A judge in California ruled Thursday that U.S. authorities cannot force people to unlock technology with fingerprint or facial recognition, even with a search warrant. A judge in California ruled Thursday that U.S. authorities cannot force people to unlock technology via fingerprint or facial recognition, even with a search warrant. Magistrate Judge Kandis Westmore, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, made the ruling as investigators tried to access someone's property in Oakland. Two people allegedly used Facebook messenger to threaten a victim with the release of an "embarrassing video" if they didn't hand over money. Authorities investigating the case requested a search and seizure warrant "to seize various items" believed to be at a home connected to the suspects.

A US federal judge has blocked new Trump administration regulations on birth control from applying across the entire country. The rules allow employers and insurers to decline to provide birth control if doing so violates their "religious beliefs" or "moral convictions". The rules were to come into effect nationwide from Monday. But the judge in Philadelphia granted an injunction requested by attorneys general in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Judge Wendy Beetlestone ruled that the new rules would make it more difficult for many women to obtain free contraception and would be an undue burden on US states. Her decision follows a similar verdict by a judge in California on Sunday.

Three new industry heavyweights have signed on to support the Australian National University's Autonomy, Agency and Assurance Institute (3Ai) and its mission to evolve new ways of thinking about and teaching artificial intelligence. KPMG, Macquarie Group and Microsoft will now join the CSIRO's Data61 in partnering with the institute, which is led by former Intel executive and recent high profile CBA board appointee professor Genevieve Bell. Bell said 3Ai was established in September last year to tackle complex problems emerging around artificial intelligence, big data, technology and their impacts on humanity. The announcement coincides with the Labor National Conference, where the party is expected to announce a greater focus on the ethical impacts of growth and development, especially in regards to technology. It also follows the Australian Human Rights Commission's release of an issues paper at its Human Rights and Technology conference in Sydney earlier this, at which Bell spoke.

Machine learning algorithms are now frequently used in sensitive contexts that substantially affect the course of human lives, such as credit lending or criminal justice. This is driven by the idea that `objective' machines base their decisions solely on facts and remain unaffected by human cognitive biases, discriminatory tendencies or emotions. Yet, there is overwhelming evidence showing that algorithms can inherit or even perpetuate human biases in their decision making when they are based on data that contains biased human decisions. This has led to a call for fairness-aware machine learning. However, fairness is a complex concept which is also reflected in the attempts to formalize fairness for algorithmic decision making. Statistical formalizations of fairness lead to a long list of criteria that are each flawed (or harmful even) in different contexts. Moreover, inherent tradeoffs in these criteria make it impossible to unify them in one general framework. Thus, fairness constraints in algorithms have to be specific to the domains to which the algorithms are applied. In the future, research in algorithmic decision making systems should be aware of data and developer biases and add a focus on transparency to facilitate regular fairness audits.

Thanks to advances in technology, we might soon be able to use sensitive data for machine learning without customers having to reveal their confidential information. Machine learning systems need access to huge volumes of data in order to learn thoroughly. But how secure is the data used to train the machine, especially if it's confidential information? Can it be traced or even hacked? Should we even use sensitive data for machine learning at all? SAP reported on the launch of SAP's guiding principles on artificial intelligence (AI) in 2018. One example of how SAP lives by these principles itself is homomorphic encryption.

U.S. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone in Philadelphia issued a nationwide injunction preventing the rules from taking effect, a day after another judge issued a more limited ruling blocking their enforcement in 13 states and the District of Columbia.

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A team of Portuguese researchers have developed a way to identify and track individual animals with artificial intelligence but without facial recognition, which could eventually be applied to public surveillance of humans, Defense One reports. The researchers used a convolutional neural network (CNN) to create idtracker.ai, CNNs are commonly used in facial biometrics, and NIST recently singled them out as the advance most responsible for the dramatic improvement of the technology's accuracy over the past five years. According to the researchers, idtracker.ai is "species agnostic," so will work with people or any other kind of animal. Microsoft called for government regulation of facial recognition in July of last year, saying it raises issues about privacy and other fundamental human rights.

International law firm Taylor Wessing is implementing artificial intelligence (AI) across the organisation and wants to ensure staff have the necessary skills to make the most of the technology. Businesses have identified a serious AI skills gap, which 69% of enterprises have described as "moderate, major or extreme" due to the difficulty involved in finding skilled people to staff their new AI-driven business models. According to Kevin Harris, IT director at Taylor Wessing, AI has the potential to greatly reduce the time lawyers spend reviewing documents, many of which can be hundreds of pages long and filled with technical legal jargon. "We are using [AI] quite extensively in looking at things like lease reviews. We've got large document stores where there's a myriad of quite complex legal terms and the AI is really helping us sort those legal terms out," he said.

ActiveProtective developed a wearable that protects the hips of older adults using wearable airbags, alerting caregivers, monitors behaviors, and promotes safer mobility. BitLumens provides decentralized power to rural communities--for example, offering farmers solar home systems which they can pay in installments--which are not connected to the power line using the blockchain to provide them with a credit score. Civic Eagle built cloud platform using artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce the time and cost of identifying, tracking, and analyzing important legislation and regulations for organizations that need to respond to quickly changing policy environments. Einride vows to disrupt the unsustainable transportation industry, making the movement of goods more intelligent (emission-free, safe, and cost-efficient) by building interconnected, all-electric, autonomous trucks or "T-pods." Elevian develops regenerative medicines, with the potential to treat and prevent many age-related diseases and extend healthy lifespan, targeting a fundamental mechanism of aging: regenerative capacity, our body's ability to heal itself, which declines with age.