A kind of ethics fever has taken hold of the AI community. As smart machines displace human jobs and seem poised to make life-or-death decisions in self-driving cars and health care, concerns about where AI is taking us are gaining increasing urgency. Earlier this month, the MIT Media Lab joined with the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society to anchor a $27 million Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence initiative. The fund joins a growing array of AI ethics initiatives crisscrossing the corporate world and academia. In July 2016, leading AI researchers discussed the technologies' social and economic implications at the AI Now symposium in New York City.

Learn what the #Chatbot Craze is all about!

Now that self-driving cars have moved beyond mere speculation and are roaming the streets of Pittsburgh, among other places, federal and local officials are busily trying to figure out how to regulate them. During a recent conference in Washington, D.C., Paul Lewis, vice-president of policy and finance at the Eno Center for Transportation, talked about how local and regional governments can lead the way in this mobility revolution. What's needed, he said, are policies "that both protect public safety and bring some accountability to this rapidly changing environment while still enabling the technology to bring the benefits." But, as December's spat between San Francisco authorities and Uber's self-driving fleet indicates, the regulatory road ahead could be a rocky one. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has published a 15-point safety assessment that laid out some early autonomous vehicle (AV) guidelines.

Has digital customer service gone a step too far? We haven't mastered Artificial Intelligence, yet for some reason, it seems like robots and automation are primed to be the next trends for customer service. Automation can save you money in the short run, compared to traditional methods (like human power), because of its increased efficiency. But not all customers are happy with all automated, all the time. While automation and digital customer service are tools you should be using (they save resources and allow you to serve customers faster), making sure your customer service strategy still includes a human element is massively important.

More and more producers are looking into solutions to improve the subtitling process. Automatic subtitling is the key to control the cost and the delay incurred by an otherwise manual subtitling process. Because expensive subtitles (or the lack thereof) may hamper the publication of valuable content, we took the challenge to radically automate the process. The Limecraft subtitling service is currently available in private beta. Producers of audiovisual content, including Film, Television and Corporate Video, consider subtitling an essential part of the production process.

Cleo, the London-based FinTech startup, got a recent boost in its angel investing round from Skype Founder Niklas Zennström. Cleo has created an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot program that works with users to manage their finances. To date, Cleo has received $700,000 in funding from eight angel investors, including the recent contribution from Zennström. Users seeking financial advice can currently access Cleo via multiple channels, including the chatbot's mobile app, Facebook Messenger, as well as through AI-assistant integrations with Amazon's Alexa and Google Home. Barney Hussey-Yeo, Cleo's cofounder and CEO, was quoted by TechCrunch as saying: "We're trying to reduce the complexity and increase the transparency of financial services for our generation. Cleo's an AI financial assistant that makes managing your money incredibly simple. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, you can ask Cleo nearly anything about your finances."

Holden Karau is transgender Canadian, and anactive open source contributor. When not in San Francisco working as asoftware development engineer at IBM's Spark Technology Center, Holdentalks internationally on Spark and holds office hours at coffee shops athome and abroad. She makes frequent contributions to Spark, specializing inPySpark and Machine Learning. Prior to IBM she worked on a variety ofdistributed, search, and classification problems at Alpine, Databricks,Google, Foursquare, and Amazon. She graduated from the University ofWaterloo with a Bachelor of Mathematics in Computer Science.

Become a machine learning engineer in this self-paced course. Job offer guaranteed, or your money back.

Deals to AI startups reached a record high last year, from 160 deals in 2012 to 658 in 2016. Although non-US deal share has been increasing over the time period, well over a majority of deals, around 70%, went to startups in the US in the last 5 years. The top 3 states for deals were California (51%), New York (11%), and Massachusetts (9%). Using the CB Insights database, we mapped the most well-funded AI startups in each of the 35 states where there have been equity deals to an AI company in the last five years. The map only includes companies that have not exited and only includes equity financing.

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 a director at 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.