Technology

Days after a New York Times investigation revealed Google gave Android creator Andy Rubin a $90 million exit package despite multiple relationships with other Google staffers and accusations of sexual misconduct, some 200 employees at the search giant are planning a walkout, per BuzzFeed News.

We&ve reached out to Google for comment.

The walkout, or &womenwalk,& as itbeen referred to in internal company forums, is planned for Thursday.

Following the NYT report, Google chief executive officer Sundar Pichaiand its vice president of people operations Eileen Naughton co-signed a companymemoadmitting that 48 people had been terminated at the company for sexual harassment in the past two years, 13 of which held a senior management position or higher. None of them, accordingto the memo, received an exit package.

&Todaystory in the New York Times was difficult to read,& they wrote. &We are dead serious about making sure we provide a safe and inclusive workplace. We want to assure you that we review every single complaint about sexual harassment or inappropriate conduct, we investigate and we take action.&

Rubin left Google in 2014 after an internal investigation found accusations of sexual misconduct against him to be credible. The details of his exit, however, were never disclosed. It wasn&t until The Information published its own bombshell report on Rubinwrongdoings last fall that details of his history of sexual harassment began to emerge. In the wake of The Informationstory, Rubin took a leave of absence from Essential to &deal with personal matters.&

After leaving Google, Rubin went on to found Essential Products, a smartphone company that raised heaps of venture capital fundingonly to cancel development of its next phone, lay off 30 percent of its staff and reportedly put itself up for sale.

In a tweet last week, Rubin claimed NYTstory contained&numerous inaccuracies.&

&Specifically, I never coerced a woman to have sex in a hotel room. These false allegations are part of a smear campaignto disparage me during a divorce and custody battle. Also, I am deeply troubled that anonymous Google executives are commenting about my personnel file and misrepresenting the facts,& he wrote.

Airware desperately sought cash for 18 months before running out of money and shutting down last month, leaving about 120 employees without jobs after the startup had burned $118 million in funding. Bandaid strategic investments from construction company Caterpillar and others kept Airware alive as it looked for a $15 million round, according to a former employee.

A late pivot from hardware to drone software sales through Caterpillardealers went sour, asAirware lacked the features found in competitors and suffered from slow engineering cycles. &So Caterpillar told them, ‘We&re not going to fund you any more. We&re pulling our money.& So Airware didn&t make payroll,& the source says. The sudden shutdown of one of the most-funded drone startups sent a shock wave through the industry.

Luckily, at least part of Airwareteam is being rescued from the wreckage. French drone services company Delair is buying AirwareRedbird analytics software and IP, plus the 26 employees who ran it. Airware had acquired Redbird and its 38-member team in 2016 to integrate its analytics that derived business metrics from 2D maps and 3D models of work sites based on imagery shot by drones.

Now the Redbird team will do that for Delair, bringing along its relationships with 30 drone dealers and 200 customers to try to make sense of aerial imagery from construction sites, mines, energy infrastructure and more. &We managed to keep that business alive with Delair,& says Redbird CEOEmmanuel de Maistre. &Customers wanted us to keep this going. They were very worried to not have a solution anymore.& He says that Airware still isn&t formally in bankruptcy or administration, and that as itbeen &actively reaching out to players in the market, to sell the assets . . .Interest from software companies and hardware companies was quite high.&

[Update: de Maistre has since published some thoughts on the successes and mistakes of Redbird.]

Founded in 2011, Delair now has 180 employees selling its UX11 mapping drone, data processing software and enterprise integration services to get businesses properly equipped with unmanned aerial vehicles. Delair had previously raised $28.5 million, and last month added a strategic Series B of undisclosed size from Intel — also an Airware investor. Delair co-founder Benjamin Benharrosh tells me that while his company started in hardware and bought TrimbleUAV business Gatewing in 2016, &lots ofthe growth now is dedicated to the software,& sothe Redbird buy makes sense.

Meanwhile, Airwarehardware assets are going to auctionon Wednesday. Heritage Global Partners will be selling dozens of DJI drones plus networking equipment and computers. Terms of the Delair deal weren&t disclosed, but the money from that sale and the auction could help Airware pay off any outstanding debts or commitments. However, AirwareA-List investors, including Y Combinator, GoogleGV, Andreessen Horowitz, First Round, Shasta, Felicis, Kleiner Perkins and Intel, aren&t likely to recoup much of their capital. We&ve reached out to Airware, its founding CEO Jonathan Downey and its final CEO Yvonne Wassenaar for comment and will update if we hear back.

Founded in 2011, Airware tried to build a drone operating system before moving to sell drone hardware to commercial enterprises. But the rapid ascent of Chinese drone maker DJI pushed Airware to pivot out of hardware sales and toward drone data collection and analysis services. But a source says that since the startup entered this market late after the hardware boondoggle, &Airwaretechnology was pretty far behind. They didn&t have a lot of the feature set a lot of others in the space did, like Propeller, 3DR and DroneDeploy.& Airware lackedseamless data uploads and quick processing times.

&What happened in the company wasn&t so much that the management team didn&t manage it correctly. The sales team just couldn&t sell a product that didn&t work as easily as it needed to compared to other products in the market,& our source says. They noted that Wassenaar, who&d replaced Downey as CEO in June 2017, had done a good job and been dedicated to fundraising to save the company since she joined. &Ultimately it was a matter of bad timing, and they didn&t have the engineering to overcome bad timing,& our source says. &The issue Airwarehad was a lack of funding.They ran out of runway,& confirms Redbird&sde Maistre.

Airwarestory should serve as a warning to startups raising at high-flying valuations. If a pivot doesn&t go smoothly or new competitors emerge, investors may disappear rather than back a down-round that might save the company but leave it in a downward spiral. Once a startup loses momentum, even having top investors and a ripe potential market can&t always stop it from disappearing into the sunset.

After months of work, a set of guidelines designed to protect humanity from a range of threats posed by artificial intelligence have been proposed.

Now, a privacy group wants the U.S. government to adopt them too.

The set of 12 universal guidelines revealed at a meeting in Brussels last week are designed to &inform and improve the design and use of AI& by maximizing the benefits while reducing the risks. AI has been for years a blanket term for machine-based decision making, but as the technology gets better and is more widely adopted, the results of AI-based outcomes are having a greater effect on human lives — from gaining credit, employment, and even tocriminal sentencing.

But often those decisions are made with proprietary and closed-off algorithms, making it near-impossible to know if the decisions are fair or justified.

These guidelines, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), are designed to be baked in to AI to ensure the protection of human rights. That includes a right to know the factors, logic and the techniques used to the outcome of a decision; a fairness obligation that removes discriminatory decision making; and an obligation to secure systems against cybersecurity threats. The principles also include a prohibition on unitary scoring — to prevent governments from using AI to score their citizens and residents — a subtle jab at Chinacontroversial social credit system.

Now, EPIC wants to bring those principles stateside, where many of the next-generation AI technologies are under development.

In a letter to the National Science Foundation, EPIC called on the little-known government agency to adopt the universal guidelines, months after it opened its doors to proposals on a national AI policy.

&By investing in AI systems that strive to meet the [universal] principles, NSF can promote the development of systems that are accurate, transparent, and accountable from the outset,& wrote Marc Rotenberg, EPICpresident and executive director. &Ethically developed, implemented, and maintained AI systems can and should cost more than systems that are not, and therefore merit investment and research.&

EPIC said that the 12 principles fit neatly within the seven strategies already set out by the U.S. so far — making the case for their adoption easier.

More than 200 experts and 50 organizations have signed on to the guidelines — including the Federal of American Scientists and the Government Accountability Project.

With the governmentrequest for information now closed, itlikely to be many more weeks — if not months — before the government decides what its next steps will be — if any. Itnot so much up to the NSF to decide, but likely the White HouseOffice of Science and Technology Policy.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

You can read the full set of guidelines below:

• Right to Transparency. All individuals have the right to know the basis of an AI decision that concerns them. This includes access to the factors, the logic, and techniques that produced the outcome.

• Right to Human Determination. All individuals have the right to a final determination made by a person.

• Identification Obligation. The institution responsible for an AI system must be made known to the public.

• Fairness Obligation. Institutions must ensure that AI systems do not reflect unfair bias or make impermissible discriminatory decisions.

• Assessment and Accountability Obligation. An AI system should be deployed only after an adequate evaluation of its purpose and objectives, its benefits, as well as its risks. Institutions must be responsible for decisions made by an AI system.

• Accuracy, Reliability, and Validity Obligations. Institutions must ensure the accuracy, reliability, and validity of decisions.

• Data Quality Obligation. Institutions must establish data provenance, and assure quality and relevance for the data input into algorithms.

• Public Safety Obligation. Institutions must assess the public safety risks that arise from the deployment of AI systems that direct or control physical devices, and implement safety controls.

• Cybersecurity Obligation. Institutions must secure AI systems against cybersecurity threats.

• Prohibition on Secret Profiling. No institution shall establish or maintain a secret profiling system.

• Prohibition on Unitary Scoring. No national government shall establish or maintain a general-purpose score on its citizens or residents.

• Termination Obligation. An institution that has established an AI system has an affirmative obligation to terminate the system if human control of the system is no longer possible.