Usually when people worry about machines and work, they are concerned that automation will take away their livelihoods, not their lives. But a new lawsuit claiming a rogue robot is responsible for killing a human colleague reveals additional nightmarish possibilities. In July 2015, Wanda Holbrook, a maintenance technician performing routine duties on an assembly line at Ventra Ionia Main, an auto-parts maker in Ionia, Michigan, was "trapped by robotic machinery" and crushed to death. On March 7, her husband, William Holbrook, filed a wrongful death complaint (pdf) in Michigan federal court, naming five North American robotics companies involved in engineering and integrating the machines and parts used at the plant: Prodomax, Flex-N-Gate, FANUC, Nachi, and Lincoln Electric. Holbrook's job involved keeping robots in working order.

Uber is asking a federal court that most of the claims of a lawsuit filed by rival self-driving car developer Waymo should be settled through arbitration, a process that is usually cheaper and faster than a federal lawsuit. The ride-hailing company is referring to Waymo's own arbitration proceedings against a former engineer who later joined Uber as the basis for its argument in favor of arbitration to resolve the dispute. Waymo filed a suit last month in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that a former employee Anthony Levandowski stole trade secrets relating to self-driving cars before leaving to start Otto, a self-driving trucking company that was later acquired by Uber. Other former Waymo employees who left for Uber and Otto were also found downloading sensitive files, Waymo alleged. "Waymo's trade secret and unfair competition claims must be referred to arbitration because they arise out of, relate to, and result from Levandowski's employment," Uber has submitted in a filing on Wednesday.

A new approach for testing whether algorithms contain hidden biases aims to prevent automated systems from perpetuating human discrimination. Machine learning is increasingly being used to make sensitive decisions, says Matt Kusner at the Alan Turing Institute in London. In some US states, judges make sentencing decisions and set bail conditions using algorithms that calculate the likelihood that someone will reoffend. Other algorithms assess whether a person should be offered a loan or a job interview. But it is often unclear how these systems come to their conclusions, which makes it impossible to tell if they are fair ones. An algorithm might conclude that people from a certain demographic are less likely to pay back a loan, for example, if it is trained on a data set in which loans were unfairly distributed in the first place.

Idaho has become the second U.S. state to pass legislation to permit unmanned, ground-based delivery robots to rove around on sidewalks across the state. Earlier this month, Virginia made robotics history as the first state to pass a law specifically addressing the use of autonomous terrestrial delivery robots. The new Idaho law, which was signed by the governor today, goes into effect July 1. The legislation was championed by state Republican lawmakers, Jason Monks in the House and Bert Brackett in the Senate. Monks worked with Starship Technologies, an Estonia-based robot delivery company, on the legislation, which sailed through both state houses to pass in less than a month.

This clarification followed an American Civil Liberties Union report late last year saying that a company called Geofeedia was marketing its social media–monitoring product to U.S. law enforcement as a tool to keep an eye on protests. In an email from Geofeedia to a potential police department client, which the ACLU obtained, the company boasts about how its special access to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter data could be used to monitor protests. Geofeedia said that its system allowed it to have "covered Ferguson/Mike Brown nationally with great success." It could access a vast amount of public posts, potentially in real time, allowing for the company to isolate posts and users in specific protest locations. In a case study document, the company also states that during the 2015 protests in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray, police officers were able to run facial recognition technology on social media photos to identify individuals with outstanding warrants and "arrest them directly from the crowds."

To the editor: Doyle McManus was only partially correct about President Trump blowing the deal on healthcare. The president has more problems. First, his attention span is too short for him to study any complicated issue. He has acknowledged that healthcare is complicated, but he has refused to or cannot learn the details. Second, he does not like to read.

Three people from Illinois last week sued Microsoft, claiming that the free Windows 10 upgrade they had installed on their PCs caused "data loss and damage to their computers." Lawyers for the trio asked a Chicago federal court Thursday to grant the case class-action status, which would allow other Americans to join the litigation. "Many consumers have had their hard drives fail because of the Windows 10 installation," alleged the complaint. "Many consumers have had their existing software and data rendered inoperable by the Windows 10 installation." All three of the plaintiffs asserted that after accepting the free Windows 10 upgrade -- a one-year deal that ran from 2015 to 2016 -- some data on their Windows PCs had been destroyed.

We present a hybrid method for latent information discovery on the data sets containing both text content and connection structure based on constrained low rank approximation. The new method jointly optimizes the Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) objective function for text clustering and the Symmetric NMF (SymNMF) objective function for graph clustering. We propose an effective algorithm for the joint NMF objective function, based on a block coordinate descent (BCD) framework. The proposed hybrid method discovers content associations via latent connections found using SymNMF. The method can also be applied with a natural conversion of the problem when a hypergraph formulation is used or the content is associated with hypergraph edges. Experimental results show that by simultaneously utilizing both content and connection structure, our hybrid method produces higher quality clustering results compared to the other NMF clustering methods that uses content alone (standard NMF) or connection structure alone (SymNMF). We also present some interesting applications to several types of real world data such as citation recommendations of papers. The hybrid method proposed in this paper can also be applied to general data expressed with both feature space vectors and pairwise similarities and can be extended to the case with multiple feature spaces or multiple similarity measures.

Microsoft Monday is a weekly column that focuses on updates in regards to the Redmond giant. This week, Microsoft Monday includes details about gamerpic support coming to Xbox Live, a custom Windows 10 version for China, an update about the Xbox 360 class action lawsuit, a data sharing agreement with Adobe, a Recon Tech Special Edition gamepad, a new LinkedIn enterprise CRM tool, a new partnership with Publicis and much more! Microsoft has completed the development of a custom Windows 10 version for the Chinese government, according to The Verge. To build the custom Windows 10 version, Microsoft collaborated with the China Electronics Technology Group (CTEC). Microsoft did not specify the changes that were made for the custom version of Windows 10 for China.

"Facial recognition technology is a powerful tool law enforcement can use to protect people, their property, our borders, and our nation," said the committee chair, Jason Chaffetz. "But it can also be used by bad actors to harass or stalk individuals. It can be used in a way that chills free speech and free association by targeting people attending certain political meetings, protests, churches, or other types of places in the public." The database got its start back in 201 with the FBI's Next Generation Identification system, which was designed to supplement the agency's existing fingerprint database. The problem was that the FBI didn't bother to tell the public about the new registration or publish a required-by-law privacy impact assessment until 2015.