That question in the headline was the challenge posed by a group of open knowledge junkies in Germany who wanted to understand how a person’s Schufa was calculated. Schufa is a credit bureau that ...

Back in 1996, a quantum physicist at Bell Labs in New Jersey published a new recipe for searching through a database of N entries. Computer scientists have long known that this process takes around N ...

More than 20 years ago, executives at rival auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s were found guilty of coordinating a massive price-fixing scheme. Leaders from the companies held covert meetings in ...

A health care algorithm makes black patients substantially less likely than their white counterparts to receive important medical treatment. The major flaw affects millions of patients, and was just ...

For better accountability, we should shift the focus from the design of these systems to their impact. Describing a decision-making system as an “algorithm” is often a way to deflect accountability ...

Artificial-intelligence programs, like the humans who develop and train them, are far from perfect. Whether it’s machine-learning software that analyzes medical images or a generative chatbot, such as ...

Please provide your email address to receive an email when new articles are posted on . An algorithm is a set of instructions for solving a problem or accomplishing a task. One common example of an ...

As organizations increasingly replace human decision-making with algorithms, they may assume these computer programs lack our biases. But algorithms still reflect the real world, which means they can ...

The reputation of UK government technology projects - and by extension that of the government itself - has been hard hit lately, not least due to last week's A-level exam results disaster. Firstly, ...

The Federal Trade Commission recently reached a settlement with WW International, the company formerly known as Weight Watchers. The FTC and Department of Justice accused WW of illegally collecting ...