These posts represent my personal views on enterprise governance, regulatory compliance, and legal or ethical issues that arise in digital transformation projects powered by the cloud and artificial intelligence. Unless otherwise indicated, they do not represent the official views of Microsoft. If you follow enterprise legal and compliance issues as I do, you have surely heard the claim that AI is transforming the way corporate legal departments and the law firms that serve them operate. I'm certainly not going to contradict this claim. In fact, I see new evidence for it nearly every week.

How will emerging autonomous and intelligent systems affect the international landscape of power and coercion two decades from now? Will the world see a new set of artificial intelligence (AI) hegemons just as it saw a handful of nuclear powers for most of the twentieth century? Will autonomous weapon systems make conflict more likely or will states find ways to control proliferation and build deterrence, as they have done (fitfully) with nuclear weapons? And importantly, will multilateral forums find ways to engage the technology holders, states as well as industry, in norm setting and other forms of controlling the competition? The answers to these questions lie not only in the scope and spread of military applications of AI technologies but also in how pervasive their civilian applications will be.

What was perhaps most fascinating, however, was how complex the problem at hand seems to be, and how varied the proposed solutions were. Commenting on why the current automation trend appears to be so strong, Daron Acemoglu (MIT Professor of Economics and coauthor of the New York Times 2012 best-selling book Why Nations Fail) spoke about how many of the most highly compensated professionals in the workplace today are turning their creative talents to "automate, automate, automate" all available technologies, which tends to adversely affect lower-wage workers. And when asked what they would do if given a "magic wand" to protect the current workforce against automation, speakers proposed making the U.S. tax code more favorable to workers by taxing capital gains at a higher rate; dramatically expanding educational opportunities, particularly alternatives to traditional four-year college degrees; and in the developing world, making social security benefits portable. Secretary Acosta, who delivered the keynote address, declared that in a rapidly automating world, "it is critical that we adapt the culture of lifelong learning," at both the personal and policy levels. Having worked in the technology sector for the six years between my undergraduate career and joining Erb, I have personally experienced the incredible rate of current technological change, and I absolutely agree with Acosta's sentiment.

The Guardian is right to oppose automated facial recognition (Editorial, 10 June), but in spite of concerns from MPs and peers, parliament has hardly discussed the issue. As the person who organised the only debate on the subject in the House of Lords, I have started legal action against the police for failing to have a regulatory framework for its use. It's shocking that we are allowing the police and companies to set the rules as we abolish privacy in public spaces, because ministers are failing to act. The difference between ourselves and the likes of China and Russia is that we have a fairly open democracy, but this is no defence against state oppression and commercial exploitation if politicians fail to recognise that when our face becomes an identity card, all the rules change. Click here to upload it and we'll publish the best submissions in the letters spread of our print edition

There are many characterisations of artificial intelligence (AI), such as Andrew Ng's in the World Intellectual Property Organization's (WIPO) report on Technology Trends 2019 regarding AI. He adds: "I can hardly imagine an industry which is not going to be transformed by AI." Precise definitions, however, are lacking. In order to come to grips with the term it is recommended to distinguish between AI techniques, such as machine learning, logic programming, fuzzy logic, probabilistic reasoning and ontology engineering, functional applications, and AI application fields. Computer vision, natural language processing and speech processing can be mentioned as examples of AI functional applications. The application fields are several, such as networks, life and medical sciences, telecommunications and transportation.

The artificial intelligence (AI) landscape has evolved significantly from 1950 when Alan Turing first posed the question of whether machines can think. Today, AI is transforming societies and economies. It promises to generate productivity gains, improve wellbeing and help address global challenges, such as climate change, resource scarcity and health crises. Yet, as AI applications are adopted around the world, their use can raises questions and challenges related to human values, fairness, human determination, privacy, safety and accountability, among others. This report helps build a shared understanding of AI in the present and near-term by mapping the AI technical, economic, use case and policy landscape and identifying major public policy considerations.

Just because we can use it, should we? That's the question more and more people are asking about face recognition technology, software that's already in our phones and our social media feeds and many security systems. San Francisco leaders have voted to ban the police from using it, and even some in the tech industry say there should be limits. BRAD SMITH: It's the kind of technology that can do a lot of good for a lot of people, but it can be misused. It can be used in ways that lead to discrimination and bias.

A remarkable time of human promise has been ushered in by the convergence of the ever-expanding availability of big data, the soaring speed and stretch of cloud computing platforms, and the advancement of increasingly sophisticated machine learning algorithms. Innovations in AI are already leaving a mark on government by improving the provision of essential social goods and services from healthcare, education, and transportation to food supply, energy, and environmental management. These bounties are likely just the start. The prospect that progress in AI will help government to confront some of its most urgent challenges is exciting, but legitimate worries abound. As with any new and rapidly evolving technology, a steep learning curve means that mistakes and miscalculations will be made and that both unanticipated and harmful impacts will occur. This guide, written for department and delivery leads in the UK public sector and adopted by the British Government in its publication, 'Using AI in the Public Sector,' identifies the potential harms caused by AI systems and proposes concrete, operationalisable measures to counteract them. It stresses that public sector organisations can anticipate and prevent these potential harms by stewarding a culture of responsible innovation and by putting in place governance processes that support the design and implementation of ethical, fair, and safe AI systems. It also highlights the need for algorithmically supported outcomes to be interpretable by their users and made understandable to decision subjects in clear, non-technical, and accessible ways. Finally, it builds out a vision of human-centred and context-sensitive implementation that gives a central role to communication, evidence-based reasoning, situational awareness, and moral justifiability.

Recent advances in language modeling have resulted in significant breakthroughs on a wide variety of benchmarks in natural language processing Dai et al. [2018], Gong et al. [2018], Takase et al. [2018]. Capturing long-term dependencies has especially been a major focus, with approaches ranging from explicit memory-based neural networks Grave et al. [2016], Ke et al. [2018] to optimization improvements aimed at stabilizing training Le et al. [2015], Trinh et al. [2018]. In this paper, we address a basic question: how do the long-term dependencies in a language model's generations compare to those of the underlying language? Furthermore, if there are measurable discrepancies, this leads to the question of whether and how we can use them to improve these models. Starting from Shannon's seminal work that essentially introduced statistical language modeling Shannon [1951], the most classical and widely studied long-term property of a language model is its entropy rate -- the average amount of information contained per word, conditioned on the preceding words. A learned model provides an upper bound for the entropy rate of a language, via its cross-entropy loss. The exponential of the entropy rate can be interpreted as the effective support size of the distribution of the next word (intuitively, the average number of "plausible" word choices to continue a document), and the perplexity score of a model (the exponential of the cross entropy loss) is an upper bound for this quantity.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications are being used to predict and assess behaviour in multiple domains, such as criminal justice and consumer finance, which directly affect human well-being. However, if AI is to improve people's lives, then people must be able to trust AI, which means being able to understand what the system is doing and why. Even though transparency is often seen as the requirement in this case, realistically it might not always be possible or desirable, whereas the need to ensure that the system operates within set moral bounds remains. In this paper, we present an approach to evaluate the moral bounds of an AI system based on the monitoring of its inputs and outputs. We place a "glass box" around the system by mapping moral values into explicit verifiable norms that constrain inputs and outputs, in such a way that if these remain within the box we can guarantee that the system adheres to the value. The focus on inputs and outputs allows for the verification and comparison of vastly different intelligent systems; from deep neural networks to agent-based systems. The explicit transformation of abstract moral values into concrete norms brings great benefits in terms of explainability; stakeholders know exactly how the system is interpreting and employing relevant abstract moral human values and calibrate their trust accordingly. Moreover, by operating at a higher level we can check the compliance of the system with different interpretations of the same value. These advantages will have an impact on the well-being of AI systems users at large, building their trust and providing them with concrete knowledge on how systems adhere to moral values.