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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The most widely used technique for finding the largest or smallest values of a math function turns out to be a fundamentally difficult computational problem. Many aspects of modern applied research ...

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 ...

Most people don't use the word algorithm every day. Many think it refers to lines of code or the latest Diplo beat. Yet, algorithms are ubiquitous and there is an increasing urgency of action around ...

How does Google's search actually work? The answer is both simple and complicated, demonstrable and secret. Every time it tweaks its algorithm, it tests the changes with a group of "search quality ...

Gothenburg promised to optimise school admissions with a piece of code. The resulting chaos showed how unaccountable systems are ruining lives, says Charlotta Kronblad of the University of Gothenburg ...

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, ...