So, there is not going to be an immediate shift to AI, but it would be smart to embrace the technology to be competitive. Ross intelligence is a research site that allows users to type, in plain English, legal research questions and the tool will return case law and statutes related the search. This is a great example of how AI could be a powerful resource for business development, trademark analytics, and identification research. The bets are that emerging technology can yield significant returns, so there is the incentive to try something creative. However, there must be a willingness to have it not pay off (acceptance of risk).

Witnesses before the House Financial Services Committee Task Force on Artificial Intelligence provided testimony on mitigating risks associated with the deployment of artificial intelligence ("AI") technologies. The witnesses cautioned against overreliance on AI solutions and emphasized the need to preserve digital identities in an increasingly connected digital world. NYU Steinhardt School Assistant Professor of Data Policy Anne Washington warned that AI technologies remain incapable of disambiguating large data sets, and stressed that even the most advanced AI systems will continue to require human input for the foreseeable future. Professor Washington suggested balancing AI technologies, such as customer identification and fraud detection, with a human-based dispute resolution process to (i) establish a procedure that preserves the value of human experience under circumstances where organizations are more likely to defer to the AI over the customer, and (ii) continuously gather feedback for incremental improvement of the technology. Accenture Security Managing Director Valerie Abend made AI-based cybersecurity recommendations, including (i) ensuring federal or state legislation addressing AI is "technology-neutral" and does not choose winners and losers, (ii) creating policies to protect and advance AI innovation, thus harnessing this technology to help financial institutions defend against cyber-threats, and (iii) adopting a national data privacy law to help foster an "effective [and] robust" digital identity ecosystem to exist alongside AI technology.

ORACLE OPENWORLD -- Oracle Exadata Database Machine X8M, available today, sets a new bar and changes the dynamics of the database infrastructure market. Exadata X8M combines Intel Optane DC persistent memory and 100 gigabit remote direct memory access (RDMA) over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) to remove storage bottlenecks and dramatically increase performance for the most demanding workloads such as Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), analytics, IoT, fraud detection, and high frequency trading. "With Exadata X8M, we deliver in-memory performance with all the benefits of shared storage for both OLTP and analytics," said Juan Loaiza, executive vice president, mission-critical database technologies, Oracle. "Reducing response times by an order of magnitude using direct database access to shared persistent memory accelerates every OLTP application, and is a game changer for applications that need real-time access to large amounts of data such as fraud detection and personalized shopping." Exadata X8M helps customers perform existing tasks faster and accelerates time-to-insight, while also enabling deeper and more frequent analyses.

Imagine sending a text message to a friend. As your fingers tap the keypad, words and the occasional emoji appear on the screen. Perhaps you write, "I feel blessed to have such good friends:)" Every character conveys your intended meaning and emotion. But other information is hiding among your words, and companies eavesdropping on your conversations are eager to collect it. Every day, they use artificial intelligence to extract hidden meaning from your messages, such as whether you are depressed or diabetic.

Businesses using innovative artificial intelligence (AI) solutions should turn their attention to Brussels as the next EU Commission promises to come forward with legislation on AI within 100 days of taking office on 1 November. European politicians have expressed concerns about some applications of AI and are convinced that immediate legislation is the answer. However, attempting to regulate a technology like AI, with its variety of applications, is a complex process and may produce unintended negative consequences. With a new parliament in place and a new Commission about to start its term, the EU is going through the process of setting its priorities for the next five years. Technology and digital policy remain key areas of interest for EU policy-makers, following on from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Digital Single Market (DSM) Strategy.

A colossal online image database used as the blueprint for artificial intelligence systems has been labelled "racist" and "cruel" after an online tool revealed strange and disturbing results. ImageNet, a trove of 14 million images hand-labelled by humans as a training guide for AIs, has been credited with kickstarting the modern AI boom and has become a benchmark against which new image recognition systems are measured. This week a public internet tool called ImageNet Roulette, created as part of an art exhibition, went viral on social media as hundreds of people uploaded pictures of their own faces to be classified by an AI. Users were perturbed to find the system tagging their faces with labels...

As more decisions become automated and processed by algorithms, these processes become more opaque and less accountable. The public has a right to know the data processes that impact their lives so they can correct errors and contest decisions made by algorithms. Personal data collected from our social connections and online activities are used by the government and companies to make determinations about our ability to fly, obtain a job, get security clearance, and even determine the severity of criminal sentencing. These opaque, automated decision-making processes bear risks of secret profiling and discrimination as well as undermine our privacy and freedom of association. Without knowledge of the factors that provide the basis for decisions, it is impossible to know whether government and companies engage in practices that are deceptive, discriminatory, or unethical.

Have you ever noticed your friends getting tagged automatically after you upload a group picture? Though the technology has now gained widespread attention, its history can be traced back to the 1960s. Woodrow Wilson (Woody) Bledsoe, an American mathematician and computer scientist, is one of the founders of pattern and facial recognition technology. Back in the 1960s, he developed ways to classify faces using gridlines. A striking fact was, even during the experimental and inception phase, the application was able to match 40 faces per hour.

You are nothing more than a collection of deeply embarrassing and problematic machine learning-determined classifiers. That humbling truth is brought home by ImageNet Roulette, an online tool that gives anyone bold or foolish enough to upload a photo the opportunity to learn just exactly how artificial intelligence sees them. The project, described as "a provocation" by its creators, aims to shed light on how artificial intelligence systems view and classify humans. AI has some pretty racist and misogynistic ideas about people. Or, rather, the dataset ImageNet Roulette draws from, ImageNet, is filled with problematic categories that reflect the bias often inherent in the large datasets that make machine learning possible.

You get on the elevator, punch the close button a few times, and slowly the doors glide together as you catch your breath. But here's the truth: The door-close button doesn't do anything. What it does do is give you the sense that you have a direct impact on the rate they shut, that you're controlling the situation. The world is full of these so-called "placebo buttons." In the US, elevators have been required by law to stay open at least three full seconds ever since the Americans with Disabilities Act passed in 1990, and many other countries, including Britain, have adopted this regulation.