All the sessions from Transform 2021 are available on-demand now. The traditional way for a database to answer a query is with a list of rows that fit the criteria. If there's any sorting, it's done by one field at a time. Vector similarity search looks for matches by comparing the likeness of objects, as captured by machine learning models. Vector similarity search is particularly useful with real-world data because that data is often unstructured and contains similar yet not identical items.

Consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica had offices in London, New York, Washington, as well as Brazil and Malaysia. The company boasted it can'find your voters and move them to action' through data-driven campaigns and a team that includes data scientists and behavioural psychologists. In 2013, Cambridge professor Aleksandr Kogan used his app, This Is Your Digital Life, to ask 270,000 Facebook users questions about their personalities. By answering them, the users granted Kogan access to not only their profiles but to those of their friends. He subsequently sold that information to Cambridge Analytica for $51million.

You probably picture robots as clodhoppers: ponderous, clunky, even doddery droids that need caffeine, badly. But robots are on the brink of making giant strides. Just ask Columbia University engineering professor Hod Lipson, who writes in Nature that "young animals gallop across fields, climb trees, and immediately find their feet with grace after they fall"--and robots are set to follow suit. A new breed of speedy robots promises to eventually outdo the runners at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Notable cybernetic contenders include MIT's dominant Cheetah, Boston Dynamics' Petman and Handle, Michigan Robotics' MABEL, and--further afield in South Africa--the University of Cape Town's Baleka. Plus, that efficiency-geared Florida University powerhouse, the Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC), fields a smart, sensor-free biped plainly called Planar Elliptical Runner (PER).

AI is often criticized for its tendency to perpetuate society's biases, but it's equally capable of fighting them. Machine learning is currently being used to scan scientific studies and news stories to identify prominent scientists who aren't featured on Wikipedia. Many of these scientists are female, and their omission is particularly significant in the world's most popular encyclopedia, where 82 percent of biographies are written about men. The research has been carried out by an AI startup named Primer as a demonstration of the company's expertise in natural language processing (NLP). This is a challenging but lively subfield of AI that's all about understanding and generating digital text.

Sen. Jerry Moran (R., Kan.), chairman of the Senate's consumer protection subcommittee, said he was considering joining in an effort by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) to pass a privacy bill of rights in Congress. His comments showed that the risks for big internet companies haven't dissipated since Facebook's scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, a political data consultancy that worked with President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and obtained data of millions of Facebook users from an app developer, Aleksandr Kogan. Sen. John Thune (R., S.D.), the chairman of the powerful Commerce Committee, added that Facebook "remains under the microscope" and said lawmakers continue to examine potential measures to protect user privacy. But key lawmakers appeared to be far from a consensus on how to proceed. At Tuesday's hearing, Mr. Kogan, a social psychologist and University of Cambridge lecturer, in prepared testimony, called for strengthening the system of obtaining users' consent for subsequent use of their information.

LONDON – The former head of Cambridge Analytica admitted on Wednesday his firm had received data from the researcher at the center of a scandal over Facebook users' personal details, contradicting previous testimony to lawmakers. Cambridge Analytica, which was hired by Donald Trump in 2016, has denied its work on the U.S. president's successful election campaign made use of data allegedly improperly harvested from around 87 million Facebook users. Former chief Alexander Nix, in earlier testimony to Parliament's media committee, also denied the political consultancy had ever been given data by Aleksandr Kogan, the researcher linked to the scandal. On Wednesday he said it had received data from Kogan. "Of course, the answer to this question should have been'yes,' " Nix said, adding that he thought he was being asked if Cambridge Analytica still held data from the researcher.

Facebook's failure to compel Cambridge Analytica to delete all traces of data from its servers – including any "derivatives" – enabled the company to retain predictive models derived from millions of social media profiles throughout the US presidential election, the Guardian can reveal. Leaked emails reveal that when Cambridge Analytica told Facebook almost a year before the election that it had deleted data harvested from tens of millions of Facebook users, it stopped short of agreeing to also erase derivatives of the data. The correspondence, obtained by the Guardian, also raises questions about the accuracy of the testimony that Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, gave to the US Congress last month. Derivatives of data, which can include predictive models, or clusters of populations in psychological groupings, can be highly valuable to companies involved in micro-targeting advertisements to voters. Data scientists say such models and analysis are often more valuable than underlying raw data.

Cambridge Analytica, the data firm at the centre of this year's Facebook privacy row, is closing and starting insolvency proceedings. The company has been plagued by scandal since the Observer reported that the personal data of about 50 million Americans and at least a million Britons had been harvested from Facebook and improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica denies any wrongdoing, but says that the negative media coverage has left it with no clients and mounting legal fees. "Despite Cambridge Analytica's unwavering confidence that its employees have acted ethically and lawfully, the siege of media coverage has driven away virtually all of the Company's customers and suppliers," said the company in a statement, which also revealed that SCL Elections Ltd, the UK entity affiliated with Cambridge Analytica, would also close and start insolvency proceedings. "As a result, it has been determined that it is no longer viable to continue operating the business, which left Cambridge Analytica with no realistic alternative to placing the company into administration."

"The Company is immediately ceasing all operations" and has filed applications to begin insolvency proceedings in the UK, Cambridge Analytica said in a statement. The statement also pushed back against widespread allegations that the company had improperly obtained Facebook user data to craft targeted advertisements, saying it "has been the subject of numerous unfounded accusations and, despite the Company's efforts to correct the record, has been vilified for activities that are not only legal, but also widely accepted as a standard component of online advertising in both the political and commercial arenas". The company, which was retained by Donald Trump's presidential campaign, has come under tremendous pressure after it was revealed to have obtained data associated with up to 87m Facebook users. Seeking to contain a spiralling crisis, Facebook executives have repeatedly faulted Cambridge Analytica and researcher Aleksander Kogan for the data transfer. The company says Mr Kogan harvested data from a survey app and then passed it along to Cambridge Analytica, which did not destroy the data despite having claimed to do so.

He later shared the information with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, which worked for President Donald Trump's 2016 electionl campaign. Cambridge Analytica has acknowledged it licensed data from Mr. Kogan but said it wasn't used in the U.S. presidential race Clients of Cambridge Analytica have said the company had trouble delivering on its claims that its personality-profiling would help politicians win votes. Mr. Kogan said the data turned out to be of zero value to the company, and his app was less effective at targeting consumers than Facebook's traditional advertising. "The idea that this data is accurate, I would say, is scientifically ridiculous," he told a committee of U.K. lawmakers investigating fake news. "The project, quite frankly, if the goal is microtargeting using Facebook ads, makes no sense. It's not what you would do."