The makers of FaceApp have apologised after users criticised it of being racist. The app's creators claim it will'transform your face using Artificial Intelligence', allowing selfie-takers to alter their photos to look old or'beautify' themselves. But users have complained after they found that one beautifying option, labelled'hot', lightens their skin tone. Another Twitter user, kung fu khary, wrote: 'So this app is apparently racist as hell. The app appeared to make his skin lighter when using the'hot' filter The app uses Artificial Intelligence to transform faces.

President Trump suggested tonight that it's not fair to compare the Republican health care plan to the Affordable Care Act, because the law is "dying, dying, dying" and won't be around anyway. "They always like to compare -- well, what about [Obamacare]? Obamacare's dead," Trump said at a rally in Harrisburg, PA. "It's gone ... The insurance companies are fleeing." Between the lines: His comments suggested that he might try to use the law's problems -- including the steep premium hikes last year -- to dismiss the comparisons people are making to the GOP replacement plan, which aren't flattering. The biggest criticisms: it would cover 24 million fewer people than the ACA, and under some of the latest changes, it might not give the same protections to people with pre-existing conditions.

In the words of one technology analyst, the legal profession hasn't really changed since the time of Charles Dickens. And like the never-ending Jarndyce and Jarndyce lawsuit in Dickens' Bleak House, today's courtrooms are overburdened and justice often frustratingly slow. Advances in artificial intelligence are changing these long-entrenched realities, and changing them fast. But just what does this mean for lawyers, judges, and the many individuals involved in court cases and other legal proceedings each year? The jury trial is just one aspect of the U.S. judicial system (the courts) and the legal industry in general (the firms).

Text IQ chief executive Apoorv Agarwal says his software's job is to spot a needle in a haystack – but a costly one. Make a mistake in discovery during litigation, and a company can face sanctions of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, he says. Like other startups, Text IQ's raised funding to solve that problem. Unlike others, Text IQ is profitable. And for its first outside funding, it's taking only about $3 million from top investor Floodgate and a group of veteran legal counsels in a seed round its founders say could be the only money it ever needs.

Out of nearly 70,000 bills introduced in the U.S. Congress from 2001 to 2015, only 2,513 were enacted. We developed a machine learning approach to forecasting the probability that any bill will become law. Starting in 2001 with the 107th Congress, we trained models on data from previous Congresses, predicted all bills in the current Congress, and repeated until the 113th Congress served as the test. For prediction we scored each sentence of a bill with a language model that embeds legislative vocabulary into a high-dimensional, semantic-laden vector space. This language representation enables our investigation into which words increase the probability of enactment for any topic. To test the relative importance of text and context, we compared the text model to a context-only model that uses variables such as whether the bill's sponsor is in the majority party. To test the effect of changes to bills after their introduction on our ability to predict their final outcome, we compared using the bill text and meta-data available at the time of introduction with using the most recent data. At the time of introduction context-only predictions outperform text-only, and with the newest data text-only outperforms context-only. Combining text and context always performs best. We conducted a global sensitivity analysis on the combined model to determine important variables predicting enactment.

Host- LIS (Law, Innovation and Society Research Group, Newcastle University Law School) Tuesday 16 May 2017, 12:00-18:00 Venue: Newcastle Law School Conference Room Lunch provided from 12:00 The rapid emergence of Artificial Intelligence and'expert systems' poses wide-ranging and often entirely novel challenges for both the law and for society. This symposium aims to explore the nature of some of these problems, looking at their basis and their implications for the future; as well as the primary areas of focus for effective research into and regulation of this potentially epochal technology. The symposium will have a significant component of discussion, and all with an interest are welcome to join us and take part.

Anthony Levandowski, who is at the centre of Alphabet's trade secrets lawsuit against Uber, stepped down from his post overseeing self-driving car technology. Uber said he'll take a lesser role on the team and won't be involved in decisions relating to lidar technology, which is the subject of the suit. Mr Levandowski explained the changes in a staff email obtained by Bloomberg. He said he decided, along with Uber Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick, that he should recuse himself from working on lidar, the laser technology used to help self-driving cars see the road. "I currently don't provide input on detailed LiDAR design choices. But making this organisational change means I will have absolutely no oversight over or input into our LiDAR work," Mr Levandowski wrote in the email.

Simon Goodyear, co-founder of mTrio and a respected Salesforce MVP, previews his session with Jessica Pillow at Accountex 2017: Elon Musk has been quoted as fearing AI, but he also set up a new company to explore the technology to make direct connections between a human brain and a computer. While we will not be plugging you into our mobile devices to show your our latest Automated Practice Management software, we will be able to show you how the technology behind a quality software package can reduce human interaction. Running a busy Accountancy practice requires all kinds of support from staff, systems and technology so managing all this information is crucial to deliver an exceptional service for your clients, as well as ensuring your staff are working efficiently and enjoying what they are doing. You may have a great practice, but if your staff hate all the niggles of your systems they'll not be happy and will either be looking to leave, or not giving their best to the firm or you clients. With great technology your systems will be able to send reminders to your clients based upon year end dates, no need for reminders for your staff to send a letter, it just happens, automatically.

Hold onto your white collars, because the robotic revolution is going to cause the biggest transformation in the world's workforce since the industrial revolution, and are 7 jobs intelligent robots have firmly in their sight. While many of us are excited about the future and the conveniences intelligent algorithms and robots may provide in our lives, 80% of Americans believe their job will "probably" or "definitely" exist in its current form within the next 50 years even though in the same study 2/3 of Americans think robots will perform most of the work currently done by humans. Clearly, many of us are overly optimistic about our future selves and careers. And, be forewarned, the jobs predicted to be taken first aren't just entry-level service or manual labor jobs. And, the robotic revolution is happening now.