant AI lead from the country's AI "godfathers", big foreign players have an unassailable advantage over homegrown efforts, Hinton said. "It's not an easy go for the average company to make a business out of AI.

In the last 10 years or so, global financial institutions and regulatory bodies have come together to unleash a battery of regulations for Banking, Insurance, and Micro-economies. The advancement of new technologies such as AI, Machine Learning Engineering, Big Data, Cloud and Edge Computing, Blockchain and Crypto, and low-code DevOps, have heavily disrupted the RegTech industry. This primer dives deep into the world of Regulatory Tech, or RegTech which is disrupted by the new emerging technologies. But, first, let's learn some basic definitions and industry trends. In a recent blog, Brian Clark, CEO of Ascent had said that RegTech is slated to become mainstream, even as early adopters begin "to see the actual, tangible benefit" these RegTech tools can provide.

Democrats say they'll keep investigating Trump; reaction and analysis on'The Five.' The hosts of "The Five" dismissed Sunday's claim by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., that Democrats "proved" their case against the president in the Senate impeachment trial and he would not have done anything differently. "Look, there's nothing that I can see that we could have done differently, because as the senators have already admitted, we've proved our case," Schiff said on CBS News' "Face The Nation." "[Schiff] has to say that, but I'm sure he regrets it," co-host Jesse Watters said. "I mean, if they had done it properly and not started it out in a secret basement with no lawyers present, maybe they would have gone differently. Maybe they would have build a stronger case. Maybe they would have gone to a judge to compel witness testimony and maybe delivered. "They could have argued in a more convincing fashion, but they wanted to do a rush job to fit a political calendar," Watters added. "They didn't really care about making a really strong constitutional case so they can continue to investigate the president." Co-host Dana Perino called Trump's eventual acquittal a "loss" for Democrats and said it only emboldens the president. "Acquittal is a loss," Perino said. "And then whoever wins in a fight like this gets to write the history." "President Trump is like... 'Pac-Man,'" Perino said, comparing him to the popular video game character from the 1980s. "You go along, ding, ding, ding, and then you eat the fruit and you get bigger and stronger and you get another man, like, that's President Trump." Co-host Greg Gutfeld predicted that Democrats will keep the proceedings "running," with congressional investigations becoming "as mundane as living next to an airport "You know, we used to think planes were interesting," he said.