DeepMind, the Google-owned artificial intelligence company, announced the formation of a new research group that will investigate ethical questions surrounding the development of AI and its impact on society. DeepMind Ethics and Society, also known as DMES, will start publishing research papers on a variety of topics relating to the development of artificial intelligence and the potential effects of the technology starting in early 2018. Google has staffed the group with eight full-time researchers to start, including six unpaid external fellows who will partner with academic groups at other institutions who are conducting similar research. DMES will eventually grow to around 25 full-time staffers within the next year. Initial partnerships will include the AI Now Institute at NYU and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.

The Senate's version of self-driving car legislation is escaping political limbo. Senators in the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee have unanimously approved the AV START Act, which lets car makers pursue safety exemptions for autonomous vehicles based on production volume and gives states control over rules for registration, licensing, insurance and safety (though not performance). The measure now goes to the Senate floor, where it'll eventually face a vote. The House of Representatives had already passed its take on the bill in early September, so a Senate vote in favor would leave only the matter of reconciling the two bills and sending the result to the President's desk to sign. Both bills exempt self-driving big rigs in the wake of pressure from labor unions, which are worried both about safety and job security for truckers.

On the face of it, Uber has had a terrible week in its legal brawl with Waymo, Google parent company Alphabet's self-driving car effort. First it suffered the public reveal of a long-awaited report that appeared to confirm Uber knew its former superstar engineer, Anthony Levandowski, took intellectual property from Google, his former employer, before it hired him. Then, over Uber's protest, the judge pushed the trial date back from this month to December, giving Waymo more time to prepare its case. To quickly sum up the case: Waymo alleges that when former star engineer Levandowski left the company in January 2016, he made off with thousands of documents containing its proprietary information, then used that intellectual property to jumpstart his own company, Otto. Uber acquired Otto for a reported $680 million in August 2016, and Waymo says Levandowski brought this stolen info with him--and that its intellectual property ended up in Uber's self-driving cars.

TekMonks – Global, Skilled and Successful 2 Vision Statement To be a reputable Global Corporation providing quality solutions for business issues using technology and highly skilled people. Apple has 400m account holders holding an Apple Store or iTunes account, that's more than the top 3 banks in the world have in retail banking customers. That's more than the 6,985 smaller institutions in the US who on average have around $185m in deposits. A coffee company that is better at taking deposits than 95% of the FDIC insured banks in the US, and they don't even have a banking license. Publishers are not fully in control of their business.

Cambridge, Mass.-based Pega on Sept. 29 introduced an industry-first product called T-Switch that gives organizations direct control over the transparency of their artificial intelligence customer engagement models. Included within the latest release of Pega's AI-powered Customer Decision Hub, T-Switch enables business users new levels of oversight to safely deploy AI based on their organization's transparency requirements. This capability is particularly critical for organizations in highly regulated industries to ensure they maintain compliance while also delivering intelligent, personalized customer experiences. The T-Switch, which will become generally available in late October, is designed to help companies mitigate potential risks and maintain regulatory compliance while providing differentiated experiences to their customers. Enterprises are increasingly deploying AI to gain better insights into customer needs and provide more personalized service, sales and marketing.

As we hand over more of our lives to artificial intelligence systems, keeping a firm grip on their ethical and societal impact is crucial. For DeepMind, whose stated mission is to "solve intelligence", that task will be the work of a new initiative tackling one of the most fundamental challenges of the digital age: technology is not neutral. DeepMind Ethics & Society (DMES), a unit comprised of both full-time DeepMind employees and external fellows, is the company's latest attempt to scrutinise the societal impacts of the technologies it creates. In development for the past 18 months, the unit is currently made up of around eight DeepMind staffers and six external, unpaid fellows. The full-time team within DeepMind will swell to around 25 people within the next 12 months.

The judge overseeing the Waymo-Uber trial over allegations of the theft of trade secrets agreed to postpone the start until Dec. 4 -- but not before telling lawyers from both companies he doesn't trust any of them. "Despite the excellent quality of the lawyers here, I cannot trust what they say," Federal District Court Judge William Alsup said Tuesday at the hearing in San Francisco. Court documents are filled with "a lot of half-truth, a lot of honest argument that is not quite accurate and overstatements. It's hard to get anywhere," the judge said. The high-stakes trial was scheduled to begin Oct. 10 before Waymo asked for a delay.

Instead, John Giannandrea is concerned about the danger that may be lurking inside the machine-learning algorithms used to make millions of decisions every minute. "The real safety question, if you want to call it that, is that if we give these systems biased data, they will be biased," Giannandrea said before a recent Google conference on the relationship between humans and AI systems. The problem of bias in machine learning is likely to become more significant as the technology spreads to critical areas like medicine and law, and as more people without a deep technical understanding are tasked with deploying it. Some experts warn that algorithmic bias is already pervasive in many industries, and that almost no one is making an effort to identify or correct it (see "Biased Algorithms Are Everywhere, and No One Seems to Care"). "It's important that we be transparent about the training data that we are using, and are looking for hidden biases in it, otherwise we are building biased systems," Giannandrea added.

What world-class looks like in online product and service development has been undergoing quite the revolution over the last few years. The series of papers we've been looking at recently can help you to understand where the bar is (it will have moved on again by the time most companies get there of course!). Just to be clear here, I'm not saying you necessarily need to build your own versions of all of these platforms. It's more about embracing their use as part of your everyday practices, and if you can do that by renting then for many organisations that's going to be the best choice. The code that implements your machine learning model is only a tiny part of what goes into using machine learning in production systems.

Last year when Uber was considering a purchase of newly founded self-driving truck company Otto, it commissioned a due diligence report that dove into the company, its assets, cofounders Anthony Levandowski, Lior Ron and Don Burnette and a few other employees that left Google for the startup. It became a hot item in the Waymo lawsuit against Uber and though Uber and Levandowski fought to keep the document out of Alphabet's hands, a judge ordered it to be turned over to Google's and Waymo's parent company by September 13th. Well that document has now been made publicly available, Recode reports, and some of its contents don't look great for Uber. The report was put together by cybersecurity firm Stroz Friedberg which found that Levandowski had 50,000 work emails on his computer from when he was employed at Google. On his phone, he also had pictures of a Google car, technical diagrams and a LiDAR patent application.