Microsoft Teams’ new Together Mode is designed for pandemic-era meetings – The Verge

Microsoft is adding a lot of new features to Microsoft Teams. A new Together Mode uses AI to place everyone in a meeting in a virtual auditorium. Teams is also getting emoji reactions, a dynamic view, and lots more.
— Read on www.theverge.com/2020/7/8/21317526/microsoft-teams-together-mode-dynamic-view-new-features

An update on our work on AI and responsible innovation

AI is a powerful tool that will have a significant impact on society for many years to come, from improving sustainability around the globe to advancing the accuracy of disease screenings. As a leader in AI, we’ve always prioritized the importance of understanding its societal implications and developing it in a way that gets it right for everyone. That’s why we first published our AI Principles two years ago and why we continue to provide regular updates on our work. As our CEO Sundar Pichai said in January, developing AI responsibly and with social benefit in mind can help avoid significant challenges and increase the potential to improve billions of lives. The world has changed a lot since January, and in many ways our Principles have become even more important to the work of our researchers and product teams. As we develop AI we are committed to testing safety, measuring social benefits, and building strong privacy protections into products. Our Principles give us a clear framework for the kinds of AI applications we will not design or deploy, like those that violate human rights or enable surveillance that violates international norms. For example, we were the first major company to have decided, several years ago, not to make general-purpose facial recognition commercially available.Over the last 12 months, we’ve shared our point of view on how to develop AI responsibly—see our  2019 annual report and our recent submission to the European Commission’s Consultation on Artificial Intelligence. This year, we’ve also expanded our internal education programs, applied our principles to our tools and research, continued to refine our comprehensive review process, and engaged with external stakeholders around the world, while identifying emerging trends and patterns in AI. Building on previous AI Principles updates we shared here on the Keyword in 2018 and 2019, here’s our latest overview of what we’ve learned, and how we’re applying these learnings in practice.
— Read on blog.google/technology/ai/update-work-ai-responsible-innovation/