After years spent pursuing a career in game development, Italian coder Luca Galante had given up. Uprooting himself from a comfortable life in Rome, he flew to England in the hope of finally making his childhood dream a reality. Yet after countless rejected job applications, Galante found himself flipping Big Macs in Thornton Heath McDonald's. Dejected, he gave up on his digital dream, leaving what he says might be "the worst McDonald's in the UK" to code slot machines for a gambling company. Now, 10 years and one bedroom-made game later, Galante is the proud owner of two Baftas.

Over the weekend, the Guardian published a trio of stories about video game addiction. One was about the 850 people referred to an NHS treatment clinic in the last three years (of whom 227 were under 18). Another was on developers' use of tactics from the gambling industry to keep people spending on games. The third was by the director of the National Centre for Gaming Disorders, calling for industry regulation to better protect young people. These stories concern a problem that is certainly real, especially so for people affected by compulsive gaming behaviour, whose stories are no less affecting than those of gambling addicts.

Art and technology have a unique intersection that has been explored in various fields, ranging from film and music to video games and gambling. With the rise of digital technology, art has found a new medium to explore and experiment with. The world of digital creativity has opened up endless possibilities for artists and creatives, allowing them to push the boundaries of what was previously thought possible. One field where this intersection has had a significant impact is gambling. Gambling has evolved from simple card games to a billion-dollar industry with the rise of online casinos and mobile apps. The gambling industry has been quick to embrace technology, and as a result, we have seen an explosion in the number of games and betting options available.

Recent AI-related scandals have shed a spotlight on accountability in AI, with increasing public interest and concern. This paper draws on literature from public policy and governance to make two contributions. First, we propose an AI accountability ecosystem as a useful lens on the system, with different stakeholders requiring and contributing to specific accountability mechanisms. We argue that the present ecosystem is unbalanced, with a need for improved transparency via AI explainability and adequate documentation and process formalisation to support internal audit, leading up eventually to external accreditation processes. Second, we use a case study in the gambling sector to illustrate in a subset of the overall ecosystem the need for industry-specific accountability principles and processes. We define and evaluate critically the implementation of key accountability principles in the gambling industry, namely addressing algorithmic bias and model explainability, before concluding and discussing directions for future work based on our findings. Keywords: Accountability, Explainable AI, Algorithmic Bias, Regulation.

Artificial intelligence is more than just a buzzword. It has seen widespread applications across several industries, and many people don't realize that they take advantage of this technology in their everyday lives. The online gambling industry is one of the quickest to adopt artificial intelligence, with land-based casinos lagging slightly in this regard. Keep reading to learn about the impact of AI on the online gambling space, its vast potential in the future, and how traditional casinos try to use it in their favor. Different industries use artificial intelligence for different reasons.

With cut-throat competition and the industry facing legal challenges world over, online casinos are focused on offering new solutions that improve service quality and draw more customers to grow their revenues. One of these solutions is artificial intelligence (AI). Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the new tech frontier. Every industry is finding a way to take advantage of the technology. Gambling industry is no exception.

On Sept. 16, 2007, a Japanese YouTuber who goes by the handle "Computing Aesthetic" uploaded a forty-eight-second-long video with the deafening title, "ULTRA MEGA SUPER LUCKY SHOT." The video shows a high-scoring shot in Peggle, a vastly popular video game, loosely based on Japanese pachinko machines, in which a ball bearing clatters down the screen, accruing points as it bounces through a crowd of candy-colored pegs, which disappear shortly after being touched; more bounces, more points. Although Peggle involves some skill--before firing the ball, the player must carefully aim the launcher that dangles at the top of the screen--you are principally at the mercy of the luck of the bounce. In Computing Aesthetic's footage, the points pile up as the ball bounces fortuitously between pegs. To underscore the seemingly miraculous shot, Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" blares euphorically until, in the video's final moments, the ball bearing sinks into the bucket at the base of the screen and the words "FEVER SCORE" flash onscreen.

Becky Liggero, Jackpotjoy co-founder Keith Laslop explains how big data is shaping the gambling industry's technology. Gambling operators' appetite for big data has become more insatiable since the launching of the first online gambling website in 1994. Bookmakers, meanwhile, use big data to provide realistic odds for punters, while casino operators use the valuable information to improve their marketing campaign results. Fantasy sports operators sift through massive sports information to come up with the best combination of players in real life competition. There are at least two technologies that are touted to become useful for data collection and even compliance in the near future: blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI).

The gambling industry has adapted to the emerging trends of the consumer world, therefore it's no surprise that a trend as groundbreaking as artificial intelligence (AI) has impacted the online gambling ecosystem, online platform developer and games aggregator SoftGamings explores the situation further. Gambling has evolved immensely since its formation, from games of chance being played in China, to present times, where we can enjoy Slots, Roulette, Baccarat, Fortune Wheel, Poker, Dice and many other games. It's undeniable that we make public a considerable amount of data on our everyday lives. The information about the websites we visit, advertisements we react to, purchases we make, updates we post on social networks and many more things inform marketers a great deal about our consuming potential. This is why data collection and analysis have become crucial for optimising marketing performance. It's something that's illustrated by the fact that the worth of the big data market was $35 bln in 2017, a figure that's expected to triple by 2027.

Since Facebook announced they were opening their platform to chatbots in 2016, there's been a proliferation of companies looking to provide services through the site with varying degrees of success. An immediate hype cycle followed proclaiming how chatbots would change the world before this had to be rowed back. Aspirations ran far ahead of the capabilities of natural language processing (NLP), and instead of presenting users with broad functionalities that were true to the conversational interface, most chatbots were little more than click-button menus and, if lucky, some key-word driven answers. Despite this first failing, many believe there is value in chatbots as they allow businesses to go to where the customer is and already spends lots of time; Whatsapp and Facebook have a combined 2.8 billion users who send over 100 billion messages a day! Brands have sought to use chatbots to go to where the customer is rather than forcing them to an app or website, and reinforcing this, chatbots also present a User Interface that doesn't require the customer to learn a website or app design; conversation is the most intuitive form of interaction.