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 ...

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 ...

Amsterdam’s struggles with its welfare fraud algorithm show us the stakes of deploying AI in situations that directly affect human lives. What Amsterdam’s welfare fraud algorithm taught me about fair ...

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 most of her life, Tammy Dobbs, who has cerebral palsy, relied on her family in Missouri for care. But in 2008, she moved to Arkansas, where she signed up for a state program that provided for a ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

By Timothy GrahamA new study published today in Nature has found that X’s algorithm – the hidden system or “recipe” that governs which posts appear in ...

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, ...