The USCO agreed that the work was generated by an AI model that Thaler calls the Creativity Machine. He claimed that the USCO's "human authorship" requirement was unconstitutional. However, Howell indicated that Thaler's case wasn't an especially complex one, since he admitted that he wasn't involved in the creation of A Recent Entrance to Paradise. "In the absence of any human involvement in the creation of the work, the clear and straightforward answer is the one given by the [Federal] Register: No," Howell ruled. Thaler plans to appeal the decision.

Many have hailed the potential of artificial intelligence to transform healthcare. Michael Howell, Google's chief clinical officer and deputy chief health officer, says, "It's hard to imagine a technology that is more hyped than AI." Even so, Stephen Parodi, executive vice president of The Permanente Federation, says, "Widespread AI use in healthcare is still in its infancy." Still, many are projecting significant growth in the prevalence of AI in medicine in the near future. During a one-hour forum hosted by The Permanente Federation Monday, healthcare leaders, all physicians, assessed the possibilities of AI, the keys to success, and expectations on its future uses.

A computer engineer who accidentally threw away a hard drive containing approximately £150m worth of bitcoin plans to use artificial intelligence to search through thousands of tonnes of landfill. James Howells discarded the hardware from an old laptop containing 8,000 bitcoins in 2013 during an office clearout and now believes it is sitting in a rubbish dump in Newport, south Wales. The council has previously denied the 37-year-old's repeated requests to search the site due to environmental concerns but he has hatched a £10m hi-tech scheme backed by hedge fund money to find the digital assets. His new proposal would utilise AI technology to operate a mechanical arm that would filter the rubbish, before then being picked by hand at a pop-up facility near the landfill site. Under the plans he will hire a number of environmental and data recovery experts, and while the search is ongoing employ robot dogs as security so no one else can try to steal the elusive hard drive.

James Howells' life changed when he threw out a hard drive about the size of an iPhone 6. Howells, from the city of Newport in southern Wales, had two identical laptop hard drives squirreled away in a drawer in 2013. One was blank; he says the other contained 8,000 bitcoins -- now worth about $181 million, even after the recent crypto crash. He'd meant to throw out the blank one, but instead the drive containing the cryptocurrency ended up going to the local dump in a garbage bag. Nine years later, he's determined to get back his stash, which he mined in 2009. Howells, 36, is hoping local authorities will let him stage a high-tech treasure hunt for the buried bitcoins.

Moves have been made to restrict the use of facial recognition across the globe. In part one of this series on Face ID, Jennifer Strong and the team at MIT Technology Review explore the unexpected ways the technology is being used, including how technology is being turned on police. This episode was reported and produced by Jennifer Strong, Tate Ryan-Mosley and Emma Cillekens, and Karen Hao. Strong: A few things have happened since we last spoke about facial recognition. We've seen more places move to restrict its use while at the same time, schools and other public buildings have started using face I-D as part of their covid-prevention plans. We're even using it on animals and not just on faces with similarities to our own, like chimps and gorillas, Chinese tech firms use it on pigs, and Canadian scientists are working to identify whales, even grizzly bears.

In order to hold police accountable when they try to hide their identities, a growing number of activists are developing facial recognition tools that identify cops, The New York Times reports -- a striking inversion of the way cops tend to use facial recognition on protestors and suspects. Police are hiding their identities while cracking down on protests, in other words, just to be outed by the same invasive technology that they use to surveil the populace. One of the projects was a shower thought for self-taught programmer Christopher Howell. He's identifying cops in Portland, Oregon because they were permitted to cover their names while responding to protests. Portland banned facial recognition for cops and companies, but the NYT reports that Howell's project is permitted because he's an individual working on a passion project.

Mr. Howell was offended by Mr. Wheeler's characterization of his project but relieved he could keep working on it. "There's a lot of excessive force here in Portland," he said in a phone interview. "Knowing who the officers are seems like a baseline." Mr. Howell, 42, is a lifelong protester and self-taught coder; in graduate school, he started working with neural net technology, an artificial intelligence that learns to make decisions from data it is fed, such as images. He said that the police had tear-gassed him during a midday protest in June, and that he had begun researching how to build a facial recognition product that could defeat officers' attempts to shield their identity.

Cornerstone Research VANDY M. HOWELL, PhD Vandy Howell received her PhD in economics from MIT. She has expertise in industrial organization and labor economics. She is the head of Cornerstone Research's San Francisco office. Dr. Howell's practice area focus has been on antitrust, intellectual property, marketing, and breach of contract matters. She has experience across many industries, including cases involving technological and innovation markets, agriculture, and labor market issues.

While the Trump administration scrapped a proposed rule to use facial recognition to identify all people entering and leaving the United States, in other areas the federal government is embracing an expanded use of the technology despite privacy concerns. Let's face it – facial recognition isn't going anywhere. Whether we realize it or not, most of use some type of facial technology software every day. It's being widely used in shopping, home security, and law enforcement, and millions of us use it constantly to open our smart phones. But privacy advocates and civil libertarians are raising alarms about the growing use of facial recognition technology by the federal government under President Trump.

Are our current institutions and global governance architecture sufficient to solve the new challenges the world is currently facing? According to Lee Howell, an executive of the Switzerland-based World Economic Forum, the existing institutions and systems around the world, created in the 20th century, are no longer capable of dealing with today's challenges. These have been triggered by multiple geopolitical, economic and environmental crises, as well as newly emerging issues involving innovative technologies. That is why it is important to have conferences like Davos, Howell said in a recent interview in Tokyo, referring to the WEF's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. The meeting will see some 3,000 global leaders from politics, business, academia and nongovernmental organizations gather to discuss pressing issues across different sectors. The meeting, dubbed the Davos conference, will kick off on Jan. 22 with discussions on problems ranging from climate change to trade issues and geopolitics to the "Fourth Industrial Revolution," in which artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies are expected to drastically transform how humans work and live.