Venture capitalists lavished $10.8 billion on artificial intelligence and machine learning technology companies in 2017, according to PitchBook Data Inc. They've placed major bets that AI innovation can't go far or fast enough to meet demand. But controversial use cases -- like when algorithms decide the fate of the criminally tried -- and the danger of coded-in bias suggest it's gone too far already without regulatory oversight. "This technology's coming at us so fast, we don't have all the policies figured out," said Beena Ammanath (pictured), global vice president of big data, artificial intelligence and new tech innovation at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. While consumer, business and government users embrace AI software that makes their jobs and lives simpler, they are simultaneously tasked with building the guardrails around the tech.

The eruption of the Agung volcano in Bali, Indonesia has been devastating, particularly for the 55,000 local people who have had to leave their homes and move into shelters. It has also played havoc with the flights in and out of the island, leaving people stranded while the experts try to work out what the volcano will do next. But this has been a fascinating time for scholars like me who investigate the use of drones in social justice, environmental activism and crisis preparedness. The use of drones in this context is just the latest example of the "computerisation of nature" and raises questions about how reality is increasingly being constructed by software. Amazon drone delivery is developing in the UK, drone blood delivery is happening in Rwanda, while in Indonesia people are using drones to monitor orangutan populations, map the growth and expansion of palm oil plantations and gather information that might help us predict when volcanoes such as Agung might again erupt with devastating impact.

Plus, the new season of Black Mirror is here. Out-of-warranty battery replacements will now cost only $29.Apple apologizes for confusion over slowdowns with older iPhones Apple has been in hot water for the last few weeks after the company admitted that it sometimes reduced processor speeds on iPhones with aging batteries as a way to balance performance and battery life. Today, the company is apologizing for not being more transparent with its customers and released more details on how exactly iOS manages battery and performance. That, however, hasn't stopped several lawsuits, from the US to France. And what we're most excited about in 2018.The best games of 2017 Early 2017 brought us legitimate contenders for game of the year in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Horizon Zero Dawn and Persona 5 -- and that's not to mention Resident Evil's return to form.

Are you passionate about model strategy and research design? Do you want to learn from data scientists and have an immediate impact on our work? Civis Analytics is looking for an Data Science Research and Development intern to join our team! Civis Analytics was born on the campaign trail, with CEO Dan Wagner and our founding members spearheading the 2012 Obama for America analytics team. Since then, our DC and Chicago teams have been building software and growing rapidly among a steadily developing client base in education, energy, government, healthcare, media, nonprofits, and politics.

WASHINGTON – When Celeste Kidd was a graduate student of neuroscience at the University of Rochester she says a professor supervising her made her life unbearable by stalking her, making demeaning comments about her weight and talking about sex. Ten years on and now a professor of neuroscience at the university, Kidd is taking legal action. She has filed a federal lawsuit against the school alleging that it mishandled its sexual harassment investigation into the professor's actions and then retaliated against her and her colleagues for reporting the misconduct. "We are trying to bring transparency to a system that is corrupt," Kidd told The Associated Press. Academia -- like Hollywood, the media and Congress -- is facing its own #MeToo movement over allegations of sexual misconduct.

Federal lawmakers want to have a say in defining artificial intelligence. Researchers are now using TV shows to feed the predictive capability of an AI system. Google said in recent days it's opening an AI-focused research facility in China. And on and on the headlines keep coming, all of which is to say that interest in AI remains acute -- and its presence pervasive -- as 2017 draws to a close. And, based on a few recent developments, 2018 should be another big year of AI-related leaps forward as machines expand their influence over the minutiae of our lives.

Algorithmic transparency is openness about the purpose, structure and underlying actions of the algorithms used to search for, process and deliver information. An algorithm is a set of steps that a computer program follows in order to make a decision about a particular course of action. The question of whether or not algorithms that affect the general public should be made transparent is controversial. Take, for example, a program used to determine credit scores. If someone is given a lower credit rating than they think they deserve, they have the right to appeal the score, but not the right to demand that algorithms used to determine the poor score be made public.

When Celeste Kidd was a graduate student of neuroscience at the University of Rochester she says a professor supervising her made her life unbearable by stalking her, making demeaning comments about her weight and talking about sex. Ten years on and now a professor of neuroscience at the university, Kidd is taking legal action. She has filed a federal lawsuit against the school alleging that it mishandled its sexual harassment investigation into the professor's actions and then retaliated against her and her colleagues for reporting the misconduct. "We are trying to bring transparency to a system that is corrupt," Kidd told The Associated Press. Academia -- like Hollywood, the media and Congress -- is facing its own #MeToo movement over allegations of sexual misconduct. Brett Sokolow, who heads an association of sexual harassment investigators on campuses, estimates that the number of reported complaints has risen by about 10 percent since the accusations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein surfaced in early October, spurring more women to speak out against harassment in various fields.

About a week ago, Stanford University researchers posted online a study on the latest dystopian AI: They'd made a machine learning algorithm that essentially works as gaydar. After training it with tens of thousands of photographs from dating sites, the algorithm could perform better than a human judge in specific instances. For example, when given photographs of a gay white man and a straight white man taken from dating sites, the algorithm could guess which one was gay more accurately than actual people participating in the study.* They wanted to protect gay people. "[Our] findings expose a threat to the privacy and safety of gay men and women," wrote Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang in the paper.

Despite the come-hitherness of the title Robot Sex, a couple of these'I-need-a-gift-for-a-geek' books are the sort where you may want to be out of town when the recipient calls you, depressed, with their feedback. The most fun of the lot is Thomas S Mullaney's The Chinese Typewriter: A History. It's easy to forget that the ubiquitous single-shift typewriter keyboard, designed specifically for our relatively simple 26-letter alphabet and limited use of capital letters (2.5 percent to five percent of text), had competitors when it was originally designed. A typewriter for the Chinese language, which has some 47,000 characters but no alphabet or syllabic structure, seemed so absurd in 1900 that people published cartoons lampooning the idea (which Mullaney reprints). Reading Mullaney sends you looking for more details of those typewriter designs not taken.