Artificial intelligence could give internet giants like Facebook and Amazon even more power to reshape the Canadian economy, threatening the viability of domestic businesses, researchers warn. A December presentation to senior civil servants said that Canadian companies were losing ownership of – and access to – data to the likes of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, requiring a federal policy response. Artificial intelligence "will reinforce this trend," presenters from the National Research Council warned top officials, adding that a national data strategy would be necessary to prevent Canada from becoming "a nation of'data cows' for other countries." The presentation, among other documents obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act, provides a window into the scale of the problem the Liberals are trying to tackle by crafting a national data strategy, and the breadth of departments involved in its creation. The Liberals took another step towards the creation of the strategy by launching online and in-person consultations that will run through the summer in order to inform a final policy.

One of my typical activities in May is to teach the Analytics Academy, a short program offered to Harvard Ph.D. students and graduates from the School of Arts and Sciences. The session is offered through the Office of Career Services and explores how Ph.Ds from various fields can secure jobs and prosper outside of academia in the field of analytics, big data, and artificial intelligence. Since that same office provided me with some very useful business orientation when I was seeking a (partially, as it turns out) nonacademic career, I am always happy to return the favor. I've been doing this program for almost a decade, and the students have always been very enthusiastic and positive about analytics. But this year was different.

Abstract Dialectical Frameworks (ADFs) generalize Dung's argumentation frameworks allowing various relationships among arguments to be expressed in a systematic way. We further generalize ADFs so as to accommodate arbitrary acceptance degrees for the arguments. This makes ADFs applicable in domains where both the initial status of arguments and their relationship are only insufficiently specified by Boolean functions. We define all standard ADF semantics for the weighted case, including grounded, preferred and stable semantics. We illustrate our approach using acceptance degrees from the unit interval and show how other valuation structures can be integrated. In each case it is sufficient to specify how the generalized acceptance conditions are represented by formulas, and to specify the information ordering underlying the characteristic ADF operator. We also present complexity results for problems related to weighted ADFs.

Several researchers have argued that a machine learning system's interpretability should be defined in relation to a specific agent or task: we should not ask if the system is interpretable, but to whom is it interpretable. We describe a model intended to help answer this question, by identifying different roles that agents can fulfill in relation to the machine learning system. We illustrate the use of our model in a variety of scenarios, exploring how an agent's role influences its goals, and the implications for defining interpretability. Finally, we make suggestions for how our model could be useful to interpretability researchers, system developers, and regulatory bodies auditing machine learning systems.

Artificial intelligence could give internet giants like Facebook and Amazon even more power to reshape the Canadian economy, threatening the viability of domestic businesses, researchers warn. A December presentation to senior civil servants said that Canadian companies were losing ownership of -- and access to -- data to the likes of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, requiring a federal policy response. Artificial intelligence "will reinforce this trend," presenters from the National Research Council warned top officials, adding that a national data strategy would be necessary to prevent Canada from becoming "a nation of'data cows' for other countries." The presentation, among other documents obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act, provides a window into the scale of the problem the Liberals are trying to tackle by crafting a national data strategy, and the breadth of departments involved in its creation. The Liberals took another step towards the creation of the strategy by launching online and in-person consultations that will run through the summer in order to inform a final policy.

The European Parliament is about to vote on a new law that campaigners claim could completely change "the free and open internet as we know it." It would potentially mean that tech companies would be forced to scan every single thing posted to their sites – and take down anything they think might be stolen. Prominent figures from the tech industry wrote an open letter to the President of the European Parliament warning that Article 13 represented an "imminent threat" to the future of the internet. "Article 13 takes an unprecedented step towards the transformation of the internet from an open platform for sharing and innovation, into a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users," the open letter warns. "We support the consideration of measures that would improve the ability for creators to receive fair remuneration for the use of their works online. For the sake of the internet's future, we urge you to vote for the deletion of this proposal."

Applications pairing artificial intelligence (AI) and legal services have gained a lot of traction in recent years. According to a recent study from legal contract review platform LawGeex, AI can now outperform lawyers, specifically when reviewing Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) and spotting risks in legal documents. In the study, 20 attorneys and the AI software each reviewed the same five NDAs. Attorneys reviewed the documents with an average accuracy rate of 85 percent in a time of 92 minutes. AI, on the other hand, had an average accuracy of 94 percent in just 26 seconds of review time.

Before Siri and Cortana, pop culture offered up several versions of feminised artificial intelligence – but none of the artists perhaps envisioned how the reality could take us backwards rather than propel us into a new, more equal world. Charli XCX's latest album, Pop 2, has been dubbed as the "sequel" to pop music. The 10-track mixtape is riddled with a slew of pop sirens, underground up-and-comers and club-ready anthems: "Go fuck your prototype I'm an upgrade of your stereotype," Charli sings in Femmebot. In 2010, Robyn's Fembot interrogated the intersection of womanhood and androidism, while Christina Aguilera's sixth album that same year, Bionic, toyed between electro-pop beats (the machine) and stripped-back ballads (the woman). The phenomenon has long been computed into film and pop culture (Her (2013), Ex Machina (2014), Stepford Wives (1975), Metropolis (1927)), but only recently have physical manifestations entered our reality. Just as we acknowledge the wiring of femmebots and female pop stars, we should also consider the broader parallel between women and technology, and the increased feminisation of artificial intelligence.

SAN FRANCISCO – IBM pitted a computer against two human debaters in the first public demonstration of artificial intelligence technology it's been working on for more than five years. The company unveiled its Project Debater in San Francisco on Monday, asking it to make a case for government-subsidized space research -- a topic it hadn't studied in advance but championed fiercely with just a few awkward gaps in reasoning. "Subsidizing space exploration is like investing in really good tires," argued the computer system, its female voice embodied in a 5-foot-tall machine shaped like a monolith with TV screens on its sides. Such research would enrich the human mind, inspire young people and be a "very sound investment," it said, making it more important even than good roads, schools or health care. The computer delivered its opening argument by pulling in evidence from its huge internal repository of newspapers, journals and other sources.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. On March 6, 2016, a small drone belonging to the open-source software company Drone Employee lifted into the Russian sky, traveling across an open field of white snow. Drone flight is relatively unremarkable today, but this particular drone wasn't controlled by anyone. Brought to life by a predetermined agreement, or "smart contract," running on the Ethereum blockchain, the drone's engines powered on and it lifted itself into the air, taking a flight path dictated--only and exclusively--by code. The smart contract controlled the drone's trajectory, without the need for a middleman with a remote to manage the device.