Apple is joining fellow tech giants Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and IBM as the sixth founding member of the recently-formed artificial intelligence research group - the Partnership on AI. The non-profit said Apple has been "involved and collaborating with the Partnership since before it was announced" in September and is "thrilled to formalize its membership." "We glad to see the industry engaging on some of the larger opportunities and concerns created with the advance of machine learning and AI," Tom Gruber, Apple's head of development for its intelligence personal assistant Siri, said in a statement on the Partnership's website. "We believe it's beneficial to Apple, our customers, and the industry to play an active role in its development and look forward to collaborating with the group to help drive discussion on how to advance AI while protecting the privacy and security of consumers." The Partnership also announced that six new non-industry trustees will be joining its board including Jason Furman, former top economic adviser for Barack Obama; Carol Rose, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts and Subbarao Kambhampati, president of the Association for the Advancement of AI.

As the Global Legal Post reported today that the Law Society urges firms to harness the power of automation, the following article was the cover story published in the Leeds & Yorkshire Lawyer (the official journal of Leeds Law Society) titled AI and the rise of the robot on 20th December 2016 and is reproduced with kind permission. I was delighted to be interviewed and share some of my thoughts about AI in the legal eco-system and the benefits for lawyers, entrepreneurs, business people and consumers... Artificial intelligence (AI) is slowly changing how law firms work. Should lawyers be worried about their futures? Technology has been forcing subtle changes to the practice of law for decades now. Whether lawyers have welcomed all of the alterations to the way in which they work has almost been immaterial.

When the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society was announced in September, it was with the stated goal of educating the public on artificial intelligence, studying AI's potential impact on the world, and establishing industry best practices. Now, how those goals will actually be achieved is becoming clearer. This week, the Partnership brought on new members that include representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union, the MacArthur Foundation, OpenAI, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Arizona State University, and the University of California, Berkeley. The organizations themselves are not officially affiliated yet--that process is still underway--but the Partnership's board selected these candidates based on their expertise in civil rights, economics, and open research, according to interim co-chair Eric Horvitz, who is also director of Microsoft Research. The Partnership also added Apple as a "founding member," putting the tech giant in good company: Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google, and Facebook are already on board.

Tax season is around the corner, and for most Americans, it involves dealing with the complex tax code, an accountant, and maybe friends who claim to be tax experts. According to IRS statistics, there were 507 million visitors to the irs.gov website in 2016, a 3 percent increase when compared to 2015. Furthermore, Americans spend 6.1 billion hours and $233.8 billion complying with the tax code. With complexity comes confusion and frustration, leading many taxpayers to turn to tax preparers or tax preparation software. Those who don't are at a disadvantage because most Americans are unaware of which deductions to consider, dependents to claims, student loan amounts to deduct, or where to file.

This article was written in collaboration with Gowling WLG. Gowling WLG is one of world's largest law firms and advises clients from offices in many of the world's most dynamic markets. It was recently ranked as the second most innovative firm in Europe in the prestigious FT Innovative Lawyer Awards 2016. "Gowling WLG is one of world's largest law firms and advises clients from offices in many of the world's most dynamic markets. It was recently ranked as the second most innovative firm in Europe in the prestigious FT Innovative Lawyer Awards 2016."

Apple has officially joined a group called "Partnership on AI" as a founding member, alongside other major tech firms like Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM, and Microsoft. Also joining the board of trustees are representatives of non-profit groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, MacArthur Foundation, OpenAI, Peterson Institute of International Economics, and UC Berkeley. The stated goals of the partnership are to support best practices for, advance understanding of, and create an open platform for discussion about artificial intelligence. Given Apple's tendency toward secrecy, it will be interesting to see what role it will take in the group. Regardless, considering the promise and risks associated with artificial intelligence, it's good to see tech giants and non-profits coming together in this way.

A backbone of a boolean formula $F$ is a collection $S$ of its variables for which there is a unique partial assignment $a_S$ such that $F[a_S]$ is satisfiable [MZK+99,WGS03]. This paper studies the nontransparency of backbones. We show that, under the widely believed assumption that integer factoring is hard, there exist sets of boolean formulas that have obvious, nontrivial backbones yet finding the values, $a_S$, of those backbones is intractable. We also show that, under the same assumption, there exist sets of boolean formulas that obviously have large backbones yet producing such a backbone $S$ is intractable. Further, we show that if integer factoring is not merely worst-case hard but is frequently hard, as is widely believed, then the frequency of hardness in our two results is not too much less than that frequency.

When the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society was announced in September, it was with the stated goal of educating the public on artificial intelligence, studying AI's potential impact on the world, and establishing industry best practices. Now, how those goals will actually be achieved is becoming clearer. This week, the Partnership brought on new members that include representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union, the MacArthur Foundation, OpenAI, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Arizona State University, and the University of California, Berkeley. The organizations themselves are not officially affiliated yet--that process is still underway--but the Partnership's board selected these candidates based on their expertise in civil rights, economics, and open research, according to interim co-chair Eric Horvitz, who is also director of Microsoft Research. The Partnership also added Apple as a "founding member," putting the tech giant in good company: Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google, and Facebook are already on board.

When industry leaders launched a non-profit organization in September to create best practices for artificial intelligence, one company was notably missing. On Friday, the Partnership on AI announced that Apple had joined as a founding member. The organization, which will publish research on the ethics, transparency and reliability of AI, among other things, was initially made up of tech giants Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and IBM. Though Apple collaborated with the partnership since before it was announced last year, it wasn't officially a member until now. Tom Gruber, Apple's head of advance development of Siri, will represent the company. "We're glad to see the industry engaging on some of the larger opportunities and concerns created with the advance of machine learning and AI," Gruber said.

An artificial intelligence watchdog should be set up to make sure people are not discriminated against by the automated computer systems making important decisions about their lives, say experts. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has led to an explosion in the number of algorithms that are used by employers, banks, police forces and others, but the systems can, and do, make bad decisions that seriously impact people's lives. But because technology companies are so secretive about how their algorithms work – to prevent other firms from copying them – they rarely disclose any detailed information about how AIs have made particular decisions. In a new report, Sandra Wachter, Brent Mittelstadt, and Luciano Floridi, a research team at the Alan Turing Institute in London and the University of Oxford, call for a trusted third party body that can investigate AI decisions for people who believe they have been discriminated against. "What we'd like to see is a trusted third party, perhaps a regulatory or supervisory body, that would have the power to scrutinise and audit algorithms, so they could go in and see whether the system is actually transparent and fair," said Wachter.