Facebook must face a class action lawsuit over its use of facial recognition technology, a California judge has ruled. The lawsuit alleges that Facebook gathered biometric information without users' explicit consent. It involves the "tag suggestions" technology, which spots users' friends in uploaded photos; the lawsuit says this breaches Illinois state law. Facebook said the case had no merit and it would fight it vigorously. On Monday, US District Judge James Donato ruled to certify a class of Facebook users - a key legal hurdle for a class action suit.

Despite how human-like they may act and appear, giving rights to robots may not be the best move. That was the consensus of 150 experts who weighed in on the discussion on Thursday, in light of the European Parliament's recent question of whether or not robots need special rights. A team of 150 experts in robotics, artificial intelligence, law, medical science and ethics wrote an open letter to the European Union advising that robots not be given special legal status as "electric persons," CNN reported. The letter says that giving robots human rights would be unhelpful. "From an ethical and legal perspective, creating a legal personality for a robot is inappropriate whatever the legal status model," the letter states.

The class will consist of Facebook users in Illinois for whom Facebook created and stored facial recognition algorithms after June 7, 2011, Donato ruled. That is the date when Facebook launched "Tag Suggestions," a feature that suggests people to tag after a Facebook user uploads a photo.

The United States and the United Kingdom are leading this initiative. Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Spain are also involved (see go.nature.com/2hebxnt). Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to revolutionize this activity.

Studies suggest that within the hierarchical architecture, the topological higher level possibly represents a conscious category of the current sensory events with slower changing activities. They attempt to predict the activities on the lower level by relaying the predicted information. On the other hand, the incoming sensory information corrects such prediction of the events on the higher level by the novel or surprising signal. We propose a predictive hierarchical artificial neural network model that examines this hypothesis on neurorobotic platforms, based on the AFA-PredNet model. In this neural network model, there are different temporal scales of predictions exist on different levels of the hierarchical predictive coding, which are defined in the temporal parameters in the neurons. Also, both the fast and the slow-changing neural activities are modulated by the active motor activities. A neurorobotic experiment based on the architecture was also conducted based on the data collected from the VRep simulator.

It is difficult to read the news today without running across an article saying that AI will change everything. Is this also true of the legal profession? Some claim that we're in the midst of an "AI apocalypse:" that every level of society will be massively disrupted. Although much of this press is hype and clickbait, the reality within the practice of law is that AI is indeed beginning to have a substantial impact. Ultimately, AI will be more disruptive to the legal profession than the move in the last century from typewriters to word processors.

Redwood City, Calif., April 16, 2018 – Informatica, the enterprise cloud data management leader, today announced the launch of its reimagined Enterprise Data Catalog with intelligent APIs and deeply enhanced AI algorithms, powered by the CLAIRE engine, for self-service data discovery by any line-of-business user. With new, intelligent APIs, users can have one-click access to the rich content of Enterprise Data Catalog from within their own applications. Developers can empower their applications with metadata intelligence and data recommendations. The AI-powered Enterprise Data Catalog intelligently scans and catalogs data assets across the enterprise and adds business context for understanding. It can identify domains and entities, such as customer, product, order, and more, providing seamless integration of all data with easy access and search capabilities.

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The House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, in a report titled AI in the UK: Ready, Willing and Able?, argued that the UK can lead the world in AI, as long as it puts ethics at the centre of its plans.

On April 9 and 10, the inaugural K&L Gates Conference on Ethics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) sought to bring to light some of the prevailing issues that surround artificial intelligence, including "effects on the workforce, social justice, fairness, privacy and many other sectors of society," as the conference website states. In 2016, a $10 million donation from Pittsburgh-headquartered international law firm K&L Gates funded the establishment of the K&L Gates Endowment for Ethics and Computational Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University. The conference utilized this endowment to bring together some of the most important thought leaders, academics, industry heads, and others to discuss the boundless implications that come out of technological advances. David Danks, philosophy department head and co-chair of the Steering Committee for the K&L Gates Endowment for Ethics & Computational Technologies explained in a university press release that "computational technologies, particularly AI and robotics, are often developed and deployed without enough public engagement or discussion about their impacts." Because of this, the conference attempts to discuss issues that have a public stake, with the collective good in mind.