Nearly everyone has heard the buzzwords Artificial Intelligence ("AI") and Machine Learning ("ML") in recent years. Even those who don't know these new technologies are almost with them. According to research,77%of the devices we use today have AI embedded in them. AI is responsible for many technological conveniences that have become part of our daily lives, including Netflix recommendations and a multitude of smart devices. In recent years, almost everyone has heard of the buzzwords Artificial Intelligence ("AI") or Machine Learning ("ML").

"All research is qualitative; some is also quantitative" Harvard Social Scientist and Statistician Gary King Suppose you wanted to find out whether a machine learning system being adopted - to recruit candidates, lend money, or predict future criminality - exhibited racial bias. You might calculate model performance across groups with different races. But how was race categorised– through a census record, a police officer's guess, or by an annotator? Each possible answer raises another set of questions. Following the thread of any seemingly quantitative issue around AI ethics quickly leads to a host of qualitative questions.

Dive into the data science & machine learning behind Netflix's recommendation algorithms.

Researchers have identified an incredibly smart method used by fruit flies to categorise odours – and it's so clever it could be applied to powering recommendation algorithms for the likes of Netflix or Spotify. In the same way that YouTube might want to flag up videos similar to the one you've just watched, fruit flies – like many other animals – need to know which smells are similar, for finding food and avoiding poisonous substances. The team from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California has found that fruit flies have an especially clever way of categorising odours which lets them recognise differences with a very fine level of accuracy. "In the natural world, you're not going to encounter exactly the same odour every time; there's going to be some noise and fluctuation," says one of the researchers, Saket Navlakha from Salk. "But if you smell something that you've previously associated with a behaviour, you need to be able to identify that similarity and recall that behaviour."