Regulators are beginning to teach robots who's the boss. After spending billions of dollars on cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies, Europe's insurers and banks face tougher scrutiny of the tools they use to help root out fraud, check borrowers' creditworthiness and automate claims decisions. European Union rules starting this week will stress human oversight and consumer protection, which may hamper companies trying to build the tools of the future. "Companies developing AI technologies will have to consider and embed the data protection issues into the design process," David Martin, senior legal officer at Brussels-based consumer advocate BEUC, said in an interview. "It's not something where they can just tick a box at the end."

The legal sector houses a much higher degree of regulation compared with other industries, and the pull towards automation has meant lots of businesses have popped up, offering tools capable of sifting and sorting though huge datasets and legal documentation. However, sophisticated models are still quite a way off. Speaking at CogX in London's Tobacco Docks today, experts from within the industry gathered to discuss how artificial intelligence could impact the legal industry. Read next: How do we legislate for AI in algorithmic trading?

The environment is a hot topic, literally. As global temperatures have warmed since 1850, the discussion on what to do about it has heated up as well. Humanity is having an undeniable impact on the natural world. Our growing demand for resources is leading to land-use changes, loss of biodiversity and pollution. Climate change continues to disrupt weather patterns, temperatures and water availability, leading to impacts on human and natural ecosystems -- even the forests are on the move.

Whenever a professional sector faces new technology, questions arise regarding how that technology will disrupt daily operations and the careers of those who choose that profession. And lawyers and the legal profession are no exception. Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to transform the legal profession in many ways, but in most cases it augments what humans do and frees them up to take on higher-level tasks such as advising to clients, negotiating deals and appearing in court. Artificial intelligence mimics certain operations of the human mind and is the term used when machines are able to complete tasks that typically require human intelligence. The term machine learning is when computers use rules (algorithms) to analyze data and learn patterns and glean insights from the data.

Over the next five years, we are about to witness the world we live in entirely disrupted by improvements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Children today are growing up with AI assistants in their homes (Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa) -- to the point that you might consider their mere presence an extension of co-parenting. As voice and facial recognition continue to evolve, machine learning algorithms are getting smarter. More and more industries are being influenced by AI, and our society as we know it is transforming. The transportation industry looks like it will be the first to be completely disrupted by artificial intelligence.

It's impossible to say exactly how much money Uber makes from drunk people, but if the number of bleary-eyed people wandering around on Friday and Saturday nights trying to find their summoned cars is anything to go by, it's probably quite a lot. The company clearly knows its audience: this week, it applied for a patent for an AI that could spot drunk or high passengers simply by the way they walked, typed or held their phone. According to the patent, the AI could measure a user's walking speed, watch for unusual typos or sense whether a phone is swaying or being held at an unusual angle. This, it suggests, could "predict user state using machine learning" and recognise "uncharacteristic user states". The company almost certainly believes that this information would be used for good, and it's undeniable that the option to avoid intoxicated passengers would come as a blessed relief to many drivers.

The FBI is asking for your assistance in finding Sydney Loofe. Sydney was last seen on the evening of November 16th. If you have any information please call 402-493-8688 option 1. Help us bring Sydney home. Two people accused of killing and dismembering a woman one of them met on a Tinder date appeared in a Nebraska court Tuesday on first-degree murder charges. Aubrey Trail, 51, and Bailey Boswell, 23, appeared in Saline County Court to face the charges related to the killing of Sydney Loofe, 24.

Melbourne man Milorad "Michael" Trkulja has won his high court battle to sue the search engine Google for defamation over images and search results that link him to the Melbourne criminal underworld. Trkulja said he would continue legal action against Google until it removed his name and photos from the internet. Trkulja, who was shot in the back in a Melbourne restaurant in 2004, successfully argued in the Victorian supreme court in 2012 that Google defamed him by publishing photos of him linked to hardened criminals of Melbourne's underworld. Four years later the Victorian court of appeal overturned the decision, finding the case had no prospect of successfully proving defamation. The high court disputed that ruling in a judgment on Wednesday and ordered Google to pay Trkulja's legal costs.

Fairness in algorithmic decision-making processes is attracting increasing concern. When an algorithm is applied to human-related decision-making an estimator solely optimizing its predictive power can learn biases on the existing data, which motivates us the notion of fairness in machine learning. while several different notions are studied in the literature, little studies are done on how these notions affect the individuals. We demonstrate such a comparison between several policies induced by well-known fairness criteria, including the color-blind (CB), the demographic parity (DP), and the equalized odds (EO). We show that the EO is the only criterion among them that removes group-level disparity. Empirical studies on the social welfare and disparity of these policies are conducted.

In her recently published 2018 trends report, Mary Meeker discussed how the combination of accelerated data gathering due to computer adoption and the declining cost of cloud computing, have enabled Artificial Intelligence (AI) to emerge as a service platform. There are many definitions of AI, from machines that work and think like humans, through to "any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximise its change of successfully achieving its goal". Whilst the specifics of the definition are still discussed, what is now unequivocal is the power AI has to shape our lives, with intelligent assistants such as Siri and Alexa understanding our spoken commands, predictive maintenance algorithms that can optimise equipment repair, and cars that can drive themselves. However, even as AI creeps deeper and deeper into our everyday lives, serious questions remain about artificial responsibility. In an interview with Newsweek, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google said:"AI is one of the most important things that humanity is working on. It's more profound than, I don't know, electricity or fire. They learn to harness fire for the benefits of humanity, but we will have to overcome its downsides, too. My point is AI is really important, but we have to be concerned about it," AI uses existing data to make predictions, such as taking logs of previous service centre calls to automatically predict the correct response to give to customer questions.