Turing AI Institute boss denies accusations of'toxic internal culture' The Alan Turing Institute Chair has told the BBC there is no substance to a number of serious accusations which rocked the organisation in the summer. In August, whistleblowers accused the charity's leadership of misusing public funds, overseeing a toxic internal culture, and failing to deliver on its mission. They said the Turing Institute, the UK's national body for artificial intelligence (AI), was on the brink of collapse after Peter Kyle, the then technology secretary, threatened to withdraw its £100m funding. But speaking exclusively to the BBC, Chair Dr Doug Gurr said the whistleblower claims were independently investigated by a third party which found them to have no substance. I fully sympathise that going through any transition is always challenging, he said.

Staff at the UK's leading artificial intelligence institute have raised concerns about the organisation's governance and internal culture in a whistleblowing complaint to the charity watchdog. The Alan Turing Institute (ATI), a registered charity with substantial state funding, is under government pressure to overhaul its strategic focus and leadership after an intervention last month from the technology secretary, Peter Kyle. In a complaint to the Charity Commission, a group of current ATI staff raise eight points of concern and say the institute is in danger of collapse due to government threats over its funding. The complaint alleges that the board of trustees, chaired by the former Amazon UK boss Doug Gurr, has failed to fulfil core legal duties such as providing strategic direction and ensuring accountability, with staff alleging a letter of no confidence was delivered last year and not acted upon. A spokesperson for ATI said the Charity Commission had not been in touch with the institute about any complaints that may have been sent to the organisation.

In her resignation letter Wednesday, Google ethical AI researcher Alex Hanna accused the company of having deep "rot" in its internal culture, "maintain[ing] white supremacy behind the veneer of race-neutrality" and being a workplace where those with "little interest in mitigating the worst harms" of its products are promoted at "lightning speed." "I am quitting because I'm tired," Hanna wrote, announcing that she is joining the research institution recently founded by Timnit Gebru, the prominent AI ethicist who previously co-led Google's ethical AI team. Gebru was fired from the company in 2020 after raising concerns about natural-language processing. Hanna will be accompanied by Dylan Baker, a software engineer who also resigned Wednesday, in joining Gebru's Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute. "When I joined Google, I was cautiously optimistic about the promise of making the world better with technology. I'm a lot less techno-solutionist now," Baker wrote in a separate letter, in which they wrote about the "cognitive dissonance" of working for a place where full-time employees and contract workers received such different benefits.

The IT industry body NASSCOM's annual Technology and Leadership Forum (NTLF) brought together industry captains to discuss a number of key themes, including the impact of artificial intelligence (AI). NASSCOM 2019 was held in Mumbai over three days in February with the NTLF itself gathering leaders with expertise in AI, automation, cloud computing, big data and cybersecurity. Indian IT service providers agreed they are well-positioned to help enterprises embrace digital transformation saying it is not only about finding the right technology, curating large amounts of data, or identifying the best use cases. Successful AI depends on changing business processes. While business leaders often focus on the change that needs to take place at the enterprise, more needs to be asked about the changes that IT services providers need to make in order to better serve their customers.