International human rights attorney & author -- Flynn Coleman has worked with the United Nations, the United States federal government, and international corporations and human rights organizations around the world. Coleman has written extensively… (show all) Flynn Coleman has worked with the United Nations, the United States federal government, and international corporations and human rights organizations around the world. Coleman has written extensively on issues of global citizenship, the future of work and purpose, political reconciliation, war crimes, genocide, human and civil rights, humanitarian issues, innovation and design for social impact, and improving access to justice and education. She lives in New York City. A Human Algorithm: How Artificial Intelligence Is Redefining Who We Are is her first book.

Countries like China, Iran and Russia are known for strictly censoring what their citizens can see on the internet. These authoritarian governments do this to control their people and protect those in power. It can be very difficult, and often dangerous, to try to get around this, but a new tool looks like it could be the best way to beat censorship in these kinds of oppressive countries. Researchers at the University of Maryland have developed a kind of AI that they've named Geneva, which stands for "Genetic Evasion." This AI uses a kind of machine learning to automatically detect bugs and gaps in a country's censorship system so the user can view uncensored content.

Throughout her life, Eileen Lach has been a leader. Growing up in northeast Minneapolis, she knew at a young age she wanted to move to New York City and travel the world. Lach accomplished that and more, carving out a position on Wall Street early in her career and later serving as the first general counsel and chief compliance officer for The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). She is considered a thought leader, especially in the area of ethics and artificial intelligence (AI). During a conversation with Lach last summer, it was hard not to be wowed by her achievements and admire her dedication to philanthropic causes.

Computer algorithms must be regulated to ensure the digital world is not lawless, Supreme Court justice Lord Sales has said. Delivering the Sir Henry Brooke Lecture at the British and Irish Legal Information Institute, Lord Sales called for the creation of an expert commission to counter the "grave threats" algorithms and artificial intelligence pose. The judge said that the technologies diminish human capacity to question and alter power relationships, can encode "unspoken biases" and nullify concepts such as fairness, justice and mercy. He said: "Subjecting human life to processes governed by code means that code can gain a grip on our thinking which reduces human capacities and diminishes political choice." Lord Sales said that algorithmic systems need to be designed with human values and the protection of fundamental human interests built in.

We live in a world where humans aren't the only ones that have rights. In the eyes of the law, artificial entities have a legal persona too. Corporations, partnerships or nation states also have the same rights and responsibility as human beings. With rapidly evolving technologies, is it time our legal system considered a similar status for artificial intelligence (AI) and robots? "AI is already impacting most aspects of our lives. Given its pervasiveness, how this technology is developed is raising profound legal and ethical questions that need to be addressed," says Julian David, chief executive of industry body techUK.

As police embrace new facial recognition technology, many fear false matches could lead to wrongful arrests. The fight over the use of our faces is far from done. A raging battle over controversial facial recognition software used by law enforcement and the civil rights of Americans might be heading to a courtroom. The latest salvo includes the American Civil Liberties Union suing the FBI, the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Agency for those federal agencies' records to see if there is any secret surveillance in use nationwide. The lawsuit, filed Oct. 31, comes as organizations and law enforcement are going toe-to-toe over what is private and what isn't.

This August, the Department of Housing and Urban Development put forth a proposed ruling that could potentially turn back the clock on the Fair Housing Act (FHA). This ruling states that landlords, lenders, and property sellers who use third-party machine learning algorithms to decide who gets approved for a loan or who can purchase or rent a property would not be held responsible for any discrimination resulting from these algorithms. The Fair Housing Act (FHA) is a part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. This stated that people should not be discriminated against for the purchase of a home, rental of a property or qualification of a lease based on race, national origin or religion. In 1974, this was expanded to include gender, and in 1988, disability.

We live in the greatest time in human history. Only 200 years ago, for most Europeans, life was a struggle rather than a pleasure. Without antibiotics and hospitals, every infection was fatal. There was only a small elite of citizens who lived in the cities in relative prosperity. Freedom of opinion, human and civil rights were far away. Voting rights and decision-making were reserved for a class consisting of nobility, clergy, the military and rich citizens. The interests of the general population were virtually ignored.

There's an old saying in the Artificial Intelligence community: once software starts working people stop calling it AI. You could make the argument that the opposite has taken place during the last 6 years of the neural network renaissance with Machine Learning researchers returning to the term AI as the old stigma of exaggerated hype wears off. However, it does point to an interesting guideline for technological maturity: it's mature when you stop noticing it. That's why the old Palm Pilots were a conversation piece but modern smartphones go completely unnoticed. One particularly powerful implementation of Deep Learning is in the proliferation of Voice assistants.

Towards a computer-interpretable actionable formal model to encode data governance rules Rui Zhao School of Informatics University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK s1623641@sms.ed.ac.uk Malcolm Atkinson School of Informatics University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK Malcolm.Atkinson@ed.ac.uk Abstract --With the needs of science and business, data sharing and reuse has become an intensive activity for various areas. In many cases, governance imposes rules concerning data use, but there is no existing computational technique to help data-users comply with such rules. We argue that intelligent systems can be used to improve the situation, by recording provenance records during processing, encoding the rules and performing reasoning. We present our initial work, designing formal models for data rules and flow rules and the reasoning system, as the first step towards helping data providers and data users sustain productive relationships. I NTRODUCTION Data ethics and privacy are of rising importance, especially with the establishment of GDPR [1]. Similar issues also apply in research when data from various sources are used as inputs to analyses and simulations. Researchers are aware that there are governance rules applied to the data, but they can easily lose track of the rules when the number of sources becomes large. The large volume of rules brings problem from three aspects: 1) to fully read and understand the rules; 2) to consider the consequence of combining data and their associate rules; 3) to assign rules to output so that results can be used compliantly. One response is to make data open and freely accessible (e.g. This sounds nice but it still leaves rules, for example to properly acknowledge sources and to protect personal and commercially sensitive data, even within collaborating communities [4]. This work has been accepted and should appear in the Proceedings of IEEE eScience 2019 Conference (BC2DC).