Josephine Lulamae reports on the latest developments in the field of AI. Prior to that, she worked as a paralegal and journalist in Berlin, Bristol, and Mytilene. Her work has been published in outlets including The Daily Beast, Coda Story, The New Republic, Gizmodo, Popula, Slate, and Quartz. She has a law degree from BPP University and a Bachelors degree in Philosophy from Cambridge University.
Mannheim, a large city on the Rhine, deployed a video system that claims to automatically detect physical violence in some streets. It can confuse hugging with strangling, and it is unclear whether it can actually prevent violence.
Read more
Early last month, many gay fetish accounts were charged for distributing online porn to minors, a criminal offense in Germany. Many suspect an automated tool, but no one knows for sure.
Read more
To allocate this year's limited number of daycare slots, the city of Münster used an algorithm with a known limitation: it did not direct siblings to the same school. Parents were not pleased.
Read more
To train machine learning models, tech companies are hiring a Germany-based service provider to buy selfies and pictures of ID cards from underpaid gig workers, whose rights are often disregarded.
Read more
Police officers in the German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania predict the likelihood of a future incident of domestic violence using ODARA, a Canadian tool with unproven reliability. It helps cooperation with social workers, but does not work all the time.
Read more
Two EU agencies, Frontex and eu-LISA, are developing ETIAS, a new system that automatically assesses the “risk” posed by some travelers. The sorting algorithm will be trained in part with past decisions by border guards.
Read moreThe neofascist party Brothers of Italy proposed to use Artificial Intelligence to assign young people mandatory jobs. The idea has a lot in common with “algorithmic solutions” to unemployment in other EU countries.
Read more
The Greek Migration Ministry announced it would use EU-funded drones with “Artificial Intelligence” to track people seeking refuge at the border. Promises that they will also improve search and rescue operations ring hollow.
Read moreNew documents indicate how the city of Berlin let Doctolib manage vaccination appointments at the height of the pandemic, when glitches left some patients waiting months for their shot.
Read more
"Pretty much hopeless", says computer linguist from the center where BAMF buys its training data.
Read more
