SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Google announced on Thursday (June 7) it would not use artificial intelligence for weapons or to "cause or directly facilitate injury to people", as it unveiled a set of principles for the technologies. Chief executive Sundar Pichai, in a blog post outlining the company's artificial intelligence policies, noted that even though Google won't use AI for weapons, "we will continue our work with governments and the military in many other areas" such as cyber security, training, or search and rescue. The news comes with Google facing an uproar from employees and others over a contract with the US military, which the California tech giant said last week would not be renewed. Pichai set out seven principles for Google's application of artificial intelligence, or advanced computing that can simulate intelligent human behaviour. He said Google is using AI "to help people tackle urgent problems" such as prediction of wildfires, helping farmers, diagnosing disease or preventing blindness. "We recognize that such powerful technology raises equally powerful questions about its use," Pichai said in the blog.

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.

Kriti Sharma, vice president of AI and Ethics at Sage, shares what she wishes she knew as a teenager growing up in India and how tech can help underserved communities. You just built your first computer from scratch after reading a few books about them. But first, you need to endure a few more years of high school in India. I know you don't like school. But, I'm asking you to embrace your love for learning.

Recent work has explored how to train machine learning models which do not discriminate against any subgroup of the population as determined by sensitive attributes such as gender or race. To avoid disparate treatment, sensitive attributes should not be considered. On the other hand, in order to avoid disparate impact, sensitive attributes must be examined, e.g., in order to learn a fair model, or to check if a given model is fair. We introduce methods from secure multi-party computation which allow us to avoid both. By encrypting sensitive attributes, we show how an outcome-based fair model may be learned, checked, or have its outputs verified and held to account, without users revealing their sensitive attributes.

Rob Bollard, CIO at IP Australia, the government's intellectual property department, is proud to say that he heads up Australia's first fully digital service delivery agency. In just the space of four years, IP Australia has gone from receiving just 12% of its IP applications online – the rest coming through on paper – to now receiving 99.6% through digital channels. Not only his, but Bollard is overseeing the decommissioning of old systems, a move to the cloud, has implemented agile working, created a DevOps environment that focuses on continuous delivery, ensures systems are designed with the user in mind, and is even deploying AI technologies to improve experiences for employees and citizens. I got the chance to sit down with Bollard at Pega's annual user event in Las Vegas this week, as IP Australia has implemented the Pega platform as its case management system. Our vision is really to become a world-class IP office and to try to support the prosperity of Australians in the system.

If AI innovation runs on data, the new European Union's General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) seem poised to freeze AI advancement. The regulations prescribe a utopian data future where consumers can refuse companies access to their personally identifiable information (PII). Although the enforcement deadline has passed, the technical infrastructure and manpower needed to meet these requirements still do not exist in most companies today. Coincidentally, the barriers to GDPR compliance are also bottlenecks of widespread AI adoption. Despite the hype, enterprise AI is still nascent: Companies may own petabytes of data that can be used for AI, but fully digitizing that data, knowing what the data tables actually contain and understanding who, where and how to access that data remains a herculean coordination effort for even the most empowered internal champion.

The Senate is currently considering a bill that would give the Department of Homeland Security more power to research, surveil, seize and destroy drones flying in the US, Gizmodo reports. Yesterday during a hearing, DHS officials expressed support for the bipartisan legislation, saying current laws prevent the agency from effectively mitigating the potential threats presented by drones. DHS Deputy General Counsel Hayley Chang said yesterday that laws like the Wiretap Act, the Pen Trap Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Aircraft Sabotage Act limit what measures the agency can take when it comes to drones that pose a risk to US security and in its written introduction, DHS said, "Legal uncertainty also impedes the department's ability to research, develop and test [counter-unmanned aircraft system (CUAS)] technologies for eventual CUAS operations by our authorized users. Under current legal constraints, only a very small number of technologies can be employed to detect and track UAS and none can be employed to disable/mitigate UAS in our homeland." As for why it needs more leeway when it comes to drones, DHS pointed to activity taking place in other countries that could threaten US security.

Artificial intelligence is already firmly rooted in our lives, and rarely does a month pass by without significant breakthroughs making the news. But amidst all the hype, it can be difficult to get a bird's-eye view of just how far AI has come, the hurdles it faces and the direction in which it's headed. In a bid to paint as precise a portrait of the AI sector as possible, The Minutes team scribbled down every noteworthy bit of information mentioned during the AI Forum 2018, a C2 Montréal track dedicated to artificial intelligence and created in partnership with Element AI. Here are the key insights they gathered. "Montreal and the Canadian AI ecosystems are winning the early innings of the AI game," says Jean-Nicolas Delage, a partner at Fasken's Intellectual Property Group.

For years, Lucas Joppa has been fascinated with the world that exists at the intersection of technology and the environment. Now, in a recent article in the journal Science, he calls on governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), academia, and the private technology sector to join him in finding new ways that artificial intelligence (AI) can help collect new information and data into managing and protecting Earth's resources with higher efficiency. "I'm talking about trying to get global society's level of information and insight into our Earth's natural resources to the same level that we've managed to achieve with our insights into human activities and behavior," says Joppa, who was named Microsoft's first chief environment scientist last year. In his article, Joppa writes that most people he meets are surprised that Microsoft has a position such as his -- but that he believes "every major tech firm will be working on applying AI to sustainability" in a few years. On the two-year anniversary of the Paris climate agreement on Dec. 11, Microsoft unveiled a deeper commitment to its "AI for Earth" program, pledging five years and $50 million to distribute AI technology to those who are working to protect the planet and its natural resources -- especially those dedicated to agriculture, water management, biodiversity, and climate change.

Google has been in hot water for the last month as details about its partnership with the US military revealed the tech titan's involvement in a clandestine, and potentially violent, program. After internal and external backlash, the company backed out of the project last week. Today, Google CEO Sundar PIchai published a new policy in response that lays out the company's ethos: From now on, it won't design or deploy AI for weapons, surveillance purposes or technology "whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights." Project Maven used Google's AI research to assist facial recognition, which may have been intended to help with military targeting. As a result, engineers petitioned the company and some reportedly quit before the tech titan announced it wouldn't renew their involvement in the project.