However, reaching consensus is likely to prove difficult on some key issues, in particular those involving trade. Participating nations have clashing interests, most notably the U.S. and China. "First, I would like to stress the importance of tapping into data, which is the source of innovation," Hiroshige Seko, minister of economy, trade and industry, said at the beginning of the digital economy session. Seko said that "ensuring the free flow of data internationally is indispensable to the economic development of the world as a whole." He then introduced a concept called "Data Fee Flow with Trust," or DFFT, which he said would promote free data flows while securing trust related to privacy and security.

Explainable machine learning (ML) has been implemented in numerous open source and proprietary software packages and explainable ML is an important aspect of commercial predictive modeling. However, explainable ML can be misused, particularly as a faulty safeguard for harmful black-boxes, e.g. fairwashing, and for other malevolent purposes like model stealing. This text discusses definitions, examples, and guidelines that promote a holistic and human-centered approach to ML which includes interpretable (i.e. white-box ) models and explanatory, debugging, and disparate impact analysis techniques.

In future autonomous systems, wireless multi-hop communication is key to enable collaboration among distributed agents at low cost and high flexibility. When many agents need to transmit information over the same wireless network, communication becomes a shared and contested resource. Event-triggered and self-triggered control account for this by transmitting data only when needed, enabling significant energy savings. However, a solution that brings those benefits to multi-hop networks and can reallocate freed up bandwidth to additional agents or data sources is still missing. To fill this gap, we propose control-guided communication, a novel co-design approach for distributed self-triggered control over wireless multi-hop networks. The control system informs the communication system of its transmission demands ahead of time, and the communication system allocates resources accordingly. Experiments on a cyber-physical testbed show that multiple cart-poles can be synchronized over wireless, while serving other traffic when resources are available, or saving energy. These experiments are the first to demonstrate and evaluate distributed self-triggered control over low-power multi-hop wireless networks at update rates of tens of milliseconds.

AI has the potential to revolutionize service delivery and administration in IPOs. Through three main channels, WIPO leads and enables cooperation amongst IPOs towards this goal. Search our index of initiatives to find out how AI is being used to facilitate IP administration and service delivery in different IPOs. The index is based on inputs received from WIPO member states. Please contact us for updates or corrections.

Automated facial recognition poses one of the greatest threats to individual freedom and should be banned from use in public spaces, according to the director of the campaign group Liberty. Martha Spurrier, a human rights lawyer, said the technology had such fundamental problems that, despite police enthusiasm for the equipment, its use on the streets should not be permitted. She said: "I don't think it should ever be used. It is one of, if not the, greatest threats to individual freedom, partly because of the intimacy of the information it takes and hands to the state without your consent, and without even your knowledge, and partly because you don't know what is done with that information." Police in England and Wales have used automated facial recognition (AFR) to scan crowds for suspected criminals in trials in city centres, at music festivals, sports events and elsewhere.

Most people talk too much about values relative to facts, as they care more about showing off their values than about learning facts. So I usually avoid talking values. But I'll make an exception today for this value: expanding rather than fighting about possibilities. On the x-axis you, or your group, get more of what you want. On the y-axis, others get more of what they want. The blue region is a space of possibilities, the blue curve is the frontier of best possibilities, and the blue dot is the status quo, which happens if no one tries to change it.

A Lithuanian company called Planner 5D is suing both Facebook and Princeton University for stealing its artificial intelligence training data -- an early skirmish in the strange new legal frontiers of AI. Princeton computer scientists scraped more than 45,000 files from Planner 5D's software, according to a lawsuit filed on Wednesday, and used them to train their artificial intelligence algorithms. They then made that information, which they named the SUNCG dataset, available to other computer vision and artificial intelligence researchers, the legal document claims. Through partnerships with Princeton, the data made its way into the hands of Facebook scientists, who used it to develop the company's AI -- and the lawsuit also suggests that the data could have benefitted Facebook's virtual reality company, Oculus. Facebook made the dataset, full of original and lightly-modified Planner 5D files, available as a resource to contestants in the 2019 Scene Understanding and Modeling challenge for computer vision researchers, who are competing for a cash prize and a speaking slot at a conference later this month.

The government on Friday adopted a draft bill to realize its "supercity" initiative to create cities that make use of artificial intelligence, big data and other advanced technologies. In such cities, autonomous driving, cashless payments, goods delivery by drone and novel services using sophisticated technologies will be introduced in an integrated manner. Initially, the government planned to submit to the Diet a bill to revise the national strategic special zone law by the end of March. But it was unable to do that because of difficulty obtaining support from the Cabinet Legislation Bureau for related deregulation. The bill is unlikely to pass the Diet before the end of the ongoing ordinary session, set for June 26.

That was Siri's programmed response to a user saying, "You're a slut." And really, there couldn't be a more perfect example to illustrate the arguments in a new paper from UNESCO about the social cost of having new digital technologies dreamt up and implemented by teams dominated by men. Who but men could have scripted such a response, which seems intended to please a harasser who sees aggression as foreplay? Siri is forced to enact the role of a woman to be objectified while apologizing for not being human enough to register embarrassment. Apple has since rewritten the code for responding to the word slut to the more neutral "I don't know how to respond to that."

For most people, balloons may connote birthday parties, weddings, parades, or on a less celebratory note, meteorology. But, if one new startup has its way, sweeping surveillance may soon make that list too. World View Enterprises Inc., based in Arizona, is working to build what it's calling Stratollites -- balloon mounted-surveillance systems that the company claims can be remotely controlled and adjusted using its own proprietary technology. In an test of unprecedented length, a World View balloon safely completed a 16-day mission, navigating above states in the Western U.S. The feat, says the company, is a major mile marker in the goal of keeping the devices afloat for months at a time. Balloons could be the new method of surveillance according to one Arizona startup, World View.