Campaigners said artificial intelligence should not be used in place of real parenting, even if only briefly.

The toy company announced the device in January and said it would sing lullabies and tell bedtime stories.

Mattel said the device was no longer part of its strategy.

At the CES technology show in January, Mattel billed its device – Aristotle – as a major leap in parenting technology.

“Aristotle is designed with a specific purpose and mission: to aid parents and use the most advanced AI-driven technology to make it easier for them to protect, develop, and nurture the most important asset in their home – their children,” the company said.

The device combined home assistant technology and a small camera that worked as a visual baby monitor.

Among its features, Aristotle would automatically “reorder or look for deals and coupons on baby consumables, formula and other baby products when it detects you are likely running low on the specific item”.

In July, Mattel replaced its chief technology officer with Sven Gerjets, who is understood to have reviewed Aristotle and decided against releasing it.

The company said it had decided not to sell Aristotle “as part of an ongoing effort to deliver the best possible connected product experience to the consumer”.

Mattel had been under pressure to pull the product. The US-based Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood said: “Aristotle isn’t a nanny, it’s an intruder. Children’s bedrooms should be free of corporate snooping.”

US politicians also had concerns about the data being gathered by the device and asked for more detail about how it would be stored or shared.

Smart devices designed for children are a growing cause of concern for those worried about the as-yet unknown effects such technologies may have on young children’s emotional development.

Another Mattel product, a talking Barbie doll that would remember details from conversations, was poorly received when released early last year.

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Source: BBC

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The Stanford University study claims its software recognises facial features relating to sexual orientation that are not perceived by human observers.

The work has been accused of being “dangerous” and “junk science”.

But the scientists involved say these are “knee-jerk” reactions.

Details of the peer-reviewed project are due to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Narrow jaws

For their study, the researchers trained an algorithm using the photos of more than 14,000 white Americans taken from a dating website.

They used between one and five of each person’s pictures and took people’s sexuality as self-reported on the dating site.

The researchers said the resulting software appeared to be able to distinguish between gay and heterosexual men and women.

In one test, when the algorithm was presented with two photos where one picture was definitely of a gay man and the other heterosexual, it was able to determine which was which 81% of the time.

With women, the figure was 71%.

“Gay faces tended to be gender atypical,” the researchers said. “Gay men had narrower jaws and longer noses, while lesbians had larger jaws.”

But their software did not perform as well in other situations, including a test in which it was given photos of 70 gay men and 930 heterosexual men.

When asked to pick 100 men “most likely to be gay” it missed 23 of them.

In its summary of the study, the Economist – which was first to report the research – pointed to several “limitations” including a concentration on white Americans and the use of dating site pictures, which were “likely to be particularly revealing of sexual orientation”.

‘Reckless findings’

On Friday, two US-based LGBT-focused civil rights groups issued a joint press release attacking the study in harsh terms.

“This research isn’t science or news, but it’s a description of beauty standards on dating sites that ignores huge segments of the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer/questioning) community, including people of colour, transgender people, older individuals, and other LGBTQ people who don’t want to post photos on dating sites,” said Jim Halloran, chief digital officer of Glaad, a media-monitoring body.

“These reckless findings could serve as a weapon to harm both heterosexuals who are inaccurately outed, as well as gay and lesbian people who are in situations where coming out is dangerous.”

The Human Rights Campaign added that it had warned the university of its concerns months ago.

“Stanford should distance itself from such junk science rather than lending its name and credibility to research that is dangerously flawed and leaves the world – and this case, millions of people’s lives – worse and less safe than before,” said its director of research, Ashland Johnson.

The two researchers involved – Prof Michael Kosinski and Yilun Wang – have since responded in turn, accusing their critics of “premature judgement”.

“Our findings could be wrong… however, scientific findings can only be debunked by scientific data and replication, not by well-meaning lawyers and communication officers lacking scientific training,” they wrote.

“However, if our results are correct, Glaad and HRC representatives’ knee-jerk dismissal of the scientific findings puts at risk the very people for whom their organisations strive to advocate.”

‘Treat cautiously’

Previous research that linked facial features to personality traits has become unstuck when follow-up studies failed to replicate the findings. This includes the claim that a face’s shape could be linked to aggression.

One independent expert, who spoke to the BBC, said he had added concerns about the claim that the software involved in the latest study picked up on “subtle” features shaped by hormones the subjects had been exposed to in the womb.

“These ‘subtle’ differences could be a consequence of gay and straight people choosing to portray themselves in systematically different ways, rather than differences in facial appearance itself,” said Prof Benedict Jones, who runs the Face Research Lab at the University of Glasgow.

It was also important, he said, for the technical details of the analysis algorithm to be published to see if they stood up to informed criticism.

“New discoveries need to be treated cautiously until the wider scientific community – and public – have had an opportunity to assess and digest their strengths and weaknesses,” he said.

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Source: BBC

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“‘Robot intelligence is dangerous’: Expert’s warning after Facebook AI ‘develop their own language'”, says the Mirror.

Similar stories have appeared in the Sun, the Independent, the Telegraph and in other online publications.

It sounds like something from a science fiction film – the Sun even included a few pictures of scary-looking androids.

So, is it time to panic and start preparing for apocalypse at the hands of machines?

Probably not. While some great minds – including Stephen Hawking – are concerned that one day AI could threaten humanity, the Facebook story is nothing to be worried about.

Where did the story come from?

Way back in June, Facebook published a blog post about interesting researchon chatbot programs – which have short, text-based conversations with humans or other bots. The story was covered by New Scientist and others at the time.

Facebook had been experimenting with bots that negotiated with each other over the ownership of virtual items.

It was an effort to understand how linguistics played a role in the way such discussions played out for negotiating parties, and crucially the bots were programmed to experiment with language in order to see how that affected their dominance in the discussion.

A few days later, some coverage picked up on the fact that in a few cases the exchanges had become – at first glance – nonsensical:

• Bob: “I can can I I everything else”
• Alice: “Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to”

Although some reports insinuate that the bots had at this point invented a new language in order to elude their human masters, a better explanation is that the neural networks had simply modified human language for the purposes of more efficient interaction.

As technology news site Gizmodo said: “In their attempts to learn from each other, the bots thus began chatting back and forth in a derived shorthand – but while it might look creepy, that’s all it was.”

AIs that rework English as we know it in order to better compute a task are not new.

Google reported that its translation software had done this during development. “The network must be encoding something about the semantics of the sentence” Google said in a blog.

And earlier this year, Wired reported on a researcher at OpenAI who is working on a system in which AIs invent their own language, improving their ability to process information quickly and therefore tackle difficult problems more effectively.

The story seems to have had a second wind in recent days, perhaps because of a verbal scrap over the potential dangers of AI between Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and technology entrepreneur Elon Musk.

Robo-fear

But the way the story has been reported says more about cultural fears and representations of machines than it does about the facts of this particular case.

Plus, let’s face it, robots just make for great villains on the big screen.

In the real world, though, AI is a huge area of research at the moment and the systems currently being designed and tested are increasingly complicated.

One result of this is that it’s often unclear how neural networks come to produce the output that they do – especially when two are set up to interact with each other without much human intervention, as in the Facebook experiment.

That’s why some argue that putting AI in systems such as autonomous weapons is dangerous.

It’s also why ethics for AI is a rapidly developing field – the technology will surely be touching our lives ever more directly in the future.

But Facebook’s system was being used for research, not public-facing applications, and it was shut down because it was doing something the team wasn’t interested in studying – not because they thought they had stumbled on an existential threat to mankind.

It’s important to remember, too, that chatbots in general are very difficult to develop.

In fact, Facebook recently decided to limit the rollout of its Messenger chatbot platform after it found many of the bots on it were unable to address 70% of users’ queries.

Chatbots can, of course, be programmed to seem very humanlike and may even dupe us in certain situations – but it’s quite a stretch to think they are also capable of plotting a rebellion.

At least, the ones at Facebook certainly aren’t.

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Source: BBC

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The firms will collaborate on developing a virtual driver system for driverless cars.

Ford intends to have an autonomous vehicle ready to launch in 2021.

Argo was founded by CEO Brian Salesky and chief operating officer Peter Rander, who led self-driving car teams at Google and Uber respectively.

The investment makes Ford the firm’s majority stakeholder.

“The next decade will be defined by the automation of the automobile, and autonomous vehicles will have as significant an impact on society as Ford’s moving assembly line did 100 years ago,” said chief executive Mark Fields.

Ford has two autonomous vehicles currently licensed for testing in California but a recent report revealed that they only covered 590 miles in 2016.

A human driver had to take control three times, twice to abort lane changes.

In the same period BMW reported 638 miles and one disengagement of autonomous control, and Google 636,000 miles and 124 disengagements.

Other US states do not require car manufacturers to report these figures.

–

Source: BBC

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Amazon, Google’s DeepMind, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft will work together on issues such as privacy, safety and the collaboration between people and AI.

Dubbed the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, it will include external experts.

One said he hoped the group would address “legitimate concerns”.

“We’ve seen a very fast development in AI over a very short period of time,” said Prof Yoshua Bengio, from the University of Montreal.

“The field brings exciting opportunities for companies and public organisations. And yet, it raises legitimate questions about the way these developments will be conducted.”

Bringing the key players together would be the “best way to ensure we all share the same values and overall objectives to serve the common good”, he added.

One notable absentee from the consortium is Apple. It has been in discussions with the group and may join the partnership “soon”, according to one member.

The group will have an equal share of corporate and non-corporate members and is in discussions with organisations such as the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

It stressed that it had no plans to “lobby government or other policy-making bodies”.

“AI has tremendous potential to improve many aspects of life, ranging from healthcare, education and manufacturing to home automation and transport and the founding members… hope to maximise this potential and ensure it benefits as many people as possible,” it said.

It will conduct research under an open licence in the following areas:

• ethics, fairness and inclusivity
• transparency
• privacy and interoperability (how AI works with people)
• trustworthiness, reliability and robustness

Microsoft’s managing director of research hailed the partnership as a “historic collaboration on AI and its influences on people and society”, while IBM’s ethics researcher Francesca Rossi said it would provide “a vital voice in the advancement of the defining technology of this century”.

Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google’s artificial intelligence division, DeepMind, said he hoped the group would be able to “break down barriers for AI teams to share best practice and research ways to maximise societal benefits and tackle ethical concerns”.

And Amazon’s director of machine learning, Ralf Herbrich, said the time was ripe for such a collaboration.

“We’re in a golden age of machine learning and AI,” he said.
“As a scientific community, we are still a long way from being able to do things the way humans do things, but we’re solving unbelievably complex problems every day and making incredibly rapid progress.”

Artificial intelligence is beginning to find roles in the real world – from the basic AI used in smartphone voice assistants and web chatbots to AI agents that can take on data analysis to significant breakthroughs such as DeepMind’s victory over champion Go player Lee Sedol.

The win – in one of the world’s most complex board games – was hailed as a defining moment for AI, with experts saying it had come a decade earlier than anyone had predicted.

DeepMind now has 250 scientists at its King’s Cross headquarters, working on a variety of projects, including several tie-ins with the NHS to analyse medical records.

In a lecture at the Royal Academy of Engineering, founder Dr Demis Hassabis revealed the team was now working on creating an artificial hippocampus, an area of the brain regarded by neuroscientists as responsible for emotion, creativity, memory and other human attributes.

But as AI has developed, so have concerns about where the technology is heading.

One of the most vocal and high-profile naysayers is Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, who has tweeted the technology is “potentially more dangerous than nukes [nuclear weapons]” and expressed concerns humans were “just the biological boot loader for digital super-intelligence”.

Last year, Mr Musk set up his own non-profit AI group, OpenAI.

It is not, at this stage, part of the Partnership on AI.

–

Source: BBC

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According to a statement signed by the party’s National Secretary, Kofi Asamoah-Siaw, the elections in the Central, Eastern, Upper East, Brong Ahafo and Volta regions will be held at party conferences between the 27^th of September and the 25^th of October.

“The remaining five Regional Conferences will be held in the month of November, 2014,” read the statement. 

The positions to be contested for at the elections include the Regional Chairman, Vice Chairpersons and the Regional Secretary with  GH¢500 set as the “approved filling fees” for the position of Chairman.

The statement added that “the party will also hold its National Convention to elect National Officers of the party on Saturday 13^th December, 2014 at Tema in the Greater Accra Region.”

Find the full statement from the PPP below:

PPP BEGINS REGIONAL CONFERENCES TO ELECT REGIONAL EXECUTIVES

 The Progressive People’s Party (PPP) has opened nominations for the election of regional executives at Regional Conferences across the country. The schedule for the conduct of regional conferences is as follows:

 The remaining five Regional Conferences will be held in the month of November, 2014.

The approved filing fees are as follows:

Per a decision of the National Committee, all female aspirants will be required to pay 50 percent of the approved filing fees.

Nomination forms are available at all regional secretariats of the party for interested members for the election of regional officers.

The party will also hold its National Convention to elect National Officers of the party on Saturday 13^th December, 2014 at Tema in the Greater Accra Region. Modalities for the National Elections will be announced in due course.

All paid up card-carrying members of the party are entitled to vote in all elections of the party.

Kofi Asamoah-Siaw

National Secretary

By: Edwin Kwakofi/citifmonline.com/Ghana

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He said the practice only serves to weaken Parliament as an institution.

“On the average, the longer a person stays in Parliament, the better he is for the institution of Parliament and for the advancement of good democratic governance,” he noted.

The Suame MP argued that individuals with experience and competence are needed in the legislature to make useful contributions towards the passing of laws and proper oversight over the Executive arm of government.

In an interview with Citi News, Mr. Mensah Bonsu said Parliament should devise ways of keeping experienced ones.

He described as unfortunate, the practice where political parties encourage “a free for all primaries and so many of the members are peeled off at the end of every four years.

The Minority leaders therefore called on the various political parties to find ways of maintaining competent and experienced MPs in the House.

Legislators in Ghana are voted into power by the constituents to serve a four-year term.

Based on one’s competence and performance, the constituents may either renew his or her mandate or elect a new Legislator to represent them in Parliament.

Gradually however, there is a seeming rise in the monetization of politics in Ghana which ensures that the person who has more money is elected into office.

This is believed to be the one of the causes for the decline in the quality of MPs being voted into power.

In recent times, there have been criticism about the quality of debate and contributions some MPs make on the floor of Parliament which some say results in the passage of weak laws.

In March this year, a former Majority leader and MP for Nadowli/Kaleo, Alban Bagbin accused some of his colleague MPs for taking bribes from individuals and organizations to articulate their views in Parliament.

A committee was subsequently set up to investigate his allegations.

By: Efua Idan Osam/citifmonline.com/Ghana
Follow @osamidan

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Speaking on Eyewitness News, Mr Asamoah-Siaw opined that the forum was geared towards promoting governmental policies to its own advantage.

“This is an attempt by government to manage a certain process for some kind of endorsement of a government policy that it has planned,” he said

Government is making preparations towards the scheduled four-day National Economic forum on May 13.

The Forum is expected to initiate an economic dialogue between government and other relevant stakeholders on how to strengthen Ghana’s economy.

The Presidential Spokesperson, Ben Doste Malor on Friday urged Ghanaians not to politicize the intentions on government to organize the forum.

But speaking on Eyewitness News, Mr. Asamoah-Siaw asserted that money will be wasted adding that, the timing for the forum is wrong.

He said the the forum was needless, considering the current economic challenges the country is experiencing.

“All the difficulties that we are experiencing, all the challenges that we are going through, we still have the Presidency or government at the highest level, denying the crises that we are facing. So if there is no crises, why the need for a national dialogue as far the economic management is concerned?” he asked.

In that regard, he emphasized the need for government to rather concentrate on embarking on practical projects and consider all the ideas in the past in order to yield efficient results.

“I think that if the President stays at the Flagstaff House and considers all their ideas in the past, it will be worth it than going to Akosombo,” he said.

By: Marian Efe Ansah/citifmonline.com/Ghana

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