After revelations that political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica allegedly appropriated Facebook user data to advise Donald Trump's 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, many are calling for greater regulation of social media networks, saying a'massive data breach' has occurred. The idea that governments can regulate their way into protecting citizen privacy is appealing, but I believe it misses the mark. What happened with Cambridge Analytica wasn't a breach or a leak. It was a wild violation of academic research ethics. The CEO finally broke his silence on the misuse of 51 million users' data Wednesday evening, outlining three steps the firm plans to take to prevent something like this from happening again.

Amazon.com has been granted a new patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a delivery drone that can respond to human gestures. The concept is part of Amazon's goal to develop a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles that can get packages to customers in 30 minutes or less. Issued earlier this week, the patent may help Amazon grapple with how flying robots might interact with human bystanders and customers waiting on their doorsteps. Depending on a person's gestures -- a welcoming thumbs up, shouting or frantic arm waving -- the drone can adjust its behavior, according to the patent. The machine could release the package it's carrying, alter its flight path to avoid crashing, ask humans a question or abort the delivery, the patent says.

Kathryn Hume and Carole Piovesan are powerful forces in the Toronto artificial intelligence community. Kathryn Hume is Vice President of product and strategy for Integrate.ai Carole Piovesan is a lawyer at McCarthy Tétrault LLP and the firm's lead in the area of artificial intelligence. Piovesan has appeared before various administrative tribunals, at all levels of court in Ontario, as well as at the Supreme Court of Canada. Hume and Piovesan are widely respected speakers and writers on AI and excel at communicating how AI and machine learning technologies work in everyday language.

In 2016, DeepMind's AlphaGo famously defeated Lee Sedol, an international Go champion, becoming the first computer program to beat a human world champion. In 2018, LawGeex, an AI contract review platform, pulled the same stunt on human lawyers. The AI system achieved a 94 percent accuracy rate at surfacing risks in non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). Experienced human lawyers average out at 85 percent accuracy for the same task. The study, conducted in collaboration with Duke and Stanford Law Schools, pitted AI against 20 top U.S.-trained lawyers with decades of experience specifically in reviewing NDAs, one of the most common agreements in law.

As policymakers debate the government's role in developing artificial intelligence, a House bill aims to shed light on the emerging technology's role in strengthening national security. The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence Act would create an independent panel to explore recent advancements in artificial intelligence and assess the economic and national security impacts of the budding technology. Introduced Tuesday by Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who heads the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, the legislation would provide direction for agencies looking to steer the growth of AI in the coming years. With some experts calling artificial intelligence "the biggest economic and technological revolution" of our lifetimes, maintaining an edge in the field could prove critical to America's position on the world stage. "Artificial intelligence is a constantly developing technology that will likely touch every aspect of our lives," Stefanik said in a statement.

The coverage and hype around artificial intelligence (AI) is reaching fever pitch. Key questions explore how it might impact people's lives and employment over the next five to ten years. These lead to questions over how to fund tax revenue shortfalls and higher unemployment costs. In practice, it's too early to know how fast AI will advance, how far it will spread into society, whether it will reach a state of superintelligence where it outsmarts humans at everything, or the net employment impact. This article explores the key economic questions that arise around the potential impact of AI on jobs in society, with a focus on robot taxes as a way of funding higher unemployment benefit costs or Guaranteed / Universal Basic Income (UBI) and Universal Basic Services (UBS) schemes.

Recent successes in word embedding and document embedding have motivated researchers to explore similar representations for networks and to use such representations for tasks such as edge prediction, node label prediction, and community detection. Such network embedding methods are largely focused on finding distributed representations for unsigned networks and are unable to discover embeddings that respect polarities inherent in edges. We propose SIGNet, a fast scalable embedding method suitable for signed networks. Our proposed objective function aims to carefully model the social structure implicit in signed networks by reinforcing the principles of social balance theory. Our method builds upon the traditional word2vec family of embedding approaches and adds a new targeted node sampling strategy to maintain structural balance in higher-order neighborhoods. We demonstrate the superiority of SIGNet over state-of-the-art methods proposed for both signed and unsigned networks on several real world datasets from different domains. In particular, SIGNet offers an approach to generate a richer vocabulary of features of signed networks to support representation and reasoning.

As policymakers debate the government's role in developing artificial intelligence, a House bill aims to shed light on the emerging technology's role in strengthening national security. The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence Act would create an independent panel to explore recent advancements in artificial intelligence and assess the economic and national security impacts of the budding technology. Introduced Tuesday by Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who heads the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, the legislation would provide direction for agencies looking to steer the growth of AI in the coming years. With some experts calling artificial intelligence "the biggest economic and technological revolution" of our lifetimes, maintaining an edge in the field could prove critical to America's position on the world stage. "Artificial intelligence is a constantly developing technology that will likely touch every aspect of our lives," Stefanik said in a statement.

Yesterday in Berlin, I attended a workshop on the use of artificial intelligence in governing communication online, hosted by the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. Section 230 of the CDA provides broad immunity to platforms, with the express goals of promoting economic development and free expression. Daphne Keller has a good summary of the legal landscape on intermediary liability. Platforms are now facing increasing pressure to detect and remove illegal (and, in some cases, legal-but-objectionable) content. In the United States, for example, bills in the House and Senate would remove safe harbor protection for platforms that do not remove illegal content related to sex trafficking.

Every time you read a trade journal, an article on LinkedIn or attend a conference you can bet there'll be something about AI and Big Data (it's always capital B and capital D too). It's also probable that many businesses will be able to get along fine without either. However, anyone wanting to profit from these innovations will be finding out exactly how they can assist them. On the one hand, AI will undoubtedly help in processes, transactions and compliance. Machine learning will reduce time, cost and complexity from many arduous jobs within companies, businesses and firms.