Amnesty International issued an Urgent Action on December 12, 2016, protesting the illegal and violent arrest of human rights defender and anti-death penalty campaigner Atena Daemi, and calling for her release. The AI wrote, "Anti-death penalty campaigner and human rights defender Atena Daemi was arrested on 26 November 2016 when three Revolutionary Guard officials raided her parents' house and took her away to Tehran's Evin Prison to begin serving her seven-year prison sentence. In a letter leaked from prison on 1 December, Atena Daemi said that she was beaten and pepper sprayed by the officials arresting her after she insisted peacefully that they present an arrest warrant. She has said that her sister was also punched in her chest when she attempted to intervene to stop the officials. She also described how, on the way to prison, the Revolutionary Guard officials blindfolded her and repeatedly threatened her by saying that they would open new cases against her and had'cooked up a plan so that she gets the thought of ever getting released from prison out of her mind.'"

Self-driving-cars are notoriously difficult to test for safety. Hotz writes in an email, "It's not my code, I did not release it"--Comma.ai Inc. "released and maintains it." Most legal experts that spoke with IEEE Spectrum--and Hotz himself--believe that if you use the company's code and something goes wrong, then it isn't liable for damages. But Consumer Watchdog advocate John Simpson doesn't believe this is fair.

Data science and machine learning will become more mainstream, especially in the following industries: energy, finance (banking, insurance), agriculture (precision farming), transportation, urban planning, healthcare (customized treatments), even government. Some, with no familiarity with data science, will want to create a legal framework about how data can be analyzed, how the algorithms should behave, and to force public disclosure of algorithm secrets. I believe that they will fail, though Obamacare is an example where predictive algorithms were required to ignore metrics such as gender or age, to compute premiums, resulting in more expensive premiums for everyone. The rise of sensor data - that is, IoT - will create data inflation. Data quality, data relevancy, and security will continue to be of critical importance.

Tay gave chat bots a bad name, but Microsoft's new version has grown up. Microsoft unveiled a new chat bot in the U.S. on Tuesday, saying it's learned from the Tay experiment earlier this year. Zo is now available on messaging app Kik and on the website Zo.ai. Tay was meant to be a cheeky young person you could talk to on Twitter. Users tried -- successfully -- to get the bot to say racist and inappropriate things. Microsoft pulled the bot offline, and its failed experiment was used as a cautionary tale for how not to create artificial intelligence.

SAN FRANCISCO – California regulators warned ride-hailing company Uber on Wednesday that it would face legal action if it did not immediately stop giving people in San Francisco rides in self-driving cars -- until it receives permission from the state. Uber started a public pilot program in the morning, and hours later, the California Department of Motor Vehicles sent a letter saying that the service was illegal until Uber got a permit required for putting "autonomous vehicles" on public roads. Uber knew about the permit requirement but argued that its cars do not meet the state's definition of an "autonomous vehicle" because they require a person behind the wheel to monitor and intervene if needed. In a letter obtained by The Associated Press, DMV Chief Counsel Brian Soublet wrote that Uber "must cease" deploying the cars or face unspecified legal action. "If Uber does not confirm immediately that it will stop its launch and seek a testing permit, DMV will initiate legal action," the letter said without elaborating.

With the amount of published research, patents, white papers, and other written knowledge out there, it's hard to be even reasonably sure you're aware of the goings-on around a certain topic or field. Omnity is a search engine made to make it easier by extracting the gist of documents you give it and finding related ones from a library of millions -- and now supports over a hundred languages. The process is simple and free, at least for the public-facing databases Omnity has assembled, comprising U.S. patents, SEC filings, PubMed papers, clinical trials, Library of Congress collections, and more. You upload a document or text snippet, and the system scans it, looking for the least common words and phrases -- which generally indicate things like topic, experiment type, equipment used, that sort of thing. It then looks through its own libraries to find documents with similar or related phrases that appear in a manner that suggests relevance. For example, say you put in the results of your clinical trial testing a food additive on a certain strain of mice, and found it resulted in a certain condition.

The race is on between the big tech giants to develop the best artificially intelligent assistant on almost human parity levels and Zo is next in line. It seems 2016 is the year of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant or indeed, chatbot. Their success depends on the machine's "IQ and EQ [Emotional Quotient -- ability to understand the emotions of others]," Harry Shum executive VP of Microsoft's AI research group told a conference in San Francisco. Creating #AI for all: Microsoft Ventures supports startups focused on inclusive growth & societal good. IQ can been developed by using deep learning techniques and speech recognition software and is essential if the bot is going to complete specific tasks.

Andrew Arruda describes himself as an entrepreneur, strategist and leader, with nearly a decade of experience in the legal industry. He is also a licensed attorney, who "knows the ins and outs of the legal profession and aims to forever change the way legal services are delivered". He plans to do this through ROSS Intelligence, which he co-founded in 2014. ROSS is "the world's first artificially intelligent attorney", built using IBM's Watson. It understands natural language legal questions and provides expert answers instantly, along with other relevant information – cutting down substantially on legal research time and energy. Prior to ROSS Intelligence, Arruda worked at Toronto litigation boutique, Azevedo & Nelson, and with the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development in Portugal.

Data science and machine learning will become more mainstream, especially in the following industries: energy, finance (banking, insurance), agriculture (precision farming), transportation, urban planning, healthcare (customized treatments), even government. Some, with no familiarity with data science, will want to create a legal framework about how data can be analyzed, how the algorithms should behave, and to force public disclosure of algorithm secrets. I believe that they will fail, though Obamacare is an example where predictive algorithms were required to ignore metrics such as gender or age, to compute premiums, resulting in more expensive premiums for everyone. The rise of sensor data - that is, IoT - will create data inflation. Data quality, data relevancy, and security will continue to be of critical importance.

Evernote set off a minor fracas on Twitter Tuesday when it announced an upcoming change to its privacy policy that would enable company employees to "exercise oversight of machine learning technologies applied to account content" in order to improve the service. The changes, which will take effect January 23rd, 2017, did not sit well with some of the service's users despite the company's explanation that it was only as oversight for the machine learning process. I need a good replacement for @evernote. Preferably one that lets me import existing notes & works on desktop, iOS and Android. According to the company's policy update notice, "Only employees who are fulfilling one of the customer or business needs... will be able to access your data."