A collaborative research team claims their artificially intelligent system should be recognized as the rightful inventor of two innovative designs, in a potentially disruptive development in patent law. Patent law is complicated even at the best of times, but a new project led by researchers from the University of Surrey could make it more convoluted still. Called the Artificial Inventor Project, the initiative is "seeking intellectual property rights for the autonomous output of artificial intelligence." As BBC reports, the researchers are claiming that an artificially intelligent system named DABUS is the rightful inventor of two designs, namely a complex, fractal-like system of interlocking food containers and a rhythmic warning light for attracting extra attention. To that end, the researchers are filing patents on behalf of DABUS with the respective patent bodies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union.

A German privacy watchdog has ordered Google to cease manual reviews of audio snippets generated by its voice AI. This follows a leak last month of scores of audio snippets from the Google Assistant service. A contractor working as a Dutch language reviewer handed more than 1,000 recordings to the Belgian news site VRT which was then able to identify some of the people in the clips. It reported being able to hear people's addresses, discussion of medical conditions, and recordings of a woman in distress. The Hamburg data protection authority told Google of its intention to use Article 66 powers of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to begin an "urgency procedure" under Article 66 of GDPR last month.

WASHINGTON – A series of privacy missteps in recent months has raised fresh concerns over the future of voice-activated online digital assistants, a growing market seen by some as the next frontier in computing. Recent incidents involving Google, Apple and Amazon devices underscore that despite strong growth in the market for smart speakers and devices, more work is needed to reassure consumers that their data is protected when they use the internet-connected technology. Apple said this past week that it was suspending its "Siri grading" program, in which staffers listen to snippets of conversations to improve its voice-recognition ability, after the Guardian newspaper in Britain reported that the contractors were hearing confidential medical information, criminal dealings and even sexual encounters. "We are committed to delivering a great Siri experience while protecting user privacy," Apple said in a statement, adding it would allow consumers to opt into this feature in a future software update. Google meanwhile said it would put a hold on listening to and transcribing conversations in the European Union gleaned from its Google Assistant, in the wake of a privacy investigation in Germany.

We all have to read this - just to see how many different ways there are to solve the same problem. It's the world's biggest experiment on #AIineducation, and no one can predict the outcome. Silicon Valley is also keenly interested. In a report in March, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation identified AI as an educational tool worthy of investment. China is undergoing the largest-scale experiment on artificial intelligence in education. Here's what's happening and how it could shape the rest of the world.

Apple has suspended its practice of having human contractors listen to users' Siri recordings to "grade" them, following a Guardian report revealing the practice. The company said it would not restart the programme until it had conducted a thorough review of the practice. It has also committed to adding the ability for users to opt out of the quality assurance scheme altogether in a future software update. Apple said: "We are committed to delivering a great Siri experience while protecting user privacy. While we conduct a thorough review, we are suspending Siri grading globally. Additionally, as part of a future software update, users will have the ability to choose to participate in grading."

Amazon says that U.S. government requests for customer data have seen a substantial spike so far this year. As reported by TechCrunch, the most recent figures released from the company -- which date between January and June 2019 -- show a 14 percent increase in subpoenas and a nearly 35 percent increase in the number of search warrants. Information handed over by the company comes from several sources according to TechCrunch, including Amazon's Echo voice assistant, Alexa, its e-reader, the Kindle, and even its home security devices sold by Ring. The company also experienced an uptick in interest for its cloud services, Amazon Web Services, which separately reported a 77 percent uptick in the number of subpoena requests over the last six-month period. According to data released in the company's latest report, Amazon's response varied depending on the type of requests.

Ada Lovelace was an English mathematician who lived in the first half of the 19th century. In 1842, Lovelace was tasked with translating an article from French into English for Charles Babbage, the "Grandfather of the Computer." Babbage's piece was about his Analytical Engine, a revolutionary new automatic calculating machine. Although originally retained solely to translate the article, Lovelace also scribbled extensive ideas about the machine into the margins, adding her unique insight, seeing that the Analytical Engine could be used to decode symbols and to make music, art, and graphics. Her notes, which included a method for calculating the Bernoulli numbers sequence and for what would become known as the "Lovelace objection," were the first computer programs on record, even though the machine could not actually be built at the time.1 Though never formally trained as a mathematician, Lovelace was able to see beyond the limitations of Babbage's invention and imagine the power and potential of programmable computers; also, she was a woman, and women in the first half of the 19th century were typically not seen as suited for this type of career. Lovelace had to sign her work with just her initials because women weren't thought of as proper authors at the time.2 Still, she persevered,3 and her work, which would eventually be considered the world's first computer algorithm, later earned her the title of the first computer programmer.

Monsters and titans share the stage of mythology across cultures as the necessary realizations of the human imagination. From stone cave to urban dwelling, the theme is unremitting; kept in the imagination, such creatures perform, innocently enough, benign functions. The catch here is the human tendency to realize such creatures. They take the form of social engineering and utopia. Folly bound, such projects and ventures wind up corrupting and degrading.

With the increasing use of machine learning in practice and because of legal regulations like EU's GDPR, it becomes indispensable to be able to explain the prediction and behavior of machine learning models. An example of easy to understand explanations of AI models are counterfactual explanations. However, for many models it is still an open research problem how to efficiently compute counterfactual explanations. We investigate how to efficiently compute counterfactual explanations of learning vector quantization models. In particular, we propose different types of convex and non-convex programs depending on the used learning vector quantization model.

An artificial intelligence system should be recognised as the inventor of two ideas in patents filed on its behalf, a team of academics says. The AI has designed interlocking food containers that are easy for robots to grasp and a warning light that flashes in a rhythm that is hard to ignore. Patents offices insist innovations are attributed to humans - to avoid legal complications that would arise if corporate inventorship were recognised. The academics say this is "outdated". And it could see patent offices refusing to assign any intellectual property rights for AI-generated creations.