RINGBACK. You are chillin to an s.p. Are nonstate Public Radio k c h o Chico and k f t r reading listener supported public radio connecting the communities of Northern California a broadcast service of California State University Chico on the web at my n.s.p. Are dot org. Or are. I'll be back after the nice. Hello I'm Gerri Smith with the b.b.c. News gunman in Iran have opened fire at a military parade in the city of furze officials say at least 8 soldiers were killed more than 20 people injured David Bamford has the latest according to state media in Iran gunman dressed in military uniform opened fire on the parade from a nearby park video on social media showed soldiers falling to the ground to avoid the bullets the attack is said to have lasted for 10 minutes pictures from the scene showed wounded soldiers being taken to safety reports say 2 gunmen were shot dead another 2 were arrested the parade being held was to mark the 38th anniversary of the start of the Iran Iraq war Sunni militants possibly from the Islamic state group asked a suspected of carrying out the attack the attack in the vase took place just as the Iranian president Hassan Rouhani was addressing a separate event in Tehran to mark the anniversary in his speech he warned President Trump that Iran would defeat any action taken by the United States just as Iran had defeated Iraq 30 years ago. Officials in Afghanistan said least 8 children were killed and 6 others wounded in a bomb blast in the northern fire your province from the Afghan capital his Sharifi the children were playing on the street on their day off from school villages say they heard a loud explosion and rushed to the scene to find more than 2 dozen children lying on the ground covered with blood a provincial spokesman told the b.b.c. That the victims were aged between 6 and 12 years old 8 of them were killed on the spot others were taken to the main hospital 45 kilometers away the village was temporarily overrun by the Taliban last week and local officials say it was a roadside bomb planted by the Taliban that caused the blast state media in Tanzania says the number of people who died in Thursday's ferry disaster has risen to over 100. There's more bodies are being brought out of the water mostly Juma reports the rescue team resumed operations on Saturday morning retrieving at least 10 more bodies from the waters as dozens of stolen people watched from the shoes the ferry had more than 400 percent is on board only 40 people were rescued alive it is said the reversal was overloaded as its official capacity was a 100 people and the ferry captain has already been detained half of the retrieved bodies have been identified and the government has pledged support to the affected families written in government has declared 4 days of national mourning the woman who's accused the Supreme Court nominee Brad Kavanagh or thanks a lot sort has been given more time to decide whether to testify against him Christine Blasi forward says Judge Kavanaugh assaulted her when they were both teenagers in 1900 to Judge Kevin or denies the allegations against him world news from the b.b.c. China is reported to have cancelled talks with the United States as the trade war between them deepens on Monday additional u.s. Tariffs on $200000000000.00 worth of Chinese imports will come into force China's responded by imposing duties on u.s. Goods valued at $60000000000.00 But the Wall Street Journal says China has canceled a planned visit to Washington bird's chief economic negotiator the u.s. Has confirmed no talks joined India's main opposition Congress party has called on the prime minister in a render Modi to resign over allegations of corruption in a multi-billion dollar military jet deal with France a controversy has erupted in India after the former French President Francois Hollande was quoted as saying that Delhi had influenced the choice of a local partner to manufacture Rafael fighter jets in India the Congress party alleges that Mr Modi gave preferential treatment to an engine conglomerate Reliance Group over stage run manufacturer. A ceremony has been held in Hong Kong to mark the launch of a controversial high speed rail link that connects the territory to the Chinese mainland this microburst Hong Kong's lead a carrier boarded the 1st train to leave the purpose built station travelling to the city of Ganjo the high speed journey takes just over 40 minutes less than half the time of the old trains he opens to the public on Sunday despite his convenience and you will link is attracted criticism because it allows the Chinese authorities to operate inside the Hong Kong terminal something this is part of China's efforts to undermine Hong Kong's unique legal status and bring the territory more closely in line with the mainland the British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt has accuse the European Union of trying to end Britain's sovereignty in Northern Ireland in the BRICs of negotiations he told the b.b.c. That the e.u. Was offensively telling British voters that they couldn't legally leave the you with their country intact and that's the b.b.c. News. It's time for sex and the show where we bring you the hottest take on the Week in Tech I'm sorry Kleinman check out our new music by the way doesn't it sound great on today's program we'll be finding out how i.b.m. Wants to tackle the thorny issue of bias in artificial intelligence we'll also take a great experience 6 2. First this week algorithms and machine learning models make all sorts of decisions about us but their owners often don't see how they're doing it they tend to operate in what's known as a black box which basically means once they get going you don't see under the bonnet but now the tech firms that busy developing tools to let their operators see how the algorithms are actually working it should help them pick up any bias that may have crept in the models which trains i b M's David Kenny who is senior vice president of cognitive solutions told me why his firm's offering is different from the rest was certainly we want to be careful that any decision our clients are making whether it be a medical decision a learning. Cision in industrial decision be made without bias and so we've done a lot of work to understand not only our algorithms but all algorithms so that you can explain clearly how the decision is reach and we're putting forward a whole set of new tools on i.b.m. Cloud to help people use all Ai whether it be i.b.m. Watson which is our Ai or something from tensor flow or open source or even something from Microsoft or Amazon you want to be able to read inside that black box and know precisely how that decision was made can you tell us how it works Yes So whenever an ai algorithm produces an outcome we call it an inference there is series of factors that go into that what we're uniquely transparent about is that will tell you exactly the weighting of each data set and each algorithm that drove that answer so you can look real time at the 10 or 12 things that drove that particular answer and understand them and you can test those against your own knowledge your own instincts your own history a diverse set of professionals can look at what drove the algorithm to make sure it really is the right thing how we ended up in a situation where we have by being displayed in algorithms Well it's certainly not intentional but all humans have some in place that bias so as you're training a model with what you know and what's happened in the past bias can creep in because it just extends decisions that have made that made in the past and in fact have there been decisions made where race or gender or economic status has affected is situation that could get repeated if you're not really careful so for us we want to understand each and every model what it's predicting and whether there's some bias in the answers that needs to be reduced we've seen Microsoft and Facebook saying they are testing and by. Tools. Go to last week what if which says that it will enable people to look at how their algorithms are actually working what is the difference between a offerings and. There are several differences but probably the most important is that our models run at run time what that means to the everyday people is every single time the model is run it actually tests the bias so this isn't something we're doing in the lab this isn't something we do once in a while we want to make sure it's an every day occurrence and I think secondly you have to remember that i.b.m. Watson is specifically aimed at business uses not it broad consumer uses so in a business decision whether they be health or law or accounting. We understand that language we understand those decisions and make sure there's not bias in those very important business and professional decisions how fast is innovation moving Can you give me a timeframe as to the next stage for ai Well we're more than doubling every year not only is the precision of the decisions that are being made and so that means more and more things are being affected by Ai every year and that's going to continue for some time we do expect exponential growth in ai it's off a small base today so 16000 sounds like a lot but it's a small number of decisions versus the millions of applications and decisions we expect to effect in the next few years. David Kenney there from i.b.m. Chris Fox the social networks have been a key is if algorithmic bias haven't they yes Twitter especially was accused of censoring conservative voices people who were expressing conservative viewpoints found that sometimes that tweets were blocked or they were banned completely and Twitter of course was called in front of the u.s. Senate hearing to explain this and it said even though it had never deliberately acted against conservatives it had never written algorithms that deliberately looked for conservative viewpoints and and sense of them some of its algorithms did act in an impartial way because of the things that they were set up to look at for example when they were judging whether to ban an account they looked at the behavior of somebodies followers and if it happened to be that your followers were breaking the rules a lot and you could end up getting banned or silenced on the platform too and that had a verse Lee affected some conservative voices including Congressman so it's not always deliberate choices but these things do work their ways into the system and it's good that companies are starting to realize that and keep an active check on it plus also you cheat for example or them's to populate you cheap kids you know the app and would you trust your kids back home with an apple you're rated by algorithms what we've seen time and time again wrong videos inappropriate videos slip through the net and appear on You Tube kids so why we're trusting an algorithm with decisions like that and should we be thank you Chris let's move on now to see a roundup of the week's other top techies and Chris 3 significant I think it sets a hardware and certainly someone usual one so we had Amazon Alexa being embedded in a microwave so now not only can you talk to your smart speaker and your fridge and whatever else you can also talk to your microwave and say cook me a baked potato for 6 minutes now I'm not entirely sure how useful that will be because you still have to put the potato in there and also remove it afterwards. And e.t. Yourself so it's not doing all the work for you but it is Amazon showing it wants to lead the charge in the Smart home although analysts say Google is not far behind is selling quite a lot of its Google assistant devices too and then there was Go Pro trying to make a comeback its latest action camera does very stable video so you can just hold it in your hand I went out in London and shot lots of videos on it and it was pretty impressive but will it convince people to buy a Go Pro again a lot people have got one in the drawers a few years old probably still works so they've got a bit of a challenge to encourage people to come back and then there's the Playstation classic now in member the original Playstation was released in December 1904 Well now a small remake of it that will connect to modern h.d. T.V.'s is going to come out it'll be about $100.00 or $120.00 here in the u.k. And it will have 20 games built in now for a console that originally had 2000 Games back in the day I think that's a bit stingy asking people to buy $100.00 for just 20 I think you also have to be aware of that in style just sometimes that you remember it being great that yes he had Will it live up you know can it keep its reputation in the modern day and a lot of the games as well have since been remastered in high definition from modern Consols on internal switch on the latest Playstation do you want to have a bit of kit that only place 20 games in low resolution on your big Tele maybe not and finally that liquid lunch of ours how with it. Do you have a chalky. And it has the bit like a gym protein shake this is about Soylent which is a Silicon Valley start up it became the largest crowd funded food project back in 2013 on the crowdfunding platforms and it was named after a fictitious all artificial food from a site fine of all back in 1966 but in a movie version of Soylent Green which was made in 1903 it turned out that Soylent was made from dead people now the company is not producing drinks made up dead people it's producing drinks made of water soy protein and vitamins. And it's designed to replace meals or if you haven't got time to eat you can chug a saw and instead although we weren't completely sold on the taste of Roy Well it was a little bit like for me I think but you know I think you just can't be having it she want to get out sandwiches and he really didn't we did we hadn't eaten anything and by the end of the day we were just missing the feeling of snacking Chris is one more thing I need to talk about for you guys and that is fitness trackers Why is it going to start costing you a lot more if you know wearing one so this is a ensure a John Hancock in North America it's added fitness tracking to all its insurance policies so you're no longer be able to get a policy that doesn't involve the fitness tracking so they want you to wear a fit better enough to watch give them your health data and if you're leading a healthy active lifestyle you'll be rewarded with discounts and vouchers now it is optional you don't have to give them your tracking data would if you do and you are leading a healthy lifestyle you will save money so people who are giving over their health data might have to pay more I've got a friend he's had his foot in he's got exactly this deal with that with an insurance company for his self this problem because he can't get a step count by putting his foot struck on his 5 year old they are not novel jesting that you do that because if you're on a dog maybe. Another way wouldn't they be suspicious this is tech sent on the b.b.c. World Service I'm sorry Kleinman and in a moment we'll be finding out how it's been a long rage towards creating autonomous cars 6 2. Barely a week passes without us hearing how our government or peace force or private company is introducing some form of biometric technology systems that measure something from your body in order to identify facial recognition for example is already being used for surveillance in China and by some u.s. Law enforcement agencies biometrics can be an effective way to tighten security but is the tech racing ahead of proper measures to protect people's rights technology recession Stephanie have looks at the situation in the u.k. . Bio metrics are some of our most personal data they include our d.n.a. Fingerprints face Iris voice the way we walk and even our behavioral patterns Silkie Carlo director of Big Brother Watch describes what can happen when the use of our biometrics goes wrong recently the Metropolitan Police used facial recognition outside a shopping mall they had what they thought was an identification come up was a young black male he was apparently according to observers stopped so also show his id emptying his pockets in front of members of the public and he was misidentified big brother watches investigation found that 98 percent of the Metropolitan Police's so-called matches were actually misidentifications And yet these people are then ending up on police databases Detective Superintendent Bernie globe and of the Metropolitan Police says there are safeguards in place as to how the technology is being tested so we had people into recently during the summer and there was a false positive it resulted in the mail being stopped a false positive is an incorrect identification on this particular day we had a very small rate of false positives but in relation to this individual I saw the image of the individual I also saw the image of the person the watch list in my opinion they were real similarities but this is where we have the safeguard in place where we have an officer who stopped the individual who spoke to them about the fact that a positive alert had been generated and after conducting some tracks realize that this was not the person who was identified through technology on myself spoke to the individual afterwards was very positive about the experience for me that provides the reassurance that we are looking at the ethical considerations that it's technology that's assisting the police here not policing the technology about 99 percent of the people who through were not falsely identified. We've not had a single complaint from him the public wants your facial images in a police database it's difficult to get it removed as Norman them who leads the Science and Technology Select Committee in the House of Commons explains there was a case brought several years ago which concluded that the practice at that time was unlawful Now it took the government a long time to come up with a plan which is published I think early last year to allow those who are acquitted of any offense or where proceedings are not pursued against them to apply to have their facial image removed from police records but there's a significant doubt as to whether people are made aware of that right to apply the numbers applying appear to be very low and a significant proportion of those who do apply are informed that their application has been rejected where we have a situation where we have automatic deletion of fingerprints and of d.n.a. It's not acceptable that the same practice doesn't apply to facial recognition images but it's not just our facial images that are being collected our voice data has been gathered to a silky current I think in the u.k. We've got 12500000 by a metric facial photo on a single database many of whom include innocent people and the database is thought to be unlawful we've got the biggest state how database of voice prints voice I.D.'s of as far as we know anywhere in the world that's $5000000.00 that's almost certainly on the offer as well it's been gathered without consent the Information Commissioner's Office is now investigating the collection of taxpayers' voice data by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs Meanwhile Big Brother Watch is bringing legal action against the Metropolitan Police over its use of facial recognition technology and liberty the human. Rights group is bringing similar action against South Wales Police The problem is that u.k. Legislation does not cover face and voice data as Professor Paul Wiles the Pio metrics commissioner for the United Kingdom explains the only legislation at the moment that covers biometrics is about the police use of bar metrics and other law enforcement agencies not the rest of the state all the private sector. And they only cover d.n.a. And fingerprints we have now got a whole new generation of biometrics that are being experimented with all d