Knowledge Update

​New York, April 14 (IANS) Artificial intelligence-powered machines can be reflections of humans and can acquire cultural biases, a new study has found.

Researchers from Princeton University and University of Bath have found that common machine learning programmes, when trained with ordinary human language available online, can acquire cultural biases embedded in the patterns of wording.

These biases range from the morally neutral to the objectionable views -- preference for birds over animals to views on race and gender.

"We have a situation where these artificial intelligence systems may be perpetuating historical patterns of bias that we might find socially unacceptable and which we might be trying to move away from," said Arvind Narayanan, Assistant Professor at Princeton University.

Researchers believe that it is important to identify and address these biases in machines as humans increasingly turn to computers for processing the natural language humans use to communicate.

In their findings, the researchers found that the machine learning programme associated female names more with familial words, like "parents" and "wedding" than male names, while it associated male names with career attributes, like "professional" and "salary". 

"Of course, results such as these are often just objective reflections of the true, unequal distributions of occupation types with respect to gender -- like how 77 per cent of computer programmers are male," the study published in the journal Science noted.

The findings point out that machine learning methods are not 'objective' or 'unbiased' just because they rely on mathematics and algorithms.

"Rather, as long as they are trained using data from society and as long as society exhibits biases, these methods will likely reproduce these biases," said Hanna Wallach, a researcher at Microsoft Research New York City.

New York, April 13 (IANS) Over 1.2 billion people use Facebook Messenger every month globally to stay in touch with the people and businesses that matter to them the most.

In the last few months, Facebook has added group video calling, a powerful and fast camera -- preloaded with stickers, masks, frames, effects and the ability to share photos

​New York, April 13 (IANS) A secret team of biomedical engineers at Apple is working on an initiative to develop sensors that can non-invasively and continuously monitor blood sugar levels to better treat diabetes.

​New Delhi, April 13 (IANS) India will build pipelines to carry diesel and natural gas to Bangladesh, Indian officials said on Thursday.

A 131-km pipeline -- India-Bangladesh Friendship Pipeline -- will be constructed from Siliguri in West Bengal to Parbatipur in northern Bangladesh to transport high speed diesel,

New York, April 13 (IANS) Photo-sharing service Snapchat is launching a new location-based product that will allow businesses see whether people go to stores after seeing advertisements. "With the new ad product, 'Snap to Store', marketers will be able to use the tool to measure whether their ad campaigns on the Snapchat app actually drive users to specific locations, like stores, restaurants and movie theaters," The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. The company has been testing its new product since last year with a handful of marketers, including Paramount Pictures and 7-Eleven. In terms of privacy, Snapchat says it only uses location data when people open the app and aggregates data from at least 1,000 Snapchat users into categories like gyms or restaurants, not specific venues. The company is also launching a dashboard that calculates incremental visitors as well as demographic information like age, gender and region. "Access to Snap to Store is available free to advertisers that reach a certain spending threshold with Snapchat, though the company declined to specify what that spending threshold is," the report added.

​Brussels, April 13 (IANS) The International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Christine Lagarde said the world economy is witnessing a cheerful "spring", but warned "sword of protectionism" would overshadow trade outlook.

New Delhi, April 13 (IANS) Google has introduced Areo, one single app for food delivery and home services, currently live in Bengaluru and Mumbai on Android devices. "Areo lets users search for local restaurants and home services like electricians, plumbers, and painters, and schedule their deliveries or appointments through the app," the company said in its Google Play store. The app also provides customer reviews of the available companies, eateries to help you make informed choices from product quality to timeliness of service. The app has pay by card, netbanking or cash on delivery services.

​New Delhi, April 12 (IANS) Global software major Adobe on Wednesday unveiled Adobe Captivate, a latest version of its eLearning authoring tool and Adobe Captivate Prime -- a learning management system (LMS) -- to bolster the personalised learning experiences.

​Bengaluru, April 12 (IANS) US-based digital technology services company UST Global on Wednesday partnered with engineering company Bosch to offer its in-car passenger safety app that alerts the users family and friends of their whereabouts during a crisis.

New York, April 12 (IANS) Software giant Microsoft has finally said goodbye to 10-year-old Windows Vista operating system that had debuted with severe criticism.

According to a report in Verge on Tuesday, the users of Windows Vista will have to move to a more recent version of Windows to remain secure.