Photographs of nearly half of all U.S. adults -- 117 million people -- are collected in police facial recognition databases across the country with little regulation over how the networks are searched and used, according to a new study. Along with a lack of regulation, critics question the accuracy of facial recognition algorithms. Meanwhile, state, city, and federal facial recognition databases include 48 percent of U.S. adults, said the report from the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law. The search of facial recognition databases is largely unregulated, the report said. "A few agencies have instituted meaningful protections to prevent the misuse of the technology," its authors wrote.

I write about gadgets, which means everyone asks me what laptop/ phone/ dishwasher to buy. I struggle with this, because the answer often starts, "It depends." Unless you ask about a phone. In that case, I usually say get an iPhone. But the phones can be … frustrating.

There's a good chance information about you is available for sale to advertisers and other businesses on Vertical Mass. The nearly 3-year-old West Hollywood start-up provides user data storage and analysis software for companies in music, sports, video games and Hollywood. Those companies also can list some of their user information for sale, with Vertical Mass collecting a portion of the proceeds. Fees from the software service and the data marketplace have brought Vertical Mass seven figures in revenue for two consecutive years, Chief Executive Mark Shedletsky said, declining to provide specific figures. But investors think the company is only getting started as a key information broker in the entertainment universe.

THE RISE OF ARTIFICIAL intelligence has inspired both fascination and fear of the world to come. Some tech prophets envision a "singularity," in which advances in AI trigger drastic technological growth, while others imagine that autonomous machines will someday turn on their creators and destroy us. But when you're engaged in the science of machine intelligence, you understand that this is a false set of choices shaped by a misleading phrase. The term "artificial intelligence" was coined in 1955 to convey the concept of general intelligence: the notion that all human cognition stems from one or more underlying algorithms, and that by programming computers to think in the same way, we could create autonomous systems modeled on the human brain. At the same time, other researchers were taking a different approach.

On the Data Technology Automation team, we know that extracting data with automation is the best path to speed and accuracy. And, we know that machine learning is the best path to automation. We develop the machine learning models and infrastructure to automate the processing of all types of financial documents. We extract data from these documents and use it to build intelligent models using information retrieval, machine learning, and natural language processing. The models we build enable our customers to get the right answers – fast.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)

Ever wanted to know what historical images would look like in color? Rudy Marsman used a computer algorithm to add color to six black and white films from the archives of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Rudy is a master student in Information Science at the VU University in Amsterdam. The automatic coloring of moving images was part of the research he did for his master thesis at Sound and Vision. As part of my master's thesis I researched the possibilities to automatically color black and white videos.

Last week, a group of aviation leaders met in Silicon Valley in a forum orchestrated by AAAE to chart a course for the innovation and improvement of airports. I had the honor of joining leaders from Google X, Lyft, and Google Tango on a panel discussion in front of an audience of innovative Airport Directors, CIOs, and government leaders. We talked about strategies for harnessing artificial intelligence to improve the airport today. If you want more background on what modern artificial intelligence means, read this piece by The Economist. When your plane lands, a human alone does not decide which gate it should go to, just like it's not a human that sets the price of your ticket. AI is already in the airport -- but why does it matter to you as a professional?

Reportedly announced, Google DeepMind is now capable of teaching itself depending on the information it already possessed. Founded in 2010, Google's British Artificial Intelligence company DeepMind is now on the edge of a revolutionary invention. DeepMind is able to learn, or we can say, to teach itself based on data it already holds. This leads to a completely self-contained learning. According to their DNC's -Differentiable Neural Computer- anwers, it can answer questions about the relationships in a family.

Over the last several decades, technology has changed tremendously. I can't tell you how many times my father has told me about a computer science class he took in college where the computer required punch cards to function (sorry to date you Dad!). Fast-forward and we have artificial intelligence at the palm of our hands, hands-free texting in our cars and smart watches that monitor our health from our wrists. But it's not only our personal lives that have been affected by these changes in technology, it's our work lives as well. At PGi, we're always trying to innovate our products to make your work life easier, so naturally we're curious about new technology and the effect it has on our work lives. Over the next few weeks, we will be producing a blog series on just that--the future of work.