HOW can a patent office seriously assert that it is serious about innovation when everyone who meets the officials comes from law firms and rarely has any scientific background? If this system's inception truly dates back to need to advance science, shouldn't these officials focus on actual scientists? This may sound like a shallow observation, but it perfectly describes the pattern we've been seeing at the European Patent Office (EPO) under António Campinos and his predecessor Battistelli (neither of whom has any background in the sciences). Seeing how the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) wants to work around 35 U.S.C. § 101, we're nowadays witnessing a similar trend in America too. A resurgence of software patents in Europe poses risk to US (case)law as well. We hope that American readers understand that. The EPO openly brags about objectives like spreading software patents to the whole world.

Computers think they know who you are. Artificial intelligence algorithms can recognize objects from images, even faces. But we rarely get a peek under the hood of facial recognition algorithms. Now, with ImageNet Roulette, we can watch an AI jump to conclusions. Some of its guesses are funny, others…racist.

Economics has experienced an empirical turn in the last few decades. We have entered an era of big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Experimental methods have greatly increased in importance in both the social and life sciences. And recent efforts at reforming the publication system promise to improve the replicability and credibility of published findings. One might be tempted to conclude that this increased availability of and reliance on quantitative evidence allows us to dispense with the normative judgements of earlier days. I will argue that the opposite is the case. The choice of objective functions, which define our goals, and of the set of policies to be considered matters ever more in all of these contexts. A famous example in debates about the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) is the hypothetical AI system with the objective of producing as many paperclips as possible. If sufficiently capable, such an AI system might end up annihilating humanity in the pursuit of this objective. Another example is the design of experiments. The majority of experiments in the social and life sciences are designed based on the (implicit) objective of obtaining precise estimates of causal effects. Such experiments randomly assign treatments using fixed probabilities.

Mr. Yiannouka is the CEO of the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), a global think tank of the Qatar Foundation. WISE is dedicated to enabling the future of education through innovation. Its activities encompass research, capacity-building programs, and advocacy. WISE flagship initiatives include an annual series of research publications, a biennial global summit dubbbed the'Davos of education', the WISE edTech Accelerator, the WISE Innovation Awards, and the WISE Words podcast. Prior to joining WISE in August 2012, Stavros was the Executive Vice-Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKY School) at the National University of Singapore.

As it is across the world, the amount of investments made in artificial intelligence (AI) and the number of entrepreneurs using AI to develop new projects is also increasing in Turkey. AI facilitates business and production processes and supports automation. This shows that the number of AI start-ups will increase in the coming years. Therefore, Lale Deliveli Alp, one of the founders of Deliveli Alp Law & Consultancy, answered the following questions to make young entrepreneurs' work easier: By what legal means are AI software developed by technology companies protected? Is it possible to patent a developed AI? Alp answered the question about which many entrepreneurs wonder with the following response: "It is not possible to patent AI, which is software, in accordance with Article No. 82 in the Industrial Property Law. Computer programs are out of patentability. However, if the developed AI does not function separately from the hardware, it can be patented. For example, the AI of a developed robot can be patented since it cannot be used separately from the robot. What about the designs developed by AI, poems and paintings by it? A work must be new and exceed the known limits of the technique in order to be protected by patent law, namely to be patentable. The solution of whether an invention developed by totally AI is protected by patent law is hidden in the answer of whether an AI is accepted as inventive by law."

Thanks to artificial intelligence and facial recognition, you can unlock your phone merely by showing your face to your screen. The technology is impressive but what's less understood, however, is just how AI classifies you behind the scenes through its algorithms. Now you can find this out thanks to ImageNet Roulette, where you can upload images of yourself and be tagged as a specific type of person and can grasp an understanding of how AI categorizes us. The results are entertaining at times but sometimes they're rude and borderline racist. Created as part of an art exhibition -- Training Humans -- at the Prada Foundation museum in Milan, ImageNet Roulette was made to show us how we as humans are classified by computer systems or machine learning systems.

Tech companies should stop behaving as though everything that is not illegal is acceptable, says Microsoft's second-in-command. Instead, they should focus on defining – and living by – the standards that they would like to see in regulation, before it gets forced on them anyway. For some of the most potentially dangerous new technologies, such as facial recognition, that could mean voluntarily refusing to sell them to certain countries, for certain uses, or even agreeing to a moratorium altogether, said Brad Smith, the president and chief legal officer of the world's most valuable publicly-traded company. Speaking to the Guardian before the launch of his new book, Tools and Weapons, Smith said that if technology firms wanted to be proud of how they changed the world for the better, they must take more responsibility for the ways they have made it worse. "When you think about all of the issues that people worry about in the world today and what they spend their time arguing about, it's often issues like trade, immigration, nationalism, globalisation," Smith said.

David Stewart leads strategy development, drives product management and provides key marketing counsel for fraud and compliance solutions worldwide. During the past 10 years, Stewart has hosted SAS' annual Counterterrorism and Financial Crimes Forum co-sponsored by the US Department of Justice and a number of global financial institutions. He has collaborated extensively to bring data mining and machine learning capabilities to market for credit analytics, customer intelligence and financial crimes applications.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE is making its way into every aspect of life, including military conflict. We look at the thorny legal and ethical issues that the newest arms race raises. Three executives from Fukushima's melted-down nuclear-power plant were cleared of negligence today, but the disaster's aftermath is far from over. And, what a swish new Chinese restaurant in Havana says about China-Cuba relations.

The human brain is a funny thing. Certain memories can stick with us forever: the birth of a child, a car crash, an election day. But we only store some details--the color of the hospital delivery room or the smell of the polling station--while others fade, such as the face of the nurse when that child was born, or what we were wearing during that accident. For Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the day he watched AI rise out of a lab is one he'll remember forever. "This was 2012, in a room with a small team, and there were just a few of us," he tells me. An engineer named Jeff Dean, a legendary programmer at Google who helped build its search engine, had been working on a new project and wanted Pichai to have a look. "Anytime Jeff wants to update you on something, you just get excited by it," he says. Pichai doesn't recall exactly which building he was in when Dean presented his work, though odd details of that day have stuck with him. He remembers standing, rather than sitting, and someone joking about an HR snafu that had designated the newly hired Geoffrey Hinton--the "Father of Deep Learning," an AI researcher for four decades, and, later, a Turing Award winner--as an intern. The future CEO of Google was an SVP at the time, running Chrome and Apps, and he hadn't been thinking about AI.