Facebook is under criminal investigation by federal prosecutors examining its data-sharing deals with other major technology companies, according to the New York Times. A New York grand jury has subpoenaed records from "at least two prominent makers of smartphones and other devices", the Times reported, citing two unnamed sources. The two companies are among more than 150, including Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, that have entered into partnerships with Facebook for access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of its users, according to the report. "We are cooperating with investigators and take those probes seriously," a Facebook spokesman told the Times. "We've provided public testimony, answered questions and pledged that we will continue to do so."

AngelPad just wrapped the 12th run of its months-long New York City startup accelerator. For the second time, the program didn't culminate in a demo day; rather, the 19 participating startups were given pre-arranged one-on-one meetings with venture capital investors late last week. AngelPad co-founders Thomas Korte and Carine Magescas did away with the demo day tradition last year after nearly a decade operating AngelPad, which is responsible for mentoring startups including Postmates, Twitter-acquired Mopub, Pipedrive, Periscope Data, Zum and DroneDeploy. "Demo days are great ways for accelerators to expose a large number of companies to a lot of investors, but we don't think it is the most productive way," Korte told TechCrunch last year. Competing accelerator Y Combinator has purportedly considered their eliminating demo day as well, though sources close to YC deny this.

At the perfect intersection of technology and civil service, every government process will be an automated one, streamlining benefits, outcomes, and applications for every citizen within a digitally-enabled country. With that approach comes a significant layer of protocol that is necessary to ensure citizens feel empowered regarding decision-making processes and how their government addresses needs from a digital perspective. Right now, Canada is leading the world in AI, thanks largely to huge government investments like the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy. The growing field is pervasive right now--there is hardly an industry it has not disrupted, from mining to legal aid. In fact, government might be one of the most obvious choices as to where automated decision processes can save time and money.

There is a rule for dealing with computers: garbage in, garbage out. Put the wrong number of zeroes in your Excel spreadsheet and it will unthinkingly pay your staff pennies on the pound; train a self-driving car to recognise human figures by showing it millions of pictures of white people, and it might struggle to identify pedestrians of other races. That was the finding of researchers from Georgia Tech, who analysed how effective various "machine vision" systems were at recognising pedestrians with different skin tones. The results were alarming: AI systems were consistently better at identifying pedestrians with lighter skin tones than darker. And not by a little bit: one headline comparison suggests that a white person was 10% more likely to be correctly identified as a pedestrian than a black person.

In the midst of a political climate already fraught with distrust, the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) to be weaponized is giving pause to tech executives, over half of whom state that regulation of AI is "critical for its safe development," according to the 2019 Edelman Artificial Intelligence survey, conducted in coordination with the World Economic Forum (WEF). The survey found that 54% of tech executives and 60% of the general population said they believe that regulation is necessary. The report cites cases in which AI is used to evaluate attributes about someone's life: "Loan analyses including credit card applications are now often performed using AI algorithms. Yet, how can an algorithm be held accountable if a customer feels that a decision about their credit card application was wrong? Many argue that people have a right to know how decisions that affect them are being made."

I'm recovering from the hyperventilating hyperbole in the reportage of IBM's labeling of a dataset of facial photographs and making it available to researchers to reduce bias in facial recognition. NBC News went with a headline that read: Facial recognition's'dirty little secret': Millions of online photos scraped without consent. That might merit a "pants on fire" rating if it were in the realm of political reporting. The photos were not "scraped." The NBC story linked to IBM's discussion of its work which, in turn, identified the dataset that it used.

Data-driven advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are now set to reshape industries and regulatory frameworks around the world. Fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is remaking the very notion of innovation as countries leverage data to compete for military and commercial advantage. As former BlackBerry Chairman and co-CEO Jim Balsillie suggests, this data-driven revolution is not just remaking the terms of global trade, it is transforming the nature and distribution of wealth. Today, it is now 90%. Intellectual property (IP) and the data it protects are the world's most important commercial and national security assets.

Notorious examples of bias in facial recognition algorithms have received a lot of adverse coverage this year. It highlights the explosion of bias in AI systems and algorithms, but according to IBM Research, only unbiased AI will survive. To counter such bias, companies like IBM have been making data sets and toolkits available. An example is a data set of annotations for over a million images to improve the understanding of bias in facial analysis. Nevertheless, it shows that users of such algorithms to develop critical thinking and not blindly trust artificial intelligence (AI).

When Wales takes on Ireland in the Six Nations rugby championship Saturday, Big Brother will be watching. Fans filing into the stadium in Cardiff will be scanned with facial recognition software as part of a police trial of the technology. Should any of their faces match a database of potential suspects, officers will be standing by, ready to swoop. It's the kind of indiscriminate mass surveillance that would be expected, in ordinary times, to be the subject of fierce debate in the U.K., as journalists and politicians fought over the proper balance between privacy and security. Instead, trial runs like the one in South Wales are taking place largely unchallenged by parliament.

His demand for a ban triggered a legal and moral quagmire, as the Pentagon faced the prospect of throwing out service members who had willingly come forward as transgender after being promised they would be protected and allowed to serve. And as legal battles blocked the ban from taking effect, the Obama-era policy continued and transgender individuals were allowed to begin enlisting in the military a little more than a year ago.