Remember your last online purchase? Chances are, the price you paid was not set by humans but rather by a software algorithm. Unlike the traditional revenue management systems long in use by such businesses as airlines and hotels, in which the programmer remains effectively in charge of the strategic choices, the pricing programs that are now emerging are much more'autonomous'. These new algorithms adopt the same logic as the artificial intelligence (AI) programs that have recently attained superhuman performances in complex strategic environments such as the game of Go or chess. That is, the algorithm is instructed by the programmer only about the aim of the exercise – winning the game, say, or generating the highest possible profit.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government will leverage latest tools and insights drawn from Artificial Intelligence to improve the quality of governance for more than 1.34 billion Indian citizens. The government will also update the legal and regulatory framework to better protect the privacy and ownership of citizen's data, said commerce minister Suresh Prabhu. Addressing a conference on AI in New Delhi on Monday, Suresh Prabhu said that India was transporting more data than the cumulative data transported by both US and China. Without naming any company, the minister said the top six companies were using this massive amount of data for value addition and monetisation. "AI is the technology of today and the one who masters it will rule the world," said Suresh Prabhu, adding that every country is developing an AI strategy and India too is working on developing a strategy for the use of AI for the common good.

The following figure highlights the consistent and impressive performance of the NP Machine Learning model across the US market (Russell 3000) over the last 15 years.

In 1950, Norbert Wiener's The Human Use of Human Beings was at the cutting edge of vision and speculation in proclaiming: But this was his book's denouement, and it has left us hanging now for 68 years, lacking not only prescriptions and proscriptions but even a well-articulated "problem statement." We have since seen similar warnings about the threat of our machines, even in the form of outreach to the masses, via films like Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), The Terminator (1984), The Matrix (1999), and Ex Machina (2015). But now the time is ripe for a major update with fresh, new perspectives -- notably focused on generalizations of our "human" rights and our existential needs. Concern has tended to focus on "us versus them" (robots) or "gray goo" (nanotech) or "monocultures of clones" (bio). To extrapolate current trends: What if we could make or grow almost anything and engineer any level of safety and efficacy desired?

Last year, Amazon scrapped its machine-learning algorithm because it discovered it had a major problem--the artificial intelligence didn't like women. The machine-based learning tool was designed to analyze resumes and compare potential applicants to Amazon's current workforce. The algorithm was designed to take 100 resumes and filter out the top five applicants. The problem was that there is a pre-existing gender gap in software developer and other technical posts. Therefore, when the artificial intelligence tool analyzed the patterns in Amazon's hiring practices over the prior 10-year period, it taught itself to favor men over women.

A project to develop breakthrough artificial intelligence technology for the anti-fraud sector is one of a number of new projects set to receive funding to enable the UK accountancy, insurance and legal services industries to transform how they operate. The artificial intelligence software, being developed by Intelligent Voice Ltd, Strenuus Ltd. and the University of East London will combine AI and voice recognition technology to detect and interpret emotion and linguistics to assess the credibility of insurance claims. The project is one of 40 backed by £13 million in Government investment to support collaborative industry and research projects to develop the next-generation of professional services. Artificial intelligence and data are transforming industries across the world.We are combining our unique heritage in AI with our world beating professional services to put the UK at the forefront of these cutting-edge technologies and their application. We want to ensure businesses and consumers benefit from the application of AI - from providing quicker access to legal advice for customers, to tackling fraudulent insurance claims, these projects illustrate our modern Industrial Strategy in action.

Online disinformation is only going to get more sophisticated, the chair of the committee investigating disinformation and fake news, Damian Collins, has warned. In a report released on Monday, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) select committee said Facebook had in effect put democracy at risk by allowing voters to be targeted with disinformation and personalised "dark adverts" from anonymous actors. It called for the company to be regulated. "Where we can see lies being spread, particularly in election periods, we should have the ability to say to the tech companies: we want you to act against that content," Collins told the BBC Radio 4's Today programme. It's being spread maliciously and you should stop it." After an 18-month investigation, the DCMS found that British election laws were not fit for purpose and were vulnerable to interference by hostile foreign actors. Although he stopped short of saying that companies such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were breaking the law, Collins said the legislation was not robust enough and needed to be made clearer. Citing evidence of agencies working from Russia, as well as an unidentifiable organisation called the Mainstream Network that urged voters to lobby their MP to support a no-deal Brexit, Collins criticised the fact that the law did not require such actors to identify themselves. "No one knows who this organisation is, and I think in a democracy, citizens need to be informed … and the law doesn't require that." He predicted false information would become more convincing, saying that "deepfake films" featuring politicians giving inflammatory speeches they never gave could circulate social media in the near future. The interviewer, John Humphrys, interjected: "So it looks like you're saying, 'sack Theresa May', but in fact it's somebody else with your face superimposed?" Collins said: "In a situation like that we are going to want to be able to go to companies like Facebook and say this is clearly fake, its being released maliciously to try to influence people's opinion to spread anger and hate and it should be taken down because its not true.

AND THEN there were three. Amazon has joined Microsoft and Google in supporting regulation of facial recognition technology, and it is easy to guess why: Research on bias in the software has amplified public skepticism, and legislators are starting to take note by proposing restrictions and even bans. Facial recognition technology could have many beneficial effects. The software could help stop human trafficking, reunify refugee families and make everyday services -- from banking to paying for groceries -- safer and faster. But it could come with costs, too, which is why regulators are right to pay attention.

Although deep convolutional networks have achieved improved performance in many natural language tasks, they have been treated as black boxes because they are difficult to interpret. Especially, little is known about how they represent language in their intermediate layers. In an attempt to understand the representations of deep convolutional networks trained on language tasks, we show that individual units are selectively responsive to specific morphemes, words, and phrases, rather than responding to arbitrary and uninterpretable patterns. In order to quantitatively analyze such an intriguing phenomenon, we propose a concept alignment method based on how units respond to the replicated text. We conduct analyses with different architectures on multiple datasets for classification and translation tasks and provide new insights into how deep models understand natural language.

A screen shows visitors being filmed by AI (Artificial Intelligence) security cameras with facial recognition technology at the 14th China International Exhibition on Public Safety and Security in Beijing. A Chinese surveillance firm using facial recognition technology left one of its databases exposed online for months, according to a prominent security researcher. A massive database for 2,565,724 people -- with names, ID card number, expiration date, home address, date of birth, nationality, gender, photograph, employer and GPS coordinates of locations -- was left online without authentication, according to a report from ZDNet. Security researcher Victor Gevers, who founded the database, told ZDNet that over a 24-hour period, a steady stream of nearly 6.7 million GPS coordinates was recorded, which means the database was actively tracking Uyghur Muslims as they moved around Xinjiang province in China. HOW AMAZON'S JEFF BEZOS AND THE NATIONAL ENQUIRER WENT TO WAR Human rights groups have said that China is keeping hundreds of thousands of Uyghur Muslims in internment camps, where they are indoctrinated, forced to perform labor and detained.