After serving a federal prison sentence for violating anti-money-laundering laws and US sanctions, former crypto exchange CEO Changpeng Zhao has been pardoned by US president Donald Trump. US president Donald Trump has pardoned Changpeng Zhao, founder of the world's largest crypto exchange, Binance. Zhao, widely known as CZ, pled guilty in November 2023 to violating anti-money-laundering laws and US sanctions. The plea formed part of a sweeping deal with the US Department of Justice, under which Binance was required to pay a record-breaking $4.3 billion penalty. Zhao ultimately spent four months in federal prison.

Three former executives at the video game company Ubisoft have been given suspended prison sentences for enabling a culture of sexual and psychological harassment in the workplace at the end of the first big trial to stem from the #MeToo movement in the gaming industry. The court in Bobigny, north of Paris, had heard how the former executives used their position to bully or sexually harass staff, leaving women terrified and feeling like pieces of meat. Former staff had said that between 2012 and 2020, the company's offices in Montreuil, east of Paris, were run with a toxic culture of bullying and sexism that one worker likened to a "boys' club above the law". Ubisoft is a French family business that rose to become one of the biggest video game creators in the world. The company has been behind several blockbusters including Assassin's Creed, Far Cry and the children's favourite Just Dance.

Social media firms could be ordered to use facial recognition technology to check children's ages. Millions of children could have their online profiles banned by the tech giants under plans to be set out by online regulator Ofcom next spring. Social media executives have been warned they could face huge fines and even prison sentences if they fail to follow guidance designed to ensure their users are not underage. John Higham, Ofcom's head of online safety policy, said platforms would be expected to remove children's accounts from their sites by using'highly accurate and effective' AI age checks. The regulator estimates that up to 60 per cent of eight to 11-year-olds have social media profiles, despite sites such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat having minimum age limits of 13.

Fox News contributor Lt. Gen Keith Kellogg reacts to Russian government officials claiming Ukrainian forces attempted to assassinate Vladimir Putin in a drone attack on Your World with Neil Cavuto. A woman was convicted in a Russian court on Thursday of desecrating the grave of Russian President Vladimir Putin's parents with a derogatory note. Irina Tsybaneva, a 60-year-old retiree from St. Petersburg, was found guilty and given a two-year suspended prison sentence for leaving the letter at the graves of Putin's parents, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin and Maria Ivanovna Shelomova. The note that Tsybaneva placed on the guarded grave on the eve of Putin's birthday in October read, "Parents of a maniac, take him to your place. He causes so much pain and trouble. You raised a freak and a killer."

Bias takes many different forms and impact all groups of people. It can range from implicit to explicit and is often very difficult to detect. In the field of machine learning bias is often subtle and hard to identify, let alone solve. Why is this a problem? Implicit bias in machine learning has very real consequences including denial of a loan, a lengthier prison sentence, and many other harmful outcomes for underprivileged groups.

AI is more pervasive in our daily lives than one may think. Spotify and Netflix use AI to recommend songs, films or television shows which it considers relevant to our interests based on our past activity or choices. Amazon uses it to recommend products based on past purchases or web browsing activity. Our increased reliance on online services and smart phones means that humans are interacting with AI at an ever-increasing rate. The technology has the potential to greatly increase efficiency, to save lives and to increase the general standard of living.

Dr. Carol Reiley's achievements are too long to list. She co-founded Drive.ai, a self-driving car startup that raised $50 million in its second round of funding last year. Forbes magazine named her one of "20 Incredible Women in AI," and she built intelligent robot systems as a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University. But when she built a voice-activated human-robot interface, her own creation couldn't recognize her voice. Dr. Reiley used Microsoft's speech recognition API to build her interface.

During last Wednesday's congressional hearing about Twitter transparency, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was forced to take accountability for the damaging cultural and political effects of his company. Soft-spoken and contrite, Dorsey provided a stark contrast to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who seemed more confident when he appeared before Congress in April. In the months since, collective faith in the fabric of the internet has been anything but restored; instead, consumers, politicians, and the tech companies themselves continue to grapple with the aftermath of what social platforms hath wrought. During the hearing, Representative Debbie Dingell asked Dorsey if Twitter's algorithms are able to learn from the decisions they make--like who they suggest users follow, which tweets rise to the top, and in some cases what gets flagged for violating the platform's terms of service or even who gets banned--and also if Dorsey could explain how all of this works. "Great question," Dorsey responded, seemingly excited at a line of questioning that piqued his intellectual curiosity.

Artificial intelligence is already making significant inroads in taking over mundane, time-consuming tasks many humans would rather not do. The responsibilities and consequences of handing over work to AI vary greatly, though; some autonomous systems recommend music or movies; others recommend sentences in court. Even more advanced AI systems will increasingly control vehicles on crowded city streets, raising questions about safety--and about liability, when the inevitable accidents occur. But philosophical arguments over AI's existential threats to humanity are often far removed from the reality of actually building and using the technology in question. Deep learning, machine vision, natural language processing--despite all that has been written and discussed about these and other aspects of artificial intelligence, AI is still at a relatively early stage in its development.

Robots must be taught morals so they can be trusted to make potentially life and death decisions, Theresa May will say. Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used to drive cars, diagnose patients and decide on prison sentences around the world. The Prime Minster will warn that as machines swoop in to carry out more jobs they must also be taught how to make ethical decisions. The PM - who was mockingly dubbed the Maybot during the election campaign - will make the warning in a major speech on AI this Thursday in Davos, a summit of political and business leaders. Theresa May (pictured in No10 last night) will warn that as machines swoop in to carry out more jobs they must also be taught how to make ethical decisions.