Leading minds in technology and computing will debate whether artificial intelligence poses a threat to our jobs at a free event at Liverpool's International Festival for Business (IFB2016) . A panel which will include a brain specialist, a tech lawyer, a technology expert and a union leader will explore the possibility of humans becoming obsolete in the workplace in reality. 'Man and Woman Vs Machine: Is AI Going to Take Your Job?' is an hour-long event, being held on Thursday, June 16, at 3.30pm at Exhibition Centre Liverpool, and is part of the IFB2016 'Blue Skies' programme featuring a number of high-profile speakers . The advancement of Artificial Intelligence and its use in modern life has prompted debate on whether men and women will be needed to work in business in years to come. Stefan Stern, the director of High Pay Centre, a UK think tank, will chair the discussion which will include Gareth Stokes, a partner at law firm DLA Piper, Dave Lester, associate professor on The Human Brain Project at the University of Manchester, Sarah Black, production manager at Siemens and Phil Jennings from UNIGlobal.

Risk assessment scoring algorithms are used in courtrooms throughout the United States to determine whether someone is more likely to commit a future crime. Evidence shows they are biased against blacks. "There's software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it's biased against blacks. ON A SPRING AFTERNOON IN 2014, Brisha Borden was running late to pick up her god-sister from school when she spotted an unlocked kid's blue Huffy bicycle and a silver Razor scooter. Borden and a friend grabbed the bike and scooter and tried to ride them down the street in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Coral Springs.Just as the 18-year-old girls were realizing they were too big for the tiny conveyances -- which belonged to a 6-year-old boy -- a woman came running after them saying, "That's my kid's stuff." Borden and her friend immediately dropped the bike and scooter and walked away. But it was too late -- a neighbor who witnessed the heist had already called the police. Borden and her friend were arrested and charged with burglary and petty theft for the items, which were valued at a total of 80. Compare their crime with a similar one: The previous summer, 41-year-old Vernon Prater was picked up for shoplifting 86.35 worth of tools from a nearby Home Depot store. Prater was the more seasoned criminal. He had already been convicted of armed robbery and attempted armed robbery, for which he served five years in prison, in addition to another armed robbery charge. Borden had a record, too, but it was for misdemeanors committed when she was a juvenile. Yet something odd happened when Borden and Prater were booked into jail: A computer program spat out a score predicting the likelihood of each committing a future crime. Borden -- who is black -- was rated a high risk. Prater -- who is white -- was rated a low risk."

The future of the way we work will be put under the spotlight by some of the leading minds in technology and computing at the International Festival for Business 2016 (IFB2016). The advancement of Artificial Intelligence and its use in modern life has prompted debate on whether men and women will be needed to work in business in years to come. Scientists have created robots who can do cognitive work and the nightmarish future of androids ruling the planet with brutal oppression has long been a science fiction storyline. A panel which will include a brain specialist, a tech lawyer, a technology expert and a union leader will explore the possibility of humans becoming obsolete in the workplace in reality. The discussion, Man and Woman vs Machine: Is AI Going to Take Your Job?' will take over the Blue Skies Stage in the Liverpool Exhibition Centre on Thursday June 16.

Algorithmic systems that employ machine learning play an increasing role in making substantive decisions in modern society, ranging from online personalization to insurance and credit decisions to predictive policing. But their decision-making processes are often opaque--it is difficult to explain why a certain decision was made. We develop a formal foundation to improve the transparency of such decision-making systems. Specifically, we introduce a family of Quantitative Input Influence (QII) measures that capture the degree of influence of inputs on outputs of systems. These measures provide a foundation for the design of transparency reports that accompany system decisions (e.g., explaining a specific credit decision) and for testing tools useful for internal and external oversight (e.g., to detect algorithmic discrimination). Distinctively, our causal QII measures carefully account for correlated inputs while measuring influence. They support a general class of transparency queries and can, in particular, explain decisions about individuals (e.g., a loan decision) and groups (e.g., disparate impact based on gender). Finally, since single inputs may not always have high influence, the QII measures also quantify the joint influence of a set of inputs (e.g., age and income) on outcomes (e.g.

The next big thing in tech is going to be AI. That's what a lot of people in Silicon Valley has been saying lately. Add one more to the list: former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. "To me the biggest platforms will be the ones that will be driven by artificial intelligence," he told an audience gathered at Bell Labs, in Murray Hill, N.J., last month. Schmidt, now executive chairman of Google's parent company Alphabet, was a speaker at a conference celebrating the life and work of Claude Shannon, the legendary Bell Labs engineer whose ideas revolutionized modern communications.

Machine-learning algorithms increasingly make decisions about credit, medical diagnoses, personalized recommendations, advertising and job opportunities, among other things, but exactly how usually remains a mystery. Now, new measurement methods developed by Carnegie Mellon University researchers could provide important insights to this process. Was it a person's age, gender or education level that had the most influence on a decision? Was it a particular combination of factors? CMU's Quantitative Input Influence (QII) measures can provide the relative weight of each factor in the final decision, said Anupam Datta, associate professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering.

As SAP continues to makes its own transition into the cloud, the company is also focused on delivering applications that will help customers make that same change simpler. At this year's recently held SAP Sapphire Now conference in Orlando, Florida, a key theme for the company was introducing machine learning to its HANA cloud platform. CEO Bill McDermott predicted that over the next five to 10 years the hype will be around machine learning, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality. "I think very strongly that intelligent applications will fundamentally change the way you do work in the enterprise and the way you collaborate with your trading partners outside of the enterprise," McDermott said. He went on to say that machine learning has the capabilities to help businesses make more informed decisions around how they can better serve their end-customer.

Leading the charge to update the traffic code is New York Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Joseph Robach, who also fears the law could allow police to ticket drivers for using vehicle features that are already available like assisted parking or Tesla's Autopilot. Due to the outdated law, Audi was reportedly unable to demonstrate the technology when it showed up in Albany with one of its self-driving vehicles last week. "We are just trying to have the law match up to the technology that people are using today and I think is only going to grow down the road," Senator Robach told the Daily News. Although six other states and Washington, D.C. have already passed legislation allowing autonomous vehicles on public roads, Robach's bill is meeting some resistance from other state lawmakers who don't believe the technology is quite ready yet. Earlier this year, however, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration decided that an autonomous vehicle's piloting system can be considered "the driver" under federal law.

The advancement of artificial intelligence may lead to sentient machines being granted'human' rights, Oxford University professor for the public understanding of science, Marcus du Sautoy, has said. Speaking at The Hay Literary Festival (via The Telegraph), Sautoy said: "It's getting to a point where we might be able to say this thing has a sense of itself and maybe there is a threshold moment where suddenly this consciousness emerges. One of the things I address in my new book is how can you tell whether my smartphone will ever be conscious. "The fascinating thing is that consciousness for a decade has been something that nobody has gone anywhere near because we didn't know how to measure it. We now have a telescope into the brain and it's given us an opportunity to see things that we've never been able to see before.

"It was magical, it was a moment in history," recalls Joseph Atick of the day in 1994 when the computer he and colleagues at Rockefeller University had built was able to recognize its masters' faces. As each of the three mathematicians introduced themselves, a metallic voice responded, "I see Joseph. Atick, who now chairs an organization that promotes identification technologies, says, "We didn't realize what we'd just done." Fast-forward two decades and picture a talking mannequin that greets a shopper by name as she enters a favorite store, informing her that pants that match the blouse she bought a week earlier have just been marked down. "It's just a matter of time until we start to see this technology reach shopping malls and beyond--it's ready right now," says Werner Goertz, a Gartner analyst who has authored a report on the adoption of facial recognition and other surveillance tools by retailers, casinos, and theme parks.