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The Sustainable Development Goals called for technology to be internationally co-operative and equitably distributed. Now, the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP) have taken that mandate and ran the ball further down the field. The two organizations also enlisted the help of a hugely influential tech-firm in their endeavors. Five years after the initial SDG announcement, Google, APRU AND ESCAP released a new research-based report titled ‘AI for Social Good―A United Nations ESCAP-APRU-Google Collaborative Network and Project.’

Slated as an exploration of the fallout from a startling discovery that AI-driven facial recognition software could not detect her face, the documentary ‘Coded Bias’ chronicles Joy Buolamwini’s journey in seeking U.S. legislation to govern against bias in the algorithms that have become so ubiquitous in our current lives and will only become more so in the future. Buolamwini work as a researcher at MIT took her down a path to learn what inputs were fed into the AI system, that have resulted in darker-skinned faces and those of women not being accurately recognized by facial recognition.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a Memorandum this week to the heads of executive departments and agencies, providing guidance for the regulation of AI. The memorandum advises that the regulation of AI should be done cautiously. “Federal agencies must avoid regulatory or non-regulatory actions that needlessly hamper AI innovation and growth,” it reads. “Where permitted by law, when deciding whether and how to regulate in an area that may affect AI applications, agencies should assess the effect of the potential regulation on Al innovation and growth.”

Facebook says it has more than 35,000 people working on safety and security issues, and more than half of those are content reviewers. The Facebook Community Standards page states that it removes hate speech and harmful content relating to gender, race, ethnicity, caste, nationality, sexual orientation, disability, and disease. “To do this, we use a combination of artificial intelligence and review by people on our Community Operations teams,” Facebook says. “We invest in technology, processes, and people to help us act quickly so violating content finds no home in our community.”

Artificial Intelligence has the ability to create and optimize many things. Using data as its ‘fuel,’ machine-learning algorithms can predict future outcomes, automate tasks, and empower robotics to do things we never imagined possible by anyone other than humans. Now, an organization in Sydney says it is using AI to help women become pregnant through IVF. Developed by IVFAustralia, the Ivy AI system can predict how likely an embryo is to develop, enabling an embryologist to select the best embryo for transfer into a woman’s uterus.

Leveraging crowdsourcing to manage traffic has become commonplace in our deeply digitized and share-heavy society, thanks to apps like Google Maps and Waze. A government-academic partnership is looking to push the merger of data and traffic a few steps – or car lengths — further. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is collaborating with the Transportation team at Argonne National Laboratory and UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to investigate mobility systems. The new project aims to expediently predict and redirect traffic and is turning to machine learning algorithms to improve the process.

When the words military and AI are used together in a sentence, often the first thing that comes to mind are drones or sophisticated fighter jets. Innovation out of the U.S. Army may change that immediate association, however, as it recently announced it is equipping tanks with artificial intelligence. The new technology, known as the Advanced Targeting and Lethality Aided System, or ATLAS, uses machine learning algorithms and advanced sensors.