Fifty civil rights groups have signed a letter asking the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate police use of facial-recognition databases following a report that half of America's adults have their images stored in at least one searchable facial-recognition database used by local, state and federal authorities They argue the technology disproportionately affects minorities and has minimal oversight. Researchers even found The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office in Arizona has enrolled all of Honduras' driver's licenses and mug shots into its database. States in dark blue use drivers license photos in police facial recognition databases. Red dots represent other jurisdictions using facial recognition. Of the 52 agencies that acknowledged using face recognition, only one obtained legislative approval for its use and only one agency provided evidence that it audited officers' face recognition searches for misuse. Not one agency required warrants, and many agencies did not even require an officer to suspect someone of committing a crime before using face recognition to identify her.

It's no secret that American law has been building facial recognition databases to aide in its investigations. But a new, comprehensive report on the status of facial recognition as a tool in law enforcement shows the sheer scope and reach of the FBI's database of faces and those of state-level law enforcement agencies: Roughly half of American adults are included in those collections. And that massive assembly of biometric data is accessed with only spotty oversight of its accuracy and how it's used and searched. The 150-page report, released on Tuesday by the Center for Privacy & Technology at the Georgetown University law school, found that law enforcement databases now include the facial recognition information of 117 million Americans, about one in two U.S. adults. It goes on to outline the dangers to privacy, free speech, and protections against unreasonable search and seizure that come from unchecked use of that information.

After settling a six-year long class action lawsuit in June, Sony has set up a website where owners of its so-called "Fat" PlayStation 3 video game console can claim their share of the settlement. Customers, depending on when they purchased the popular console, could pull down as much as 55, the Associated Press reported Monday. The suit involved Sony's OtherOS feature, which allowed PS3 users to portion off part of the console's hard drive and install popular open-source operating system Linux, and the company's decision to nix the feature in a software update in April 2010. Customers claimed Sony violated the system's warranty and accused the Japanese company of false advertising. Now, after years of litigation, customers who bought the "Fat" PS3, the title given to the original and larger systems compared to later slimmer models, between Nov. 1, 2006, and April 1, 2010, are eligible for a piece of the settlement, TechTimes reported.

The idea of falling in love with a robot is not currently accepted in any society in the world--most likely because robots are regarded as nonliving objects. But as AI evolves, it has the potential to surpass human intelligence, so, at some point, robots may not be perceived as objects anymore, but as equivalent to humans. Many of the companies developing companion robots design them with humanlike functionality, such as the ability to identify their owner's feelings and to evolve their knowledge based on their owner's lifestyle and preferences. The ultimate goal is to ensure the human is happy and satisfied. In this report, we examine how technological advancements could revolutionize relationships and love between human beings and robots.

People using desktop computers to search on Google could soon be left behind. The firm is said to be altering the way its search function works so that people searching on mobile get more up-to-date results. Currently, all Google users get the same search results whether they're using smartphones, tablets or a computer. But the latest move could create a'second class' of web surfers, experts have warned. Google is said to be introducing a'primary index' for mobile searches, while those using desktops to search will be relegated to a second-class service which won't be updated as regularly While Google is usually helpful at answering weird and wonderful questions, it may have got itself into deep water with a question about racism.

As excellently argued in The Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society (2009), a voluntary society will not rely purely on for-profit organizations. Fans of the free market shoot themselves in the foot if they lead critics to believe that there will be no role for fraternal orders, charities, foundations, or religious entities in a laissez-faire world. On the contrary, without paternalistic mandates and payment schemes from a coercive state, society would need such voluntary but non-commercial operations. Yet these institutions would still be embedded in the larger nexus of property rights and money prices, and they would still need to respond to the values of their paying (contributing) customers.

Dynamic text networks have been widely studied in recent years, primarily because the Internet stores textual data in a way that allows links between different documents. Articles on the Wikipedia (Hoffman et al., 2010), citation networks in journal articles (Moody, 2004), and linked blog posts (Latouche et al., 2011) are examples of dynamic text networks, or networks of documents that are generated over time. But each application has idiosyncratic features, such as the structure of the links and the nature of the time varying documents, so analysis typically requires bespoke models that directly address those aspects.

Computers should be allowed to patent their inventions, experts have claimed. They say without a change in the law, the findings warn that there will be less innovation, caused by uncertainty, which would prevent industry from capitalising on the huge potential of creative computers. They say the future will bring more disputes over inventorship, with individuals taking credit for inventions that are not genuinely theirs, they say. Researchers say uncertainty could stifle innovation unless the changes are made. We are also likely to see disputes over inventorship, they say.

Have you seen the Audi commercial with the autonomous mail delivery drones stalking the employees leaving their office? It's a bit of a stretch, but the commercial is pretty funny and a good example of the technological advances that are on the horizon. To manage a fleet of autonomous mail delivery drones an enormous amount of telemetry, geolocation, artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, and flight coordination data would be required. This post describes our perspective that all businesses are data-businesses, even the ones that aren't. I will illustrate examples of available data to businesses, and I'll give a story of a seemingly simple business that is a data business but doesn't realize it.

The legal AI market has another new cognitive engine: UK-based Cognitiv, which is a system designed to review documents and contracts, while also cross-referencing them with the latest regulation in order to provide a compliance tool. Based in King Cross, London, Cogntiv is the brainchild of CEO Vasilis Tsolis and CTO Achilleas Michos. Artificial Lawyer had a chat with Tsolis about how the company came about, where it's headed and how he sees the legal AI market evolving. Vasilis Tsolis is an engineer, but also has a law degree. He says he found himself having to deal with a lot of procurement and contract review issues in his previous jobs.