Artificial Lawyer caught up with Canadian legal consultant and futurist Jordan Furlong of Law Twenty One and asked him about his perspective on what opportunities and challenges AI faced in the legal sector. Do you see a strategic advantage for the law firms that embrace AI? If yes, how would that advantage manifest itself? We should probably begin by creating a working definition of'AI', which is a term applied so broadly in the legal sphere that, as Ryan McClead has pointed out, it might as well just be written as'magic'. Michael Mills of Neota Logic has suggested instead the term'cognitive technologies', which encompasses a wide range of tech applications including machine learning, natural language processing, and expert systems.

This A.I. Chatbot Is Scaring Lawyers and Fighting Homelessness

Top data science teams around the world are doing incredible work on some of the most interesting datasets in the world. Google has more data on human interests than every 20th century researcher, while Uber seamlessly coordinates the itinerary and pricing of more than 1 million trips every day. With machine learning, and artificial intelligence, top data science teams are changing the way we ingest and process data, and they are coming up with actionable insights that impact the lives of millions. What if there were common patterns between the interviews top data science teams were giving that would let you master the data science interview process? What if the specific differences between various teams and their interview practices could be enumerated so that interviewing with a top data science team were more akin to a science than an art?

It has been well documented that technology has played a major role in the Olympics this year in Rio. Athletes are using technology to train smarter, wearing specialized equipment to compete stronger and are recovering faster and more effectively all due to advances in technology and new innovations. Barbara Kendall has seen this transformation in a way in which few can relate. She competed in the 1992, 1996 and 2000 Olympics in Barcelona, Atlanta and Sydney and won gold, silver and bronze medals through her 25-year Sailboarding career. When her athletic career ended, she got into the technology world and is now a member of board of directors for an artificial intelligence (AI) company Arria NLG.

FANUC, the world's largest maker of industrial robots, plans to start connecting 400,000 of their installed systems by the end of this year. The goal is to collect data about their operations and, through the use of deep learning, improve performance. Similarly, Kuka is building a deep-learning AI network for their industrial robots. FANUC is now moving forward to connect all its manufacturing robots. The system proactively detects and informs of a potential equipment or process problem before unexpected downtime occurs.

This is the first in Blue Hill Research's occasional blog series "Questioning Authority with Toph Whitmore." As co-founder (with friend Michael Stonebraker) of Vertica, Andy Palmer ambitiously sought nothing less than to reinvent the database. In 2013, he and Stonebraker moved up the data value chain and founded Tamr, the Cambridge, MA-based software company aiming to provide a unified view of data in the modern enterprise. Palmer joined me for a discussion in which he talked Tamr, predicted the future of enterprise data management, and introduced a rather colorful (yet apt) analogy of which, he admits, his marketing team is less than fond. TOPH WHITMORE: Tell me about the genesis of Tamr.

From May to July 2016, over one thousand Kagglers competed in Facebook's fifth recruitment competition: Predicting Check-Ins. In this challenge, Kagglers were required to predict the most probable check-in locations occurring in artificial time and space. As the first place winner, Tom Van de Wiele, notes in this winner's interview, the uniquely designed test dataset contained about one trillion place-observation combinations, posing a huge difficulty to competitors. Tom describes how he quickly rocketed from his first getting started competition on Kaggle to first place in Facebook V through his remarkable insight into data consisting only of x,y coordinates, time, and accuracy using k-nearest neighbors and XGBoost. I have completed two Master programs at two different Belgian universities (Leuven and Ghent), one in Computer Science (2010) and one in Statistics (2016).

EC: Welcome to the Wastes, Arthur! Hey, real quick before we get started… I understand you like to "poke pixels into proper shape". I'm a bit of a video game nerd, could you tell me about the game developer thing? AW: A friend I've known for 25 years, asked me to help him build games. He loves games, but isn't super creative.

Nick Triantos spent the past year trying to commercialize the technology being developed at SRI International, the Stanford research offshoot that helped invent the Internet and Siri, among other things. Now he has joined Ignition Partners at its new office in Los Altos, where he says he will be able to help create companies from a broader range of innovation. Triantos said his focus will be on business-focused startups, particularly ones working in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and augmented and virtual reality. But he doesn't expect that will include startups in the currently hot space of chatbots, despite his background with voice recognition and machine learning at SRI. The following Q&A about these and other topics has been edited for length and clarity. What was your role at SRI and why are you leaving there? Unfortunately, not many people know about SRI.

Apple CEO Tim Cook was the subject of an in-depth interview published over the weekend in The Washington Post in which he talked about a wide range of issues, including augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI), the future of the iPhone, and the company's North Star. In the interview, Cook dismissed the idea of the iPhone accounting for two-thirds of Apple's revenues being problematic, calling the smartphone's dominance a privilege and expressing his belief that one day, every person on earth will own a smartphone. Cook also defended the company's progress in AI technology, pointing to the expanding capabilities of Siri, the digital assistant that Apple launched in 2011. Apple is opening up Siri to third-party developers so the technology can be used by other applications -- such as Uber or Lyft, as Cook pointed out -- to help users complete tasks faster and more efficiently. Earlier this month, the company reportedly bought Turi, a Seattle-based startup company and the latest purchase in a string of acquisitions aimed at bolstering its machine learning and AI capabilities.