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In the mid-1960s, computer science and AI researchers adopted the pet name drosophila for the game of Chess a reference to the fruit flies commonly used in genetic research. American evolutionary biologist Thomas Morgan made critical contributions to the field by studying his famous fly rooms, and AI researchers today believe multiplayer games like Chess can provide similar accessible and relatively simple experimental environments for shaping useful knowledge about complex systems.

In recent years researchers have made multiplayer games a hot testbed for AI research, using reinforcement learning techniques to create superhuman agents in Chess, Go, StarCraft II and others.

This progress, however, can be better informed by characterizing games and their topological landscape, proposes the paper Navigating the Landscape of Multiplayer Games, recently published in Nature Communications. In the work, researchers from DeepMind and Universidade de Lisboa introduce a graph-based toolkit for analyzing and comparing games in this regard.

Understanding and decomposing the characterizing features of games can be leveraged for downstream training of agents via curriculum learning, which seeks to enable agents to learn increasingly-complex tasks. The researchers say it has become increasingly important to identify a framework that can taxonomize, characterize, and decompose complex AI tasks, and they turned to multiplayer games for references. They defined the core challenge as a Problem Problem: the engineering problem of generating large numbers of interesting adaptive environments to support research.

The researchers start with a fundamental question: What makes a game interesting enough for an AI agent to learn to play? They propose that answering this requires techniques that can characterize and enable discovery over the topological landscape of games, whether they are interesting or not.

The team combined graph and game theory to analyze the structure of general-sum, multiplayer games. They used the new toolkit to characterize games, looking at motivating examples and canonical games with well-defined structures first, then extending to larger-scale empirical games datasets. The games graph representations can offer researchers various insights, such as strong transitive relationships revealed in AlphaGo, the DeepMind program that defeated Go grandmaster Lee Sedol in 2016.

The study surveys the landscape of games and develops techniques to help with understanding the space of games, the downstream training of agents in game settings, and interest-improving algorithmic development. The team says the work opens paths for further exploration of the theoretical properties of graph-based games analysis and the Problem Problem and task theory, and can benefit related studies on the geometry and structure of games.

The paper Navigating the Landscape of Multiplayer Games is on Nature Communications.

Reporter: Fangyu Cai |Editor: Michael Sarazen

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DeepMind Proposes Graph-Theoretic Investigation of the Multiplayer Games Landscape - Synced

October 17, 2020, the 22nd Meeting of the Standing Committee of the Thirteenth National People's Congress adopted the decision on amending the Patent Law of the People's Republic of China (PRC). This is the fourth amendment of PRC Patent Law. The PRC Patent Law was first entered into force in 1985, and was amended three times in 1992, 2000 and 2008. The fourth amendment was drafted in 2015 and adopted after several years of discussion and many rounds of solicitation of different opinions. The amended Patent Law will come into effect on June 1, 2021. The substantive amendments include the following: I. Design patent regulations This amendment made the following changes to the design patent regulations: (1) Broadening the eligible subject matter of the design patent According to the current Patent Law, partial designs are not eligible subject matter of the design patent. In other words, the current Patent Law in China protects only the design of an overall product, and applicants are not allowed to claim a partial design of a product. Accordingly, in practice, it is not allowed to include broken lines in six-dimensional views and perspective view(s) of a design patent application (Note: It is allowable to include broken lines in the reference view(s)). In contrast, Article 2 of the amended Patent Law stipulates that, "a design means any new design of the shape, the pattern, or their combination, or the combination of the color with shape or pattern, of the whole or part of a product, which creates an aesthetic feeling and is fit for industrial application," which makes partial design become eligible subject matter of a design patent. After the new law comes into force, applicants may apply for design patent protection for partial innovative designs of the product. In practice, the applicant may show the unclaimed parts by broken lines (or other ways) and the claimed parts by solid lines in the drawings of a design patent application. (2) Extending the term of a design patent According to the current Patent Law, the protection period of a design patent is 10 years. Pursuant to Article 42 of the amended Patent Law, "the duration of the design patent right is 15 years." This amendment was made to keep pace with international standards and prepare for China's future participation in the Hague Agreement Concerning the International Deposit of Industrial Design. (3) Adding domestic priority right regulations Pursuant to Article 29 of the current Patent Law, applicants may claim both foreign priority and domestic priority rights for inventions and utility models according to the law, and may only claim foreign priority right for designs. This amendment introduced domestic priority right regulations for design patent applications. II. Addition of novelty grace period Pursuant to Article 24 of the current Patent Law, any invention-creation for which a patent is 2 applied shall not lose its novelty if, within six months before the filing date of the application, one of the following events has occurred: (1) it was exhibited for the first time at an international exhibition sponsored or recognized by the Chinese Government; (2) it was made public for the first time at a prescribed academic or technical conference; or (3) it was disclosed by any person without the consent of the applicant. Regarding state-of-the-art technology put to use in response to emergencies, to allow such technology to be patentable subject matter, the amended Patent Law stipulates that: any invention-creation which is first disclosed for the purpose of the public interest when a national emergency or extraordinary state of affairs occurs shall not lose its novelty within six months before the date of filing. III. Addition of unpatentable subject matter According to Article 25 of the amended Patent Law, nuclear transformation methods are subject matter that cannot be granted a patent right. IV. Extension of time for submitting copies of priority documents for inventions and utility models According to Article 30 of the current Patent Law, an applicant who requests a right of priority shall submit copies of priority documents within three months. Article 30 of the amended Patent Law is as follows: (1) Any applicant who requests the right of priority of a patent for invention and utility model shall submit a written declaration at the time of application, and submit, within sixteen months, a copy of the patent application documents filed for the first time. (2) Any applicant who requests the right of priority for a patent for design shall submit a written declaration at the time of application, and submit, within three months, a copy of the patent application documents filed for the first time. According to the above amendments, the time for submitting a copy of the priority document for inventions and utility models is extended from three months to sixteen months, and for designs, the time remains unchanged, i.e., three months. V. Encouraging entities to dispose of their rights for service inventions and motivated inventors According to Article 6 of the amended Patent Law, an entity may dispose of its right to apply for a patent of a service invention-creation and the patent right thereof in accordance with the law, to promote the exploitation and utilization of the invention-creation concerned. The foregoing regulations can ensure that entities have the right to dispose of its right for service inventions. In addition, in accordance with Article 15 of the amended Patent Law, the state encourages entities that have been granted patent rights to implement property right incentives by using equity, share options, dividends, etc., so that inventors or designers can share the benefits of innovation in a reasonable way. The foregoing regulations clearly encourage entities to use equity, share options, and dividends to motivate inventors to be more innovative. VI. Introduction of regulations on extension of the duration of patent protection Duration of patent protection (for example: The duration of a patent right for an invention is 3 20 years) is counted from the date of filing. In the current patent examination practice, some inventions are granted patent rights several years (or even more than 10 years) after the filling date. This excessively long examination period will undoubtedly shorten the protection term of patent rights. This amendment introduced regulations on extension of the patent protection term for the first time. According to Article 42.2 in the amended Patent Law: "where the patent right for an invention was granted after four years from the date of its application and after three years from the date of substantive examination of the application, the patent administration department under the State Council shall, at the request of the patentee, grant a compensation period for the duration of a patent right with regard to the unreasonable delay during the granting process of the invention patent, except where the unreasonable delay was caused by the applicant. VII. Introduction of a compensation mechanism for duration of drug patent right Drug patents usually involve very high research and development costs, so all drug patentees wish to obtain more effective and longer-term protection for drug patents. However, due to the particularity of drug-related inventions, drugs need to be approved by the relevant authorities before going on the market, which delays the time to market for patented drugs. For this reason, this amendment introduced regulations on compensation for the duration of a drug patent right, to better protect drug-related patents. According to Article 42.2 in the amended Patent Law: "in order to compensate for the time occupied by the review and approval of new drugs before they go on sale, the patent administration department under the State Council shall, at the request of the patentee, grant a compensation period for the duration of patents of new drug inventions that have been approved for marketing in China. The compensation period shall not exceed five years, and the total effective duration of the patent right after the new drug goes public shall not exceed 14 years." VIII. Introduction of regulations on open licensing and annual fee reduction for patents In order to promote licensing and exploitation of patents, this amendment introduced open licensing regulations. The amended Patent Law is as follows: (1) Where a patentee voluntarily declares in writing to the patent administration department under the State Council that he/she is willing to license any entity or individual to exploit their patent, and specifies the payment method and standard for license fees, the patent administration department under the State Council shall make an announcement and implement open licensing. Where an open licensing statement is filed for a utility model or design patent, a patent right evaluation report shall be provided. Any patentee who withdraws his/her open license statement shall make a written request and the patent administration department under the State Council shall make an announcement. Where the open licensing statement is announced and withdrawn, the validity of the open licenses granted earlier will not be affected. (Article 50). (2) Any entity or individual who is willing to exploit an open-licensed patent shall notify the patentee in writing, and obtain a patent exploitation license after paying the license fee in accordance with the payment method and standard as indicated in the announcement. During implementation of open license, the annual patent fee paid by the patentee shall be reduced or exempted accordingly. Patentees who implement open license may grant an ordinary license after negotiating with the licensee on the license fee, but shall not grant an exclusive or sole license for the patent. (Article 51). (3) If any dispute arises from the exploitation of open license between the parties, it shall be 4 settled by the parties through consultation; if they are unwilling or fail to reach an agreement through consultation, they may request the patent administration department under the State Council for mediation or may directly file a suit in the people's court. (Article 52). IX. Introduction of a regulation that allows the alleged infringer to voluntarily submit a patent evaluation report Since utility model and design applications are not subject to substantive examination, in the process of enforcement after these patents are granted, courts or local intellectual property offices generally require patentees to submit a patent right evaluation report to prove the stability of their patent rights. According to the current Patent Law and patent examination guidelines, courts or local intellectual property offices may require the patentee or interested party (i.e., exclusive licensees) to submit a patent rights evaluation report issued by the State Intellectual Property Office of China. According to Article 66 of the amended Patent Law: "the patentee, interested party or alleged infringer may also submit a patent right evaluation report." This amendment includes the "alleged infringer" as a subject who can request the State Intellectual Property Office of China to issue a patent right evaluation report. This makes the regulation for the patent right evaluation report more complete and neutral in terms of procedures, and also provides a new way for the alleged infringer to confront the patentee. X. Introduction of principle of good faith This amendment of the Patent Law not only strengthens the protection of the legitimate rights and interests of the patentee, but also provides regulations so as to prevent the abuse of the patent right by the right holders. According to Article 20 of the amended Patent Law, "the principle of good faith shall be followed in applying for and enforcing the patent right, and the patent right shall not be abused to damage the public interest or the legitimate rights and interests of others. Those who abuse the patent right to exclude or restrict competition and therefore constitute monopolistic behavior shall be dealt with according to the Anti-monopoly Law of the People's Republic of China." XI. Perfection of administrative protective mechanism against patent infringement Patent protection in China has been implemented through a two-track system, which means that a patentee may file a lawsuit with the people's court or apply for handling by the patent administration department in the case of patent infringement disputes. This amendment has improved the administrative protective mechanism against patent infringement, and the key points are as follows: (1) According to the current Patent Law, only a local intellectual property office may handle patent infringement disputes. In order to further improve the patent administrative protection, Article 70.1 of the amended Patent Law stipulates that "the administrative department for a patent under the State Council (i.e., the China National Intellectual Property Administration "CNIPA"; formerly known as the State Intellectual Property Office, "SIPO", of the P.R.C.) may, at the request of the patentee or interested party, handle patent infringement disputes that are of nationwide significance.

Read more:
China adopted the fourth amendment of the Patent Law - Lexology

Yahoo News Canada

Americans across the United States took to the streets in a joyous celebration, following the news that Democratic nominee Joe Biden has won the 2020 U.S. Election.In Los Angeles, a march is taking place to help enforce the results of the election, since Donald Trump is refusing to concede to Biden, and instead is looking to challenge the result in court.After polls originally closed on Nov. 3, Americans and people all over the world waited in anticipation for a nominee to secure 270 electoral votes. Biden has now accomplished that feat to become the 46th president of the United States, along Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, who is the first in the role to be either a woman, Black or Asian American.Following a historic U.S. election where more people voted than ever before Americans look ready to celebrate what could be a promising new chapter for their country.

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Societe Generale: Availability of the fourth amendment to the 2020 Universal Registration Document - Yahoo Finance UK

In 2019, agents of the federal and state governments persuaded judges to issue 99% of all requested intercepts. An intercept is any type of government surveillance telephone, text message, email, even in-person. These are intercepts that theoretically are based on probable cause of crime, as is required by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

The 2019 numbers which the government released as we were all watching the end of the presidential election campaign are staggering. The feds, and local and state police in America engaged in 27,431,687 intercepts on 777,840 people. They arrested 17,101 people from among those intercepted and obtained convictions on the basis of evidence obtained via the intercepts on 5,304. That is a conviction rate of 4% of all people spied upon by law enforcement in the United States.

Readers of this column are familiar with the use by federal agents of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to obtain intercepts using a standard of proof considerably lesser than probable cause of crime. That came about because Congress basically has no respect for the Constitution and authorized the FISA Court to issue intercept warrants if federal agents can identify an American or a foreign person in America who has spoken to a foreign person in another country.

Call your cousin in Florence or a bookseller in Edinburgh or an art dealer in Brussels, and under FISA, the feds can get a warrant from the FISA Court to monitor your future calls and texts and emails.

This FISA system is profoundly unconstitutional; the Fourth Amendment expressly requires that the government state and federal can only lawfully engage in searches and seizures pursuant to warrants issued by a judge based upon a showing under oath of probable cause of crime. The Supreme Court has ruled consistently that intercepts and surveillances constitute searches and seizures. The government searches a database of emails, texts or recorded phone calls and seizes the data it wants.

Thus, when the feds have targeted someone for prosecution and lack probable cause of crime about that person, they resort to FISA. This is not only unlawful and unconstitutional, but also it is corrupting, as it permits criminal investigators to cut constitutional corners by obtaining evidence of crimes outside the scope of the Fourth Amendment. The use of the Fourth Amendment is the only lawful means of engaging in surveillance sufficient to introduce the fruits of the surveillance at a criminal trial.

If the feds happen upon evidence of a crime from their FISA-authorized intercepts, they then need to engage in deceptive acts of parallel construction. That connotes the false creation of an ostensibly lawful intercept in order to claim that they obtained lawfully what they already have obtained unlawfully.

Law enforcement personnel then fake the true means they used to acquire evidence even duping the prosecutors for whom they work so the evidence will appear to have been obtained lawfully and thus can be used at trial. At its essence, parallel construction is a deception on the court. If the deception is perpetrated under oath, it is perjury a felony.

This corruption of the Constitution by those in whose hands we have reposed it for safekeeping happens every day in America.

The FISA-induced corruption has regrettably bled into the culture of non-FISA law enforcement, and even into the judiciary. The statistics I cited above are not from FISA those numbers are secret. Rather, the statistics reflect the governments voracious appetite for spying that now pervades non-FISA law enforcement. This is so because judges accept uncritically the applications made before them for intercept or surveillance warrants.

Thus, even though the Fourth Amendment permits judges to issue warrants only upon the probable likelihood of evidence of a crime in the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized, the attitude of what constitutes probable cause has been attenuated by both the law enforcement personnel who seek warrants and the judges who hear the applications. We know this because we have not seen a number like 99% of all warrant applications every one supposedly based on probable cause of crime granted. Nor have we seen only 4% of those intercepts resulting in convictions.

The rational conclusion is that the governments appetite for surveillance remains voracious, and judges whose affirmative duty it is to uphold the Constitution as against the other two branches of government have done very little to abate this.

So, what becomes of the remaining 96% of those on whom the government spied? That depends on whether the government charges anyone. If a person is charged and acquitted, and law enforcement unlawfully obtained evidence against that person, his remedy is either persuading the court to suppress the evidence thus resulting in the acquittal, or suing the law enforcement agents who unlawfully spied on him.

Yet, under current Supreme Court decisions about who can sue the government, if the government has spied on you and not charged you and not told you, you have no cause of action against the law enforcement agents who did this.

Stated differently, in 2019, at least 760,739 people in America were spied upon pursuant to judicial orders allegedly based upon probable cause of crime and were neither charged nor informed of the spying.

My Fox colleagues often deride my attacks on those who fail to safeguard our privacy because they argue, we have no privacy. Yet, as Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, the most comprehensive of rights is the right to be let alone. If we forget this, my colleagues will have the last laugh. If we expose its violation, we might know the joys of unmonitored personal fulfillment.

Continued here:
Napolitano: The government's lust to spy - Daily Herald

The U.S. elections on November 3, 2020 included three states with privacy-related ballot initiatives: California, Massachusetts, and Michigan. Voters supported all three initiatives.

California California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA)

We had previously summarized this proposal to amend the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) with a ballot initiative known as the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA). Most of the changes will take effect as of January 1, 2023, but one of the immediate effects is that the initiative extends the B2B and employee exceptions through December 31, 2022.

The CPRA potentially extends the 12-month look-back period for access requests to an amount of time to be determined by new regulations, but this change would affect only information collected on or after January 1, 2022.

The CPRA adds two new consumer rights: a right to correct inaccurate personal information and a right to limit use and disclosure of sensitive personal information. In addition, California will have the nations first privacy regulatory agency, because CPRA creates and funds the new California Privacy Protection Agency.

The Do Not Sell My Personal Information website link for consumers will become Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information and there will be a second link Limit the Use of My Sensitive Personal Information.

Although its not entirely clear, because the health research amendment to CCPA that the California legislature had passed in September appears to be largely unaffected by CPRA. We had previously summarized that amendment here. Because the amendment added sections to CCPA that are not affected by CPRA, the new sections apparently are unchanged.

Importantly, CPRA does not contain any new private right of action. It leaves unchanged the private right of action for breaches as currently provided in CCPA.

Massachusetts On-Board Diagnostics (Telematics) Data

In Massachusetts, Question 1 for voters related to owner access to motor vehicle networks and on-board diagnostics systemsso-called telematics data. Under this ballot initiative, commencing with model year 2022, any manufacturer of motor vehicles equipped with telematics systems that are sold in Massachusetts must equip the vehicles with an inter-operable, standardized and open access platform across all of the manufacturers makes and models. The new law requires that the platform be capable of securely communicating all mechanical data emanating directly from the motor vehicle via direct data connection to the platform.

The data must be directly accessible by the motor vehicle owner and, with the owners authorization, by independent repair facilities or class 1 dealers, for the time needed to repair the vehicle or for maintaining, diagnosing and repairing the vehicle.

The Attorney General is required to create an explanatory notice for prospective motor vehicle owners, which the individuals will be required to sign. The new right to repair law provides a private right of action by owners and authorized independent repair shops denied access to the data. Penalties for each denial of access are the greater of treble damages or $10,000.

Michigan Search Warrant for Electronic Data

In Michigan, Proposal 2 asked voters to weigh in on a proposed amendment to the state constitution. The Michigan constitutions Article 1 12 is similar to the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The approved ballot proposal revised the state constitution section to read:

Searches and Seizures

The person, houses, papers, and possessions, and electronic data and electronic communications of every person shall be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures. No warrant to search any place or to seize any person or things or to access electronic data or electronic communications shall issue without describing them, nor without probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation. The provisions of this section shall not be construed to bar from evidence in any criminal proceeding any narcotic drug, firearm, bomb, explosive or any other dangerous weapon, seized by a peace officer outside the curtilage of any dwelling house in this state.

Readers may recall that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment required the police to obtain a warrant to access a suspects cell phone (Riley v California, in 2014) or to access cell phone tracking data (Carpenter v. United States, in 2018). The changes to the Michigan constitution extend to electronic data and electronic communications beyond what the U.S. Supreme Court had addressed.

Read more from the original source:
California, Massachusetts, and Michigan - 2020 Ballot Initiatives on Privacy - Data Protection Report