[It's] an impossible dream because privacy, reliability, bias, human rights and transparency are subject to both technology limitations and differing cultural definitions,

As police embrace new facial recognition technology, many fear false matches could lead to wrongful arrests. The fight over the use of our faces is far from done. A raging battle over controversial facial recognition software used by law enforcement and the civil rights of Americans might be heading to a courtroom. The latest salvo includes the American Civil Liberties Union suing the FBI, the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Agency for those federal agencies' records to see if there is any secret surveillance in use nationwide. The lawsuit, filed Oct. 31, comes as organizations and law enforcement are going toe-to-toe over what is private and what isn't.

For the past several years, giant tech companies have rapidly ramped up investments in artificial intelligence and machine learning. They've competed intensely to hire more AI researchers and used that talent to rush out smarter virtual assistants and more powerful facial recognition. In 2018, some of those companies moved to put some guardrails around AI technology. The most prominent example is Google, which announced constraints on its use of AI after two projects triggered public pushback and an employee revolt. The internal dissent began after the search company's work on a Pentagon program called Maven became public.

IBM wants to help companies mitigate the chances that their artificial intelligence technologies unintentionally discriminate against certain groups like women and minorities. The technology giant's tool, announced on Wednesday, can inspect AI-powered software for unintentional bias when it makes decisions, like when a loan might be denied to a particular person, explained Ruchir Puri, the chief technology officer and chief architect of IBM Watson. The technology industry is increasingly combating the problem of bias in machine learning systems, used to power software that can automatically recognize images in pictures or translate languages. A number of companies have suffered a public relations black eye when their technologies failed to work as well for minority groups as for white users. For instance, researchers discovered that Microsoft and IBM's facial-recognition technology could more accurately identify the faces of lighter-skin males than darker-skin females.

Oracle on Tuesday demonstrated artificial intelligence and machine learning advances in the Oracle Cloud Platform at Oracle CloudWorld in New York. Autonomous capabilities for application development, mobile and bots, integration, analytics, security and system management are scheduled for availability in the first half of this year. Oracle also demonstrated an Oracle Digital Assistant, which will provide centralized communications across CRM, ERP, HCM, custom applications and business intelligence data. The assistant will use AI to correlate data and automate user behavior. The Assistant's cross-application capability "is the differentiator," said Holger Mueller, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

Somewhere between 2009 and 2010 a new and exciting technology broke into the forefront of Artificial Intelligence research. Within a few months, a combination of advanced computing power and huge amounts of data set the stage for a new era in AI. Sophisticated algorithms, invented back in the 1950s, previously considered no more than an academic thought experiment, were transmuted into the cutting edge of the industry. These algorithms -- Deep Neural Networks -- broke boundaries, smashed records, and obtained novel achievements in the field of Artificial Intelligence, that had been all but lying dormant for decades. One of the areas where these achievements were most prominent was Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), i.e., the task of automatically transcribing voice recordings into written words.

When Google built the latest version of its Android mobile operating system, the web giant made some big changes to the way the OS interprets your voice commands. It installed a voice recognition system based on what's called a neural network -- a computerized learning system that behaves much like the human brain. For many users, says Vincent Vanhoucke, a Google research scientist who helped steer the effort, the results were dramatic. "It kind of came as a surprise that we could do so much better by just changing the model," he says. Vanhoucke says that the voice error rate with the new version of Android -- known as Jelly Bean -- is about 25 percent lower than previous versions of the software, and that this is making people more comfortable with voice commands.

Amazon is looking to launch a new service for businesses which will enable them to run artificial intelligence (AI) software on the cloud. Currently, the company is testing the new service, which is aimed at stepping up competition with rivals such as Google, Microsoft and IBM, sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. The service aims to create more powerful applications that can perform tasks like pattern recognition and speech transcription, by allowing businesses to run a range of AI software. Some AWS clients are already testing the new services, sources told the publication, requesting anonymity, as the announcement regarding the roll out hasn't been made. An Amazon spokeswoman said that the company is currently working on other machine learning capabilities for cloud customers.