The UK's first major Parliamentary inquiry into Artificial Intelligence has called for a new cross-sector ethics code to ensure that the country becomes a world leader in AI. Lord Clement-Jones, the Chairman of The House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, told Techworld that an ethical approach was essential to ensure public support for AI. "What we want is to make sure that the public is fully trusting in this technology, and you can only do that if they believe it's for the benefit of them and others when they're being applied, and also that it's transparent and unbiased in its application," he said. The proposed "AI Code" could attract public support by creating consistent guidelines for developing and using AI across all organisations and companies in both the public and private sectors. In a report titled AI in the UK: Ready, Willing and Able?, the committee set out five principles to form the basis of the code, which could be adopted internationally: This AI code could provide the basis for future statutory regulation, but the committee stopped short of recommending new regulation specifically for AI at this point.

The UK's House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, has finally published its major report into the impact, regulation and use of AI, called'AI in the UK: ready, willing and able?' after taking evidence from multiple experts across many sectors, including from the legal industry. For those who have been following the debate closely it will come as no surprise that the report understandably sticks to the main themes of jobs and ethics. Although'the law' appears many times as a subject related to liability, transparency and ethics, there is little about the actual business of law and AI, or the New Wave of legal technology that is driven by AI tech such as NLP and machine learning. Although, again, there are references to the need for transparency in any algorithms that may help make decisions related to a defendant in a court case. The Lords committee also have asked the UK's Law Commission to review whether existing laws on liability cover errors created by an AI system.

A controversial Facebook AI tool could soon be making a return to Europe and Canada. Facial recognition, launched in 2010, suggests names for people it identifies in photos uploaded by users. It was suspended for users in Europe in 2012 over privacy concerns, but still lives on in the US and other regions worldwide. Now the firm says it will make a comeback, using the new European data protection regulations as a chance to collect more information if users opt in. The move to reintroduce the image scanning software is likely to ruffle feathers, coming in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data handling debacle.

Experienced lawyers in the US have been left behind by AI when it came to reviewing legal documents according to a new report – with the lawyers exhibiting 85% average accuracy compared to 94% average accuracy rate achieved by AI software. This revelation is based on a study carried out by professors at Duke Law, University of Southern California, and Stanford Law School. Metaphorically, the study was a race between LawGeex, an AI contract review platform provider, and a team of 20 top corporate lawyers with notable experience particularly in reviewing Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs). For the study, the lawyers and the LawGeex AI had to analyse five previously unseen contracts with 153 paragraphs of technical legal language, under controlled conditions precisely prepared the way lawyers review and approve everyday contracts. The highest performing lawyer stood in line with LawGeex AI by achieving 94% accuracy but the average accuracy achieved by the least performing lawyer stood at just 67%.

Facebook has started to seek explicit consent from users for targeted advertising, storage of sensitive information, and – for the first time in the EU – application of facial recognition technology as the European general data protection regulation (GDPR) is due to come into force in just over a month. The company is only required to seek the new permissions in the European Union, but it plans to roll them out to all Facebook users, no matter where they live. The move follows Mark Zuckerberg's stated goal to apply the spirit of GDPR worldwide. When Facebook users log in during the coming weeks, they will be asked to agree to the company's updated terms of service, and to make specific choices in a number of areas defined by the new law. In a blogpost, Facebook executives Erin Egan and Ashlie Beringer said users would be asked to review information about targeted advertising, and to choose whether or not they want the social network to use data from partners to show them ads; to explicitly confirm whether they're happy to share "political, religious, and relationship information", which is defined as specially protected data under EU law; and to agree to the use of facial recognition technology, which Facebook says will be used to detect which pictures users are in and help protect them against strangers using their photos.

Somewhere between my eighth and eighteenth turmeric lattes, I realized I was dangerously close to falling for TED. The annual conference, which gathers elite technologists, thought leaders, scientists, economists, futurists, visionaries, activists, physicists, poets, enthusiasts, academics, entertainers and billionaires has a binary reputation: For anyone who hasn't been, it's an object of easy mockery. For anyone who has, it's a religion. After five days in the garden of TED, downing blueberry mint kombucha, champagne gummy bears and green juice described as "good for when you feel like you're being chased by a cheetah," I had seen the light. The ideas felt exciting (flying cars!

Facebook has started asking European and Canadian users to let it use facial recognition technology to identify them in photos and videos. Facebook originally began face-matching users outside Canada in 2011, but stopped doing so for EU citizens the following year after protests from regulators and privacy campaigners. The new request is one of several opt-in permissions being rolled out in advance of a new data privacy law. The move is likely to be controversial. The company is currently embroiled in a privacy scandal related to the use of its members' personal information by the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

This paper builds on the recent ASPIC+ formalism, to develop a general framework for argumentation with preferences. We motivate a revised definition of conflict free sets of arguments, adapt ASPIC+ to accommodate a broader range of instantiating logics, and show that under some assumptions, the resulting framework satisfies key properties and rationality postulates. We then show that the generalised framework accommodates Tarskian logic instantiations extended with preferences, and then study instantiations of the framework by classical logic approaches to argumentation. We conclude by arguing that ASPIC+'s modelling of defeasible inference rules further testifies to the generality of the framework, and then examine and counter recent critiques of Dung's framework and its extensions to accommodate preferences.

A U.S. federal judge ruled on Monday that Facebook must face a class action lawsuit alleging that the social network unlawfully used a facial recognition process on photos without user permission. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. A U.S. federal judge ruled on Monday that Facebook must face a class action lawsuit alleging that the social network unlawfully used a facial recognition process on photos without user permission.

Facebook will face a class action law suit in the wake of its privacy scandal, a US federal judge has ruled. Allegations of privacy violations emerged when it was revealed the app used a photo-scanning tool on users' images without their explicit consent. The facial recognition tool, launched in 2010, suggests names for people it identifies in photos uploaded by users. Under Illinois state law, the company could be fined $1,000 to $5,000 (£700 - £3,500) each time a person's image was used without consent. The technology was suspended for users in Europe in 2012 over privacy fears but is still live in the US and other regions worldwide.