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"Jimmy Wales said it was dangerous to have companies decide what should and should not be allowed to appear on the internet. His comments came after the bosses of the leading search engines met the heads of European data watchdogs on Thursday."

"Now, the number of combinations of these columns grows exponentially with the number of columns. So if you have many, many columns-and we do in modern databases-you'll get up into millions and millions of attributes for each person. Now, if I start allowing myself to look at all of the combinations of these features-if you live in Beijing, and you ride bike to work, and you work in a certain job, and are a certain age-what's the probability you will have a certain disease or you will like my advertisement? Now I'm getting combinations of millions of attributes, and the number of such combinations is exponential; it gets to be the size of the number of atoms in the universe."

"The US government is researching technology that it hopes will turn soldiers into cyborgs, allowing them to connect directly to computers. The US military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has unveiled a research programme called Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) which aims to develop an implantable neural interface, connecting humans directly to computers."

"TeslaCrypt ransomware with new features that are impossible to crack, according to Cisco's Talos security arm. That means user infected with the latest version (3.01) of the malware can no longer use white hat-engineered software to get their files back. Until someone finds a new solution -- and that seems unlikely -- victims will have to pay."

"At the heart of the problem that troubles Ming is the training that computer engineers receive and their uncritical faith in AI. Too often, she says, their approach to a problem is to train a neural network on a mass of data and expect the result to work fine. She berates companies for failing to engage with the problem first - applying what is already known about good employees and successful students, for example - before applying the AI."

"There is little evidence to show algorithms by online firms are based on politics, and many conservatives - including Trump himself - have large a social media following. Analysts say it would be dangerous to try to regulate how search engines work to please a government or political faction."

"This way of thinking about search results is wrong. Recent studies suggest that search engines, rather than providing a neutral way to find information, may actually play a major role in shaping public opinion on political issues and candidates. Some research has even argued that search results can affect the outcomes of close elections. In a study aptly titled In Google We Trust participants heavily prioritized the first page of search results, and the order of the results on that page, and continued to do so even when researchers reversed the order of the actual results."

"The platform's automated tools may have mistaken the visuals of the burning building for 9/11 footage, according to Vagelis Papalexakis, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, Riverside who studies machine learning used in similar systems."

"Across the technology industry, rank-and-file employees are demanding greater insight into how their companies are deploying the technology that they build. At Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, as well as at tech startups, engineers and technologists are increasingly asking whether the products they are working on are being used for surveillance in places like China or for military projects in the United States or elsewhere."

"Tech workers are in demand: companies find it easier to raise cash than to hire engineers; this gives workers enormous bargaining power, and they're using it. From the Google uprisings over a Pentagon babykiller project and a Chinese surveillance project to the Microsoft uprising over ICE contracts, tech workers are emerging as part of the solution -- while their secretive, shareholder-haunted bosses are more and more the problem."

"And if your password can be reverse-engineered to reveal something about you or others like you, how safe or unique is it really."

"At Imperial College London, Murray Shanahan and colleagues are working on a way around this problem using an old, unfashionable technique called symbolic AI. "Basically this meant an engineer labelled everything for the AI," says Shanahan. His idea is to combine this with modern machine learning. Symbolic AI never took off, because manually describing everything quickly proved overwhelming. Modern AI has overcome that problem by using neural networks, which learn their own representations of the world around them. "They decide what is salient," says Marta Garnelo, also at Imperial College."

"Unlike other companies, Zebra's algorithms provide an actual diagnosis, completely automatically using only imaging data. This is a very new field - older technology was always driven by the radiologist, and never automatic. The algorithms are part of the Zebra Analytics Platform - a cloud based analytics engine that receives medical imaging studies, analyzes them and returns results to participating hospitals and physicians."

"In Neural Photo Editing With Introspective Adversarial Networks, a group of University of Edinburgh engineers and a private research colleague describe a method for using "introspective adversarial networks" to edit images in realtime, which they demonstrate in an open project called "Neural Photo Editor" that "enhances" photos by predicting what should be under your brush."

""Robots are a great educational tool for children. It inspires them to learn about science and engineering," Sharkey told the Guardian in March. "But there are significant dangers in having robots mind our children. They do not have the sensitivity or understanding needed for childcare." "

"It is also self-improving. The 10-year-old grading software leverages deep learning algorithms to "compare notes" with human teachers' scores, suggestions, and comments. An engineer involved in the project compared its capabilities to those of AlphaGo, the record-breaking AI Go player developed by Google subsidiary DeepMind."

"When Fry returned to London, she realised how mathematicians, computer engineers and physicists are so used to working on abstract problems that they rarely stop to consider the ethics of how their work might be used"

"The thousands of leaked documents focus mainly on techniques for hacking and reveal how the CIA cooperated with British intelligence to engineer a way to compromise smart televisions and turn them into improvised surveillance devices."

"Coding isn't the only job that demands intense focus. But you'd never hear someone say that brain surgery is "fun," or that structural engineering is "easy." When it comes to programming, why do policymakers and technologists pretend otherwise?"