An artificial intelligence watchdog should be set up to make sure people are not discriminated against by the automated computer systems making important decisions about their lives, say experts. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has led to an explosion in the number of algorithms that are used by employers, banks, police forces and others, but the systems can, and do, make bad decisions that seriously impact people's lives. But because technology companies are so secretive about how their algorithms work – to prevent other firms from copying them – they rarely disclose any detailed information about how AIs have made particular decisions. In a new report, Sandra Wachter, Brent Mittelstadt, and Luciano Floridi, a research team at the Alan Turing Institute in London and the University of Oxford, call for a trusted third party body that can investigate AI decisions for people who believe they have been discriminated against. "What we'd like to see is a trusted third party, perhaps a regulatory or supervisory body, that would have the power to scrutinise and audit algorithms, so they could go in and see whether the system is actually transparent and fair," said Wachter.

Apple has joined the Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society, and will work alongside other tech giants on artificial intelligence initiatives, the partnership announced Friday. Apple previously worked with Partnership on AI, but Friday's announcement makes the company's membership official, as it joined as a founding member. Apple has not yet announced the partnership. Partnership on AI, a nonprofit, was launched by Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM, and Microsoft in September 2016. The organization works to address "opportunities and challenges with AI technologies to benefit people and society."

Chainer is a deep learning framework that's designed on the principle of define-by-run. Unlike frameworks that use the define-and-run approach, Chainer lets you modify networks during runtime, allowing you to use arbitrary control flow statements. It is simple, efficient, and can run and learn state-of-the-art CNNs. Deeplearning4J integrates with Hadoop and Spark and runs on several backends that enable use of CPUs and GPUs.

The non-profit organization had been created in late September 2016 by Amazon, DeepMind/Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft to further public understanding of artificial intelligence and devise best practices on associated technologies. Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), while involved with the operation prior to original announcement, today formally joins as one of its founding members. More details (how others can join, research, activities) about the partnership are expected to follow an inaugural board meeting to be held in San Francisco on February 3, 2017.

San Francisco: A technology industry alliance devoted to making sure smart machines don't turn against humanity said Friday that Apple has signed on and will have a seat on the board. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, and Google-owned British AI firm DeepMind last year established the non-profit organization, called "Partnership on AI," which will have its inaugural board meeting in San Francisco on February 3. Apple "has been involved and collaborating with the partnership since before it was first announced and is thrilled to formalize its membership," the alliance said in an online post. Major technology firms joined forces in the group, with stated aims including cooperation on "best practices" for AI and using the technology "to benefit people and society." Creation of the group came amid concerns that new artificial intelligence efforts could spin out of control and end up being detrimental to society. The companies "will conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research under an open license in areas such as ethics, fairness, and inclusivity; transparency, privacy, and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability, and robustness of the technology," according to a statement.

Distilling a generally-accepted definition of what qualifies as artificial intelligence (AI) has become a revived topic of debate in recent times. Some have rebranded AI as "cognitive computing" or "machine intelligence", while others incorrectly interchange AI with "machine learning". This is in part because AI is not one technology. It is in fact a broad field constituted of many disciplines, ranging from robotics to machine learning. The ultimate goal of AI, most of us affirm, is to build machines capable of performing tasks and cognitive functions that are otherwise only within the scope of human intelligence.

A dermatologist uses a handheld microscope called a dermatoscope to examine skin lesions. Stanford University researchers think a new AI developed could potentially provide another layer of screening. Stanford University researchers say that they've trained a deep learning algorithm to identify skin cancer as well as dermatologists. The researchers pitted the artificial intelligence against 21 board-certified dermatologists when it came to diagnosing skin lesions. The deep convolutional neural network's performance was on par with the experts when it came to spotting the most common cancers--keratinocyte carcinomas versus benign seborrheic keratoses.

Apple has formally joined the Partnership on AI as a founding member, confirming an earlier report, the organization announced today. Apple has joined the Partnership on AI as a founding member. The company has been involved and collaborating with the Partnership since before it was first announced and is thrilled to formalize its membership alongside Amazon, Facebook, Google/DeepMind, IBM, and Microsoft.Siri co-founder Tom Gruber, who heads advanced development of the assistant at Apple, will serve on the Partnership's inaugural Board of Trustees. The Partnership on AI is a non-profit research consortium established in September to "study and formulate best practices, to advance the public's understanding of AI, and to serve as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society," according to its website. Apple has always been notoriously secretive, but it recently started allowing its AI and machine learning researchers to publish papers.

Increased investor interest in AI startups – from around 10 deals in Q1'11 to over 120 in Q2'16 – can be attributed to recent advances in machine learning algorithms, particularly "deep learning" technology, a souped up version of AI. Just this week, Google integrated deep learning into its Google Translate tool; Baidu announced the launch of DeepBench, an "open source benchmarking tool for evaluating deep learning performance across different hardware platforms"; and NVIDIA introduced Xavier, a deep learning-based supercomputer for driverless cars. In the private market, Google put deep learning in the spotlight back in 2014 when it acquired 4 startups focused on this AI tech in quick succession: DeepMind, Vision Factory, Dark Blue Labs, and DNNresearch. Apple, which joined the race in 2015, most recently acquired Turi, which has developed a deep learning toolkit, among other AI-based solutions. Not to be outdone, Intel has acquired around 5 AI startups since January 2015, including deep learning startup Nervana Systems and, more recently, Movidius.

There is a long list of possible platforms or libraries that you can use, but here I want to focus on some of the most common. Machine learning platforms are useful because they help reduce the complexity needed to get started. The downside is the lack of flexibility because you need to adapt to their features and options, therefore making it difficult to fit with specific problems in your project. Just as developers use software libraries in their usual work, with deep learning it is no different. A library is simply a set of functions that are pre-made by a development team.