A former patient of the University of Chicago Medical Center is suing the institution amid claims it violated patients' privacy rights. The class-action lawsuit claims records containing identifiable patient information were shared as a result of a partnership between Google and the University of Chicago. All three institutions are named as defendants in the suit, which was filed Wednesday in the Northern District of Illinois by Matt Dinerstein, who received treatment at the medical center during two hospital stays in 2015. The collaboration between Google and the University of Chicago was launched in 2017 to study electronic health records and develop new machine-learning techniques to create predictive models that could prevent unplanned hospital readmissions, avoid costly complications and save lives, according to a 2017 news release from the university. The tech giant has similar partnerships with Stanford University and the University of California-San Francisco.

The possibility of ending partisan gerrymandering-- the practice of redrawing voting districts in favor one party over another -- was all but obliterated on Thursday, when the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that challenges to the controversial practice cannot be heard in federal court. In an impassioned dissent, Justice Elena Kagan warned that in the era of artificial intelligence, such a move could put American democracy at risk. "Gerrymanders will only get worse (or depending on your perspective, better) as time goes on -- as data becomes ever more fine-grained and data analysis techniques continue to improve," she wrote. "What was possible with paper and pen -- or even with Windows 95 -- doesn't hold a candle (or an LED bulb?) to what will become possible with developments like machine learning. And someplace along this road, 'we the people' become sovereign no longer."

We believe that AI will be a force multiplier on technological progress in our increasingly digital, data-driven world. This is because everything around us today, ranging from culture to consumer products, is a product of intelligence. In this report, we set out to capture a snapshot of the exponential progress in AI with a focus on developments in the past 12 months. Consider this report as a compilation of the most interesting things we've seen with a goal of triggering an informed conversation about the state of AI and its implication for the future. This edition builds on the inaugural State of AI Report 2018, which can be found here: www.stateof.ai/2018 We consider the following key dimensions in our report: - Research: Technology breakthroughs and their capabilities.

Ruha Benjamin is an associate professor of African American studies at Princeton University, and lectures around the intersection of race, justice and technology. She founded the Just Data Lab, which aims to bring together activists, technologists and artists to reassess how data can be used for justice. Her latest book, Race After Technology, looks at how the design of technology can be discriminatory. Where did the motivation to write this book come from? It seems like we're looking to outsource decisions to technology, on the assumption that it's going to make better decisions than us.

Missing data is a pervasive problem in data analyses, resulting in datasets that contain censored realizations of a target distribution. Many approaches to inference on the target distribution using censored observed data, rely on missing data models represented as a factorization with respect to a directed acyclic graph. In this paper we consider the identifiability of the target distribution within this class of models, and show that the most general identification strategies proposed so far retain a significant gap in that they fail to identify a wide class of identifiable distributions. To address this gap, we propose a new algorithm that significantly generalizes the types of manipulations used in the ID algorithm, developed in the context of causal inference, in order to obtain identification.

You're part of an underground network of feminists in Chicago that provide illegal (at the time) abortion services to vulnerable, pregnant people with few options. Despite the risk of imprisonment, and the ways that your personal experiences may not always perfectly align with your activism, you persist. It's a live-action roleplaying game by Jon Cole and Kelley Vanda called The Abortionists, which requires three players, one facilitator, six hours and a willingness to dig deep into the painful history of reproductive rights in the United States. That history has terrifying relevance in 2019, as numerous states pass laws that put their residents in a reality where abortion is functionally illegal. Based on the real-life work of a 1970s activist group called Jane, it challenges its participants to think about the "internal landscapes" of its players, and how they deal with the larger political and personal landscape of their world.

At $2,900, Sony's robot dog Aibo sits at the fringe of technology, but it might not stay there. Whether you find it cute or creepy, the tech that makes Aibo tick is continuing to evolve, and it isn't hard to imagine a whole litter of less expensive Aibo competitors aimed at consumers -- and even at children -- in the not-so-distant future. To be clear, Aibo's tech already includes artificial intelligence, sensors and microphones that help it interact with people, and cameras that can recognize faces and help it navigate your home like a Roomba. A reasonable consumer might rightly wonder just how much data this dog gathers as it wanders their home scanning faces and learning about its owners. Perhaps more important -- what exactly does Sony do with that data?

Rapid advances in computing and robotics have led to calls for government controls. Before acting, we need to distinguish among the many meanings and applications of the technology. New technologies often spur public anxiety, but the intensity of concern about the implications of advances in artificial intelligence (AI) is particularly noteworthy. Several respected scholars and technology leaders warn that AI is on the path to turning robots into a master class that will subjugate humanity, if not destroy it. Others fear that AI is enabling governments to mass produce autonomous weapons--"killing machines"--that will choose their own targets, including innocent civilians. Renowned economists point out that AI, unlike previous technologies, is destroying many more jobs than it creates, leading to major economic disruptions. There seems to be widespread agreement that AI growth is accelerating.

A disturbing app has been developed which uses artificial intelligence and algorithms to produce fake nude images of women. The app, called DeepNude, removes all clothing from any uploaded image of a woman - sparking fears it could be used to blackmail unsuspecting victims with fake revenge porn threats. Since the app came to light, it has been taken offline, claiming it'cannot cope' with the volume of interest. The anonymous developers said they would be back within days and just needed'to fix some bugs and catch our breath'. In the free version of the app, the output images are partially covered with a large watermark.

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems permeate our world, the problem of implicit biases in these systems have become more serious. AI systems are routinely used to make decisions or support the decision-making process in credit, hiring, criminal justice, and education, all of which are domains protected by anti-discrimination law. Although AI systems appear to eliminate the biases of a human decision maker, they may perpetuate or even exacerbate biases in the training data [64]. Such biases are especially objectionable when it adversely affects underprivileged groups of users [3]. Although the most obvious remedy is to remove the biases in the training data, this is impractical in most applications.