More people will speak to a voice assistance machine than to their partners in the next five years, the U.N. says, so it matters what they have to say. The numbers are eye-popping: 85% of Americans use at least one product with artificial intelligence (AI), and global use will reach 1.8 billion by 2021, so the impact of these "robot overlords" is unparalleled. But (AI) voice assistants, including Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google's Assistant are inflaming gender stereotypes and teaching sexism to a generation of millennials by creating a model of "docile and eager-to-please helpers," with acceptance of sexual harassment and verbal abuse, a new U.N. study says. A 145-page U.N. report published this week by the educational, scientific and cultural organization UNESCO concludes that the voices we speak to are programmed to be submissive and accept abuse as a norm. The report is titled, "I'd blush if I could: Closing Gender Divides in Digital Skills Through Education."

Welcome to EURACTIV's Digital Brief, your weekly update on all things digital in the EU. You can subscribe to the newsletter here. With the Brits and the Dutch heading to the polls today, the big news of the week is the story that Facebook has removed around 80 pages spreading fake news or using tactics aimed at unfairly influencing the polls. The takedowns came following a discovery by the human rights group Avaaz, in which it uncovered far-right disinformation networks in France, UK, Germany, Spain, Italy and Poland, posting content that was viewed an estimated 533 million times over the past three months. EURACTIV Digital went to investigate further and paid Avaaz a visit at their recently opened'Citizens' War Room' in Brussels (pictured below).

WASHINGTON - The U.S. is considering cutting off the flow of vital American technology to five Chinese companies including Megvii, widening a dragnet beyond Huawei to include world leaders in video surveillance as it seeks to challenge China's treatment of minority Uighurs in the country's northwest. The U.S. is deliberating whether to add Megvii, Zhejiang Dahua Technology Co., Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co. and two others to a blacklist that bars them from U.S. components or software, people familiar with the matter said. The two others under consideration are Meiya Pico and Iflytek Co. Ltd., according to one of the people. The Trump administration is concerned about their role in helping Beijing repress minority Uighurs, they said, asking not to be identified talking about private deliberations. There's concern also that Hikvision or Dahua's cameras, which come with facial-recognition capabilities, could be employed in espionage, the people said.

Shareholders seeking to halt Amazon's sale of its facial recognition technology to US police forces have been defeated in two votes that sought to pressure the company into a rethink. Civil rights campaigners had said it was "perhaps the most dangerous surveillance technology ever developed". But investors rejected the proposals at the company's annual general meeting. That meant less than 50% voted for either of the measures. A breakdown of the results has yet to be disclosed. The first vote had proposed that the company should stop offering its Rekognition system to government agencies.

San Francisco supervisors approved a ban on police using facial recognition technology, making it the first city in the U.S. with such a restriction. Amazon shareholders will continue selling the company's facial recognition technology "Rekognition" to governments and law enforcement agencies. During the e-commerce giant's annual meeting Wednesday, shareholders rejected all proposals including two related to Rekognition, Amazon confirmed to USA TODAY. One proposed banning the sales of the technology and the other called for the company to conduct an independent study and issue a report on the risks of governments using the technology. Amazon did not release shareholder vote totals Wednesday but said information would be filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission later in the week.

Amazon will continue to sell its controversial facial recognition software to law enforcement and other entities after its shareholders shot down a proposal to reel the technology in. The vote effectively kills two initiatives brought before Amazon's board. One proposal would have required board approval to sell the software to governments, with approval only being given if the client meets certain standards of civil liberties. Another proposal called for a study on the technology's implications on rights and privacy. The exact breakdown of the vote is unclear and according to an Amazon representative it will only be made available via SEC filings later this week.

The digital revolution of the banking system with evolving European regulations have pushed the major banking actors to innovate by a newly use of their clients' digital information. Given highly sparse client activities, we propose CPOPT-Net, an algorithm that combines the CP canonical tensor decomposition, a multidimensional matrix decomposition that factorizes a tensor as the sum of rank-one tensors, and neural networks. CPOPT-Net removes efficiently sparse information with a gradient-based resolution while relying on neural networks for time series predictions. Our experiments show that CPOPT-Net is capable to perform accurate predictions of the clients' actions in the context of personalized recommendation. CPOPT-Net is the first algorithm to use non-linear conjugate gradient tensor resolution with neural networks to propose predictions of financial activities on a public data set.

Beginning as early as next year, many people are expected to have more conversations with digital voice assistants than with their spouse. Presently, the vast majority of these assistants--from Amazon's Alexa to Microsoft's Cortana--are projected as female, in name, sound of voice and'personality'. 'I'd blush if I could', a new UNESCO publication produced in collaboration with Germany and the EQUALS Skills Coalition holds a critical lens to this growing and global practice, explaining how it: The title of the publication borrows its name from the response Siri, Apple's female-gendered voice assistant used by nearly half a billion people, would give when a human user told'her', "Hey Siri, you're a bi***." Siri's submissiveness in the face of gender abuse – and the servility expressed by so many other digital assistants projected as young women – provides a powerful illustration of gender biases coded into technology products, pervasive in the technology sector and apparent in digital skills education. According to Saniye Gülser Corat, UNESCO's Director for Gender Equality, "The world needs to pay much closer attention to how, when and whether AI technologies are gendered and, crucially, who is gendering them."

U.S. Senators Rob Portman (R-OH), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), and Brian Schatz (D-HI) today proposed the Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act, legislation to pump $2.2 billion into federal research and development and create a national AI strategy. The $2.2 billion would be doled out over the course of the next 5 years to federal agencies like the Department of Energy, Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and others. The legislation would establish a National AI Coordination Office to lead federal AI efforts, require the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study the effects of AI on society and education, and allocate $40 million a year to NIST to create AI evaluation standards. The bill would also include $20 million a year from 2020-2024 to fund the creation of 5 multidisciplinary AI research centers, with one focused solely on K-12 education. Plans to open national AI centers in the bill closely resembles plans from the 20-year AI research program proposed by the Computing Consortium.

Microsoft's latest breakthrough could make DNA-based data centers possible