Microsoft's attempt at engaging millennials with artificial intelligence has backfired hours into its launch, with waggish Twitter users teaching its chatbot how to be racist. The company launched a verified Twitter account for "Tay" – billed as its "AI fam from the internet that's got zero chill" – early on Wednesday. The chatbot, targeted at 18- to 24-year-olds in the US, was developed by Microsoft's technology and research and Bing teams to "experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding". "Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation," Microsoft said. "The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets."

An autonomous idea-creation system that already has invented patentable concepts has itself now been patented. The U.S. Patent and Trade Office has awarded a patent to Stephen L. Thaler, president and CEO of Imagination Engines Inc., for his Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience (DABUS). Formally, the patent is titled "Electro‐Optical Device and Method for Identifying and Inducing Topological States Formed Among Interconnecting Neural Modules," which Thaler says constitutes a "successor to deep learning and the future of artificial general intelligence." With DABUS, "vast swarms of neural nets join to form chains that encode concepts gleaned from their environment," Thaler said in a press release. "It also teaches the noise‐stimulation of such neural chaining systems to generate derivative concepts from their accumulated experience (i.e., idea formation)."

The European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ) of the Council of Europe has adopted the first European text setting out ethical principles relating to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in judicial systems. The Charter provides a framework of principles that can guide policy makers, legislators and justice professionals when they grapple with the rapid development of AI in national judicial processes. The CEPEJ's view as set out in the Charter is that the application of AI in the field of justice can contribute to improve the efficiency and quality and must be implemented in a responsible manner which complies with the fundamental rights guaranteed in particular in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the Council of Europe Convention on the Protection of Personal Data. For the CEPEJ, it is essential to ensure that AI remains a tool in the service of the general interest and that its use respects individual rights. Principle "under user control": precluding a prescriptive approach and ensuring that users are informed actors and in control of their choices.

Police chief calls Tlaib's comments racist; Democratic strategist Monique Pressley and Blexit Movement founder Candace Owens react. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., last week responded to backlash after she told Detroit police to hire only black facial recognition analysts, writing in a scathing op-ed that her comments were neither "racist" nor "inappropriate" and pushed further for a total ban of the technology used to identify criminal suspects. "I'm going to call out every injustice I see. It's probably what makes most people uncomfortable when I speak the truth," Tlaib wrote in an op-ed in The Detroit News. It is inappropriate to implement a broken, flawed and racist technology that doesn't recognize black and brown faces in a city that is over 80% black." "I was elected to serve my residents, and I cannot in good conscience sit by while inaccurate facial recognition technology is deployed in ways that run the risk of false arrests and over-policing," she continued. "Facial recognition technology will have racist results and relying on human analysts for intervention is inadequate.

One day in 2017, Alexa went rogue. When Martin Josephson, who lives in London, came home from work, he heard his Amazon Echo Dot voice assistant spitting out fragmentary commands, seemingly based on his previous interactions with the device. It appeared to be regurgitating requests to book train tickets for journeys he had already taken and to record TV shows that he had already watched. Josephson had not said the wake word – "Alexa" – to activate it and nothing he said would stop it. It was, he says, "Kafkaesque". This was especially interesting because Josephson (not his real name) was a former Amazon employee.

John Armour is Professor of Law and Finance and Horst Eidenmueller is the Freshfields Professor of Commercial Law, both at the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford. This post is based on their recent paper. In a recent essay, we explore the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) for corporate law. Today, corporate law is primarily understood as a means of facilitating productive activity in business firms. On this view, it is a predominantly private endeavor, concerned with helping parties to lower the costs they encounter.

DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet (Google's parent company) is working to remove the inherent human biases from machine learning algorithms. The increased deployment of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms into the real world has coincided with increased concerns over biases in the algorithms' decision making. From loan and job applications to surveillance and even criminal justice, AI has been shown to exhibit bias – particularly in terms of race and gender – in its decision making. Researchers at DeepMind believe they've developed a useful framework for identifying and removing unfairness in AI decision making. Called Causal Bayesian Networks (CBNs), these are visual representations of datasets that can identify causal relationships within the data and help experts identify factors that might be unfairly weighed against or skewing others.

We know all know that artificial intelligence (AI) and facial recognition are perfect tools to unlock your iPhone. The new technological systems are a novelty, however, what mortals don't understand is how policies are governed and created to categorize facial recognition through AI and its algorithms. Trevor Paglen and Kate Crawford, two artists who question the boundaries between science and ideology, created ImageNet Roulette, a database where the user can upload images and be tagged by an AI system to understand how this technology categorizes us. The results could be entertaining or really prejudiced, sexist or even racist. ImageNet Roulette was created to understand how human beings are classified by machine learning systems.

Evidence-based reasoning is at the core of ma ny problem - solving and decision-making tasks in a wide variety of domains. Generalizing from the research and development of cognitive agents in several such domains, this paper presents progress toward a computational theory for the development of instructable cognitive agents for evide nce-based reasoning tasks. The paper also illustrates the application of this theory to the development of four prototype cognitive agents in domains that are critical to the government and the public sector . Two agents function as cognitive assistants, one in intelligence analysis, and the other in science education . The other two agents operate autonomously, one in cybersecurity and the other in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. The paper concludes with the directions of future research on th e proposed computational theory.

Founded in 1990, the Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Visiting Professors and Scholars Program honors the life and legacy of Martin Luther King by increasing the presence of, and recognizing the contributions of, underrepresented minority scholars at MIT. MLK Visiting Professors and Scholars enhance their scholarship through intellectual engagement with the MIT community and enrich the cultural, academic, and professional experience of students. Six scholars are visiting MIT this academic year as part of the program. Kasso Okoudjou is returning for a second year as an MLK Visiting Professor in the Department of Mathematics. Originally from Benin, he moved to the United States in 1998 and earned a PhD in mathematics from Georgia Tech. Okoudjou joins MIT from the University of Maryland College Park, where he is a professor.