Calling data as the new oil, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman during her Budget speech announced the launch of a new policy to set up data centre parks for enabling digitisation of all public institutions in the country. While announcing the allocation of Rs 6,000 crore to the BharatNet programme, Sitharaman also said that advanced technology such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning, cloud computing, drones are disrupting the existent business models and rewriting the world economic order. "Data now is clearly the new oil. I propose a policy to set up data centre farms throughout the country. The idea is to skilfully incorporate data in every step of the value chain," she said.

Facebook has settled a long-running legal dispute about the way it scans and tags people's photos. It will pay $550m (£421m) to a group of users in Illinois, who argued that its facial recognition tool was in violation of the state's privacy laws. The case has been ongoing since 2015, and the settlement was announced in its quarterly earnings. It comes as facial recognition use by the police, and in public spaces, comes under intense scrutiny. The lawsuit against Facebook was given the go-ahead in 2018 when a federal judge ruled it could be heard as a class action (group) case.

Perth City Council has reportedly been filming and tracking people moving around parts of the city without their knowledge. In what the council calls a trial, a network of 30 cameras with facial recognition technology have been deployed across East Perth. This has quietly gone on for six months. The cameras use deep-learning artificial intelligence (AI) to recognise faces and vehicles, and to count passing people – a form of population control which China widely employs, and is criticised for by human rights groups. But in Perth – the third Australian city to invest in the technology – many residents were unaware of the trial before it started.

Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz weighs in on the impeachment trial as it nears the final vote. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, appeared to have some fun at the expense of Democrats, particularly House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, at the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump. In a 51-49 vote Friday, the GOP successfully blocked Democrats' efforts to add additional witnesses to the trial. It was also determined that both the House impeachment managers and Trump's defense team would make closing arguments Monday, with the Senate likely to vote Wednesday to acquit the president of charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. However, during a recess, Cruz was seen talking to colleagues and making a particular hand gesture.

"Ensuring that human rights are strengthened and not undermined by artificial intelligence is one of the key factors that will define the world we live in", says Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatović, in a Recommendation published today. This Recommendation – entitled "Unboxing artificial intelligence: 10 steps to protect human rights" – provides a number of steps which national authorities can take to maximise the potential of artificial intelligence systems and prevent or mitigate the negative impact they may have on people's lives and rights. The Recommendation also contains an annexed checklist to help implement the measures recommended in each key area. "Artificial intelligence driven technology is entering more aspects of every individual's life, from smart home appliances to social media applications, and it is increasingly being utilised by public authorities to evaluate people's personality or skills, allocate resources, and otherwise make decisions that can have real and serious consequences for the human rights of individuals. Finding the right balance between technological development and human rights protection is therefore an urgent matter", says Commissioner Mijatović.

Several countries are currently investigating issues of neglect, poor quality care and abuse in the aged care sector. In most cases it is the State who license and monitor aged care providers, which frequently introduces a serious conflict of interest because the State also operate many of the facilities where our most vulnerable peoples are cared for. Where issues are raised with the standard of care being provided, the State are seen by many as a deep-pockets defendant and become the target of high-value lawsuits. This paper draws on cases and circumstances from one jurisdiction based on the English legal tradition, Australia, and proposes a Bayesian solution capable of determining probability for success for citizen plaintiffs who bring negligence claims against a public authority defendant. Use of a Bayesian network trained on case audit data shows that even when the plaintiff case meets all requirements for a successful negligence litigation, success is not often assured. Only in around one-fifth of these cases does the plaintiff succeed against a public authority as defendant.

A debate on the future of artificial intelligence (AI) in Europe drew a full house at the European Parliament - with MEPs and Commission leaders keen to find the best way to regulate and make the most of AI, while protecting us against its worst aspects, too. "We want to discuss this because you have to be cautious. Some artificial intelligence is simple, low risk, no risk, but some artificial intelligence may be life or death for you," says Margrethe Vestager, the Executive Vice-President of the European Commission. "So if it is very risky we have to be cautious, and all the rest of it, just go, go, go." And AI is already go, go, going fast, revolutionising areas like voice recognition and translation.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is adding efficiencies and transforming businesses everywhere, and legal practices are no exception.

Facebook has agreed to pay a $550 million settlement over its use of facial recognition technology nearly a decade ago. This comes just days after a relatively unknown startup selling facial recognition systems to police departments caught the attention of Congress. It seems, after years of civil liberties advocates worrying, facial recognition technology is more powerful and more prevalent than ever. Neither a mammoth new settlement nor the piecemeal legislation nationwide seem suited to stop the takeover. As it announced in the company's quarterly earnings report on Wednesday, Facebook will shell out half a billion dollars to settle a 2015 class action lawsuit over its facial recognition software that suggested tags for people it identified in users' photos.

In this part 2 of the series, we will examine some key considerations and hurdles in patenting machine learning-based biotech or synthetic biology inventions. In this series, we are focusing on artificial intelligence inventions, but as Alan Turing aptly pointed out, that neologism is a "suitcase" term because you can stuff a lot of intelligence classifications and different types of technologies into it. Many of the ground-breaking AI developments in biotech are in the AI subfield of Machine Learning. First, we will briefly discuss what is meant by Machine Learning and discuss some relevant terms. Second, we will review some real world challenges in patenting AI inventions.