A company known as Truleo uses A.I. to process bodycam footage so law enforcement agencies can review their officers' behavior and actions on a daily basis. Law enforcement agencies are using artificial intelligence to analyze body camera video in an effort to improve trust and transparency in communities nationwide. Truleo automatically detects critical situations from body camera footage that involves use-of-force, pursuits and frisking. The A.I. platform also screens for both professional and unprofessional language. This automated analysis is readily available to supervisors within minutes so they can evaluate officers' conduct.

A new alliance of professional and research organisations is aiming to deliver a set of professional standards for data scientists. If widely adopted, the framework could go a long way to ensuring those working on advanced AI and machine learning systems (AI/ML) do so in a way that mitigates the emerging technology's risk to society. It could eventually lead to anyone unethically implementing AI being'struck off', or banned from the profession, one expert told Tech Monitor. The Alliance for Data Science Professionals has been formed by organisations including the BCS, the chartered institute for IT, and the Alan Turing Institute for AI research, along with the Royal Statistical Society, the Institute of Mathematics and the National Physical Laboratory. It aims to set the standards "needed to ensure an ethical and well-governed approach so the public, organisations and governments can have confidence in how their data is used".

BCS, the chartered institute for IT, has released a report that supports the government's recent £13.5m investment in master's level AI conversion degrees. The report, 'Scaling up the ethical artificial intelligence MSc pipeline', was commissioned by the government's Office for AI, with the aim to understand what can be done to tackle the severe shortage of AI professionals, particularly from diverse backgrounds. The government's own AI review found that around 3,000 AI MSc graduates will be needed every year in order to furnish the country with the skills base it needs, and that ethical skills will be a necessary element of this base. Research for the report involved extensive consultation with more than 50 universities, blue-chip companies, the Institute of Coding, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Office for Students (OFS), as well as government departments including the DCMS and DfE. The report recommends that the AI sector should implement evidence-based solutions to diversity issues – such as those being used in engineering – as a "matter of urgency".

In part one of this series last week, we discussed the emerging ecosystem of machine learning applications and what promise those portend. But of course, as with any emerging application area (although to be fair, machine learning is not new), there are bound to be some barriers. Even in analytically sophisticated organizations, machine learning often operates in "silos of expertise." For example, the financial crimes unit in a bank may use advanced techniques to catch anti-money laundering; the credit risk team uses completely different and incompatible tools to predict loan defaults and set risk-based pricing; while treasury uses still other tools to predict cash flow. Meanwhile, customer service and branch operations do not use machine learning at all because they lack the critical mass of specialists and software.