Algorithms behaving badly: 2020 edition The racism problem A lot of problems with algorithmic decision-making come down to bias, but some instances are more explicit than others. The Markupreportedthat Google’s ad portal connects the keywords “Black girls,” “Asian girls,” and “Latina girls” (but not “White girls”) to porn. (Google blocked the automated suggestions after The Markup reached out to the company. In the meantime, Googles’ search algorithm briefly sent our story to the first page of search results for the word “porn....

While Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen were racing for the Formula 1 title over the weekend, self-driving cars were fighting for the inauguralIndy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) championship. The Technical University of Munich (TUM) took the chequered flag at the iconic Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The team bagged a cool $1 million after hitting an average speed of 218 km/h on the fabled oval track. The contest was an impressive showcase of self-driving engineering, but it didn’t convince me that AI will soon replace human race car drivers....

Alibaba Group, Chinas leading e-commerce company today announced, it is planning to build a network of warehouses across China and hopes to mobilize other partners to join in this effort to create an integrated logistics platform that will help elevate the quality of service to Chinese consumers and allow merchants to meet rapidly growing domestic consumption needs. Over the medium term, Alibaba Group and its financing partners will commit between RMB20 billion and RMB30 billion (US$3....

China-based Alibaba Group is reportedly planning to develop and launch its own mobile operating system to rival Google’s Android platform and Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS, theWall Street Journal reports. With roots in online commerce, retail, payment platforms and cloud computing services, Alibaba’s decision to become a smartphone software vendor could benefit the company in its home country as it would be able to provide consumers with known services for its own operating system....

To ensure the company is able to adapt its service in times of national disaster, Google routinely tests its employees on how they would handle an Alien invasion of its offices or if California was wiped off the map, Eran Feigenbaum, Google’s Enterprise director of security has revealed. The idea of aliens taking over Google sounds a little crazy but these are the sorts of scenarios that the team working onGoogle Enterpriseare faced with as they try to ensure Google’s infrastructure remains operational when the worst truly happens....