Artificial intelligence experts are urging governments to require assessments of AI implementation that mimic the environmental impact reports now required by many jurisdictions. AI Now, a nonprofit founded to study the societal impacts of AI, said an algorithmic impact assessment (AIA) would assure that the public and governments understand the scope, capability, and secondary impacts an algorithm could have, and people could voice concerns if an algorithm was behaving in a biased or unfair way. "If governments deploy systems on human populations without frameworks for accountability, they risk losing touch with how decisions have been made, thus rendering them unable to know or respond to bias, errors, or other problems," the report said. "The public will have less insight into how agencies function, and have less power to question or appeal decisions." An AIA would first define the automated system a government wants to use, the researchers said.

UK startup Juro, which is applying a "design centric approach" and machine learning tech to help businesses speed up the authoring and management of sales contracts, has closed $2m in seed funding led by Point Nine Capital. Prior investor Seedcamp also contributed to the round. Juro is announcing Taavet Hinrikus (TransferWise's co-founder) as an investor now too, as well as Michael Pennington (Gumtree co-founder) and the family office of Paul Forster (co-founder of Indeed.com). Back in January 2017 the London-based startup closed a $750,000 (£615k) seed round, though CEO and co-founder Richard Mabey tells us that was really better classed as an angel round -- with Point Nine Capital only joining "late" in the day. "We actually could have strung it out to Series A," he says of the funding that's being announced now. "But we had multiple offers come in and there is so much of an explosion in demand for the [machine learning] that it made sense to do a round now rather than wait for the A. The whole legal industry is undergoing radical change and we want to be leading it."

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been receiving special coaching on how to present himself when he appears before US politicians demanding to know what he is doing to protect users' data, and how Russia was able to use his platform to allegedly meddle in the 2016 presidential election. Amid continuing controversy over the inappropriate harvesting of the data of up to 87 million Facebook users by British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, Mr Zuckerberg will try and reassure Congress he is taking the concerns of them and the general public seriously. He will also try to deflect the efforts of those who favour more stringent government regulation. "It's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm," he is expected to tell the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, according to written testimony released ahead of his appearance. "We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I'm sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I'm responsible for what happens here."

Summary: This is the third in our series on chatbots. In this installment we'll look at the best practice dos and don'ts as described by a number of successful chatbot developers. In our first article we covered the chatbot basics including their brief technological history, uses, basic design choices, and where deep learning comes into play. The second article focused on the universal NLU front ends for all chatbots and some of the technical definitions and programming particulars necessary to understand how these really function. In this article, we've scoured the internet for advice from successful chatbot developers to provide some useful best practices, or at least some valuable dos and don'ts. The user doesn't care that you've got a chatbot.

Google services such as its image search and translation tools use sophisticated machine learning which allow computers to see, listen and speak in much the same way as human do. Machine learning is the term for the current cutting-edge applications in artificial intelligence. Basically, the idea is that by teaching machines to "learn" by processing huge amounts of data they will become increasingly better at carrying out tasks that traditionally can only be completed by human brains. These techniques include "computer vision" – training computers to recognize images in a similar way we do. For example, an object with four legs and a tail has a high probability of being an animal.

Campaigners are renewing calls for a pre-emptive ban on so-called "killer robots" as representatives of more than 80 countries meet to discuss the autonomous weapons systems. The use of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) is "a step too far", said Mary Wareham, the global coordinator of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. "They cross a moral line, because we would see machines taking human lives on the battlefield or in law enforcement. "We want weapon systems and the use of force to remain under human control," Wareham said. Wareham spoke to Al Jazeera before Monday's meeting in Geneva, Switzerland on a possible ban on LAWS. This is the fifth international meeting to discuss so-called "killer robots" since 2014, but no formal decisions will be taken yet as countries are still working towards a common definition of LAWS, and have yet to agree on whether they should be outlawed in international law. This is going to be a crucial year. If we do not move swiftly, we could end up in a situation where it's too late and where fully autonomous weapons proliferate to the extent that every country has them," Wareham told Al Jazeera.

Google has launched a new product to the American market, the Google Clip, that uses AI and machine learning to automatically capture photos of what it deems to be "interesting moments". In Australia, the answers appear to be: there isn't and no one. Under Australian law, the author of an artistic work is "the person who took the photograph". The Clip is a machine, not a person, so is not the author (under Australian law). The owner of the Clip did not "take" the photograph, so is not the author.

Separately on Friday, consumer groups filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, saying Facebook violates users' privacy rights through its facial-recognition software. In October, Facebook unveiled a similar authorization requirement for election-related ads. The latest move will cover "issue ads"--those that don't specifically mention a candidate but weigh in on a divisive issue, including during an election campaign. Such advertisers will be required to confirm their identities and locations with the company. The change marks the latest step in Facebook's efforts to secure its platform after Russian-backed groups used the social network to sow divisions before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and elsewhere in the world.

It was a chaotic week in the tech world, even before the YouTube HQ shooting. Apple's pushing its luck by pushing its Mac Pro release to next year, Russia's mail delivery drone barely got off the ground, and Scott Pruitt's EPA is doing its best to suffocate California in smog. Numbers, because how else will you know when yours is up? And it looks like the creatives that the Pro is designed for will have to wait just a little bit longer as the company announced this week that the promised revamp won't happen until 2019. Guess Nick Cage won't be headed to Mars anytime soon.

This year, for the first time, the Manhattan, Kan.-based company tapped an artificial-intelligence tool called Xander to analyze responses. Xander can determine whether an employee feels optimistic, confused or angry, and provide insights to help manage teams, the tool's developers at Ultimate Software Group Inc. ULTI -1.88% said. From a block of text, the software analyzes answers to open-ended questions based on language and other data, assigning attitudes or opinions to employees. One top executive at SPS learned from recent survey analysis that he needed to work on his temper. "One of my lowest scoring items was maintaining my composure under stress," he said of the feedback from his direct reports.