Petitions demanding people get the chance to be released from ICE custody have overwhelmed courts throughout the US. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation in Minnesota is pushing the United States court system to its breaking point. Since Operation Metro Surge began in December, federal immigration agents have arrested some 4,000 people, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The result is an avalanche of cases filed in the US district court in Minnesota on behalf of people challenging their imprisonment by federal immigration enforcement agents. According to WIRED's review of court records and official judicial statistics, attorneys filed nearly as many so-called habeas corpus petitions in Minnesota alone as were filed across the US during an entire year.

"What I do not understand is that we are supporting big tech instead of protecting European creative ideas and content." The EU's AI Act, which came into force last year, was already in the works when ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that can generate essays, jokes and job applications, burst into public consciousness in late 2022, becoming the fastest-growing consumer application in history. ChatGPT was developed by OpenAI, which is also behind the AI image generator Dall-E. He would like legislation to fill that gap, but said it would take years, after the European Commission's decision last week to withdraw the proposed AI Liability Act. "It might be getting very difficult.

Far from the palm trees of Miami or Austin's taco trucks, Catalin Voss has headquartered his literacy start-up between a cannabis club and pawn shop in the heart of the Mission District. Voss rents a nondescript office building in one of San Francisco's most vibrant neighborhoods as a home base for Ello, a company he co-founded in 2020 that uses speech recognition technology, powered by artificial intelligence, to help struggling students develop their reading skills. The office is within walking distance of his Noe Valley apartment and only steps away from some of the city's best taquerias and cocktail bars. And those are just a few of the perks he recited in explaining why he is headquartered in San Francisco. Voss is part of a sizable cohort of San Francisco loyalists -- old and new -- who say they are flummoxed by the "all is lost" narrative propagated by conservative media hosts and more recently a vocal contingent of tech leaders that includes billionaire entrepreneur-turned-agitator Elon Musk.

Garante, the Italian data protection authority, apparently jumped the gun at the end of March when it imposed a temporary ban on ChatGPT, a chatbot that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate texts that seem as if they were created by humans, and computer games. The watchdog was less concerned by the use of AI -- the simulation of human intelligence by computer systems -- than by breaches of data protection legislation. Garante then told the Microsoft Corp-backed company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI, that it would have to be more transparent with its users about how their data were processed. It also said that the US company had to obtain permission from users if their data were to be used to further develop the software -- that is, to help it learn -- and that access to minors had to be filtered. In a press release, the Italian authority said that the ban would be lifted if OpenAI met these conditions by April 30.

Artificial Intelligence in a Digital Age (AIDA), a special committee set up in September 2020 to analyse the horizontal impact of Artificial Intelligence on society, has concluded with its own-initiative report, adopted on Tuesday (22 March). The AIDA report had a rocky start, as progressive political groups criticised conservative rapporteur Axel Voss for the report's overall narrative. It was seen as too focused on international competition, where the EU was inevitably falling behind. After significant redrafting, the report was adopted with a vast majority in the parliamentary committee while maintaining the original emphasis on the potential benefits of the emerging technology. "The EU now has the unique chance to promote a human-centric and trustworthy approach to AI based on fundamental rights that manages risks while taking full advantage of the benefits AI can bring for the whole of society – including in healthcare, sustainability, the labour market, competitiveness and security," Voss said.

Greg Kruger pauses for what seems like an eternity during his presentation, but it actually just lasts six seconds. The senior agronomist for BASF's xarvio digital farming division did it to prove a point about BASF's Smart Farming joint collaboration with Bosch that includes precision spraying technology the firms call Smart Spraying. The strategy teams machine-learning algorithms with computer vision to enable "green-on-green" spraying that distinguishes between weeds and crops in-season. Kruger's presentation was part of a BASF media briefing held before this week's Commodity Classic in New Orleans. "In the six seconds that I paused, we've taken 1,000 images [with Smart Spraying] on the boom," says Kruger.

An internal report on Artificial Intelligence recently approved by a special committee of the European Parliament embodies a push from EU lawmakers and member states to make regulation on artificial intelligence less burdensome and more innovation-friendly. Christian Democrat MEP Axel Voss has been leading the charge against "overburdening" companies with excessive regulation, arguing that the EU regulatory environment should leave more room for innovation. That was the underlying motive of an own-initiative report on Artificial Intelligence in a Digital Age, recently approved in the AIDA committee, a parliamentary body set up in 2020, under Voss' leadership. "We need a better regulatory framework that learns also from the mistakes of the GDPR," Voss said while presenting the report. Instead of overburdening companies, the AI Act should give clear guidance and should leave space for innovation, he added.

An internal report on Artificial Intelligence recently approved by a special committee of the European Parliament embodies a push from EU lawmakers and member states to make regulation on artificial intelligence less burdensome and more innovation-friendly. Christian Democrat MEP Axel Voss has been leading the charge against "overburdening" companies with excessive regulation, arguing that the EU regulatory environment should leave more room for innovation. That was the underlying motive of an own-initiative report on Artificial Intelligence in a Digital Age, recently approved in the AIDA committee, a parliamentary body set up in 2020, under Voss' leadership. "We need a better regulatory framework that learns also from the mistakes of the GDPR," Voss said while presenting the report. Instead of overburdening companies, the AI Act should give clear guidance and should leave space for innovation, he added.

Markov decision processes (MDPs) and partially observable MDPs (POMDPs) can effectively represent complex real-world decision and control problems. However, continuous space MDPs and POMDPs, i.e. those having continuous state, action and observation spaces, are extremely difficult to solve, and there are few online algorithms with convergence guarantees. This paper introduces Voronoi Progressive Widening (VPW), a general technique to modify tree search algorithms to effectively handle continuous or hybrid action spaces, and proposes and evaluates three continuous space solvers: VOSS, VOWSS, and VOMCPOW. VOSS and VOWSS are theoretical tools based on sparse sampling and Voronoi optimistic optimization designed to justify VPW-based online solvers. While previous algorithms have enjoyed convergence guarantees for problems with continuous state and observation spaces, VOWSS is the first with global convergence guarantees for problems that additionally have continuous action spaces. VOMCPOW is a versatile and efficient VPW-based algorithm that consistently outperforms POMCPOW and BOMCP in several simulation experiments.

It is one of several efforts in the industry to improve the usefulness of robots in warehouses, where they are increasingly common. The platform is currently online at one location near Madrid, where it has already reduced integration time for new robot systems by 60%, said Markus Voss, DHL Supply Chain's global chief information officer and chief operating officer. "We're at the beginning of the journey," Mr. Voss said. "We are implementing it as we speak at two additional sites, and we think it has applicability across all of our sites." The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team.