The European Commission recently announced plans to increase that funding, to make more data available for use in AI, and to work with EU member states on a strategy for deploying AI in the European economy. But at the same time, the EU's new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) puts tight restrictions on uses of AI that involve personal data, and EU policymakers continue to search for additional restrictions on AI to address their remaining fears. Unlike tobacco, AI has many beneficial uses, and the potential risks depend on how it is developed and used over the long-term. The irony is that if Europe over-regulates AI now, it will miss its chance for global influence over the technology's future. The commission does not see a contradiction because it believes that stringent regulation will engender consumer trust in AI. But that reasoning is flawed.

It seems as if everybody is starting to look at artificial intelligence as some sort of make-or-break technology for the human race. Where the fate of the planet is concerned, there is an increasing collision between the nationalistic view that AI's overriding purpose is to help countries hold their own in geopolitical struggles and the humanitarian view that AI should deliver the benefits of material prosperity to all peoples, serving as an activist force in the universal struggle for equality, free expression, personal autonomy and democratic governance. The nationalistic perspective keeps popping out in headlines. For example, there are the sentiments expressed in this recent article by Horacio Rozanski, chief executive of Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. He discusses what he regards as a "close race" between the United States and China in developing and exploiting AI. I've been exploring AI benchmarking initiatives recently, and I take issue with the assumption that we can validly benchmark one nation against another in this regard.

The application of artificial intelligence algorithms in the justice system - for example to decide which offenders are eligible for alternatives to custodial sentences - will be among the first items on the agenda of a year-long investigation into the impact of technology opened by the Law Society. The Public Policy Technology and Law Commission - Algorithms in the Justice System, will meet in public three times, its chair Christina Blacklaws, who next month assumes the presidency of the Law Society, announced last night. The commmission's formation reflects growing concern about the advent of so-called'Schrodinger's justice' - in which decisions are taken by self-learning systems impervious to examination or challenge. Pressure group Big Brother Watch revealed yesterday that it has instructed human rights firm Leigh Day to take action against the Metropolitan Police over to demand the withdrawal of'dangerously authoritarian' automated technology for recognising faces at public events such as the Notting Hill Carnival. Blacklaws told an event at Chancery Lane last night that facial recognition systems in effect require'a degree of privacy to be surrendered in return for a promise of greater security' - but that the technology had so far failed to work.

Artificial intelligence is transforming the legal profession -- and that includes legal ethics. AI and similar cutting-edge technologies raise many complex ethical issues and challenges that lawyers ignore at their peril. At the same time, AI also holds out the promise of helping lawyers to meet their ethical obligations, serve their clients more effectively, and promote access to justice and the rule of law. What does AI mean for legal ethics, what should lawyers do to prepare for these changes, and how could AI help improve the legal profession? Together with our partners at Thomson Reuters, we at Above the Law have been examining these important subjects.

Facial recognition technology used by the UK police is making thousands of mistakes - and now there could be legal repercussions. Civil liberties group, Big Brother Watch, has teamed up with Baroness Jenny Jones to ask the government and the Met to stop using the technology. They claim the use of facial recognition has proven to be'dangerously authoritarian', inaccurate and a breach if rights protecting privacy and freedom of expression. If their request is rejected, the group says it will take the case to court in what will be the first legal challenge of its kind. South Wales Police, London's Met and Leicestershire are all trialling automated facial recognition systems in public places to identify wanted criminals.

NEW DELHI: The government is looking to tweak the existing intellectual property regime to make it more flexible and widen its scope to encourage research and innovation in artificial intelligence (AI). A high-level task force will soon be set up to examine and issue appropriate modifications to the existing intellectual property regulatory regime pertaining to AI. The government has chalked out a plan to use AI to improve India's social indicators. The proposed task force will have representatives from stakeholder ministries and departments like information and technology, company affairs, Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion and the Niti Aayog. "The current IP regime with its stringent and narrowly focussed patent laws is posing a challenge to AI applications given the unique nature of AI solution development," a senior government official told ET.

Much of the literature on fair classifiers considers the case of a single classifier used once, in isolation. We initiate the study of composition of fair classifiers. In particular, we address the pitfalls of na{\i}ve composition and give general constructions for fair composition. Focusing on the individual fairness setting proposed in [Dwork, Hardt, Pitassi, Reingold, Zemel, 2011], we also extend our results to a large class of group fairness definitions popular in the recent literature. We exhibit several cases in which group fairness definitions give misleading signals under composition and conclude that additional context is needed to evaluate both group and individual fairness under composition.

Developing classification algorithms that are fair with respect to sensitive attributes of the data has become an important problem due to the growing deployment of classification algorithms in various social contexts. Several recent works have focused on fairness with respect to a specific metric, modeled the corresponding fair classification problem as a constrained optimization problem, and developed tailored algorithms to solve them. Despite this, there still remain important metrics for which we do not have fair classifiers and many of the aforementioned algorithms do not come with theoretical guarantees; perhaps because the resulting optimization problem is non-convex. The main contribution of this paper is a new meta-algorithm for classification that takes as input a large class of fairness constraints, with respect to multiple non-disjoint sensitive attributes, and which comes with provable guarantees. This is achieved by first developing a meta-algorithm for a large family of classification problems with convex constraints, and then showing that classification problems with general types of fairness constraints can be reduced to those in this family. We present empirical results that show that our algorithm can achieve near-perfect fairness with respect to various fairness metrics, and that the loss in accuracy due to the imposed fairness constraints is often small. Overall, this work unifies several prior works on fair classification, presents a practical algorithm with theoretical guarantees, and can handle fairness metrics that were previously not possible.

In a report on Thursday, Ofcom said the progress toward the legal separation of BT and Openreach has been "broadly satisfactory", but some steps were yet to be completed such as the transfer of Openreach employees to the new Openreach Ltd due to complexities with BT's pension scheme.

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook Inc., center, leaves after testifying at the European Union (EU) parliament in Brussels, Belgium, on Tuesday, May 22, 2018. Zuckerberg offered European Union lawmakers his latest mea culpa for the social network's role in a privacy scandal that tarnished his company's reputation. In Open Society and Its Enemies, Sir Karl Popper positioned Plato as public enemy No. 1. Plato, in his work The Republic, proposed an ideal system of government that should cause any lover of liberty and progress to recoil. Popper warned that in Plato's utopia, "Everything possible has been done to eradicate from our life everywhere and in every way all that is private and individual…. Our very eyes and ears and hands seem to see, to hear, and to act, as if they belonged not to individuals but to the community."