Corruption has again been exposed at Los Angeles City Hall, with one council member under indictment in a development scandal and another having pleaded guilty to his part in it. The transgressions highlight the real-world consequences of failing to modernize outdated planning codes and leaving decision-making power over development projects in the hands of City Council members. To try to prevent future corruption, the city needs to fix what's broken about L.A. planning -- by fully updating planning and zoning laws according to the recommendations of an outside commission, not the council. Some City Council members have proposed incremental reforms in reaction to the indictment of council member Jose Huizar, who has been charged with a running a "pay-to-play" scheme to shake down real estate developers for cash bribes and campaign donations in exchange for his help getting high-rise development projects approved. Former council member Mitch Englander pleaded guilty to falsifying material facts related to the scheme.

This article is brought to you in association with the European Parliament. MEPs approved proposals to address long-term opportunities and legal challenges posed by AI in the area of ethics, civil liability and intellectual property. The Legal Affairs Committee adopted three reports on Thursday on specific issues linked to the increased development and use of artificial intelligence systems. The Commission is expected to put forward a legislative proposal on the matter in early 2021. The legislative initiative by Iban García del Blanco (S&D, ES), adopted with 20 votes in favour, none against and 4 abstentions, urges the EU Commission to present a new legal framework outlining the ethical principles to be used when developing, deploying and using artificial intelligence, robotics and related technologies in the EU, including software, algorithms and data.

Since late 2016, the Chinese government has subjected the 13 million ethnic Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang to mass arbitrary detention, forced political indoctrination, restrictions on movement, and religious oppression. Credible estimates indicate that under this heightened repression, up to one million people are being held in "political education" camps. The government's "Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism" (Strike Hard Campaign, 严厉打击暴力恐怖活动专项行动) has turned Xinjiang into one of China's major centers for using innovative technologies for social control. This report provides a detailed description and analysis of a mobile app that police and other officials use to communicate with the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP, 一体化联合作战平台), one of the main systems Chinese authorities use for mass surveillance in Xinjiang. Human Rights Watch first reported on the IJOP in February 2018, noting the policing program aggregates data about people and flags to ...

Speaking at the Responsible AI for Social Empowerment (RAISE) 2020 summit, PM Modi said that while he wants India to become a global hub for AI, it is also a collective responsibility of the nation to protect the world from misuse of AI by non-state actors such as cyber criminals, terrorists, among others. "It remains our collective responsibility to ensure trust in how AI is used. Algorithm Transparency is key to establishing this trust. We must protect the world against weaponisation of AI by non-state actors," he said. In a first, the union government has organized a five-day virtual global summit to kickstart discussion on the creation of robust AI-powered public infrastructure to benefit India as well as other nations.

After widespread protests against racism in the U.S., tech giants Microsoft, Amazon and IBM publicly announced they would no longer allow police departments access to their facial recognition technology. Artificial intelligence (AI) can be prone to errors, particularly in recognizing people of color and those in other underrepresented groups. Any organization developing or using AI solutions needs to be proactive in ensuring that AI dangers don't jeopardize their brand, draw regulatory actions, lead to boycotts or destroy business value. Install an external AI ethics board to prevent -- not just mitigate -- AI dangers. Microsoft President Brad Smith was widely quoted as saying his company wouldn't sell facial-recognition technology to police departments in the U.S., "until we have a national law in place, grounded in human rights, that will govern this technology."

Automatic charge prediction task aims to determine the final charges based on fact descriptions of criminal cases, which is a vital application of legal assistant systems. Conventional works usually depend on fact descriptions to predict charges while ignoring the legal schematic knowledge, which makes it difficult to distinguish confusing charges. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-attentive neural network model, which introduces legal schematic knowledge about charges and exploit the knowledge hierarchical representation as the discriminative features to differentiate confusing charges. Our model takes the textual fact description as the input and learns fact representation through a graph convolutional network. A legal schematic knowledge transformer is utilized to generate crucial knowledge representations oriented to the legal schematic knowledge at both the schema and charge levels. We apply a knowledge matching network for effectively incorporating charge information into the fact to learn knowledge-aware fact representation. Finally, we use the knowledge-aware fact representation for charge prediction. We create two real-world datasets and experimental results show that our proposed model can outperform other state-of-the-art baselines on accuracy and F1 score, especially on dealing with confusing charges.

Though the computer technologies involved in the case are far removed from century-old telephony, that ancient system's history shows precisely what is at stake before the Supreme Court: The wrong outcome could end up unexpectedly empowering Big Tech more than ever. But the words Oracle accuses Google of copying are no ordinary words. This gets technical, but bear with me. In the 1990s as part of its Java system, Sun Microsystems developed software tools for encrypting data, reading databases, and compressing files. Sun also devised an "application programming interface" consisting of command names and syntaxes that programmers would use to communicate with the tools. In much the same way as one pushes a button marked "Play" to tell a VCR to start a tape, a programmer writes words like "javax.crypto.KeyGenerator.getInstance" to tell the Java software to start making encryption keys.

It is almost inevitable to introduce analytics in some format or other in the products you own. However, before you open the gates to this world of magic, there are three questions you should try answering. These three basic questions shall help in better planning for your analytics strategy and would act as a compass in times of uncertainty. Great that you have decided to embark on the journey - could be because of fear of missing the bandwagon. Nevertheless, without answering this question, your team would always be involved in directionless busy work.

On Wed 30th Sept 2020, a selection of international legal technology providers and their client's came together to discuss experiences, collaborations and the journey of adopting AI-powered legal tools. Watch the event recording above to hear representatives from Eversheds Sutherland, Mishcon de Reya and The Legal Director share their insights on adopting new technology, and learn more about the current legal tech solutions available for law firms around the world. Co-hosted by vLex and the UKLTA this was the first of many online events, in a series of new and unique webinars about law and technology.

Rapid developments in AI have triggered digital advancements in almost every industry. The technology is capable of construing data contextually to provide requested information, supply analysis, and push events based on findings. Simultaneously, businesses need to meet social, investor and regulatory requirements regarding how they use advanced technologies like AI. Significantly, it is also crucial that organizations must commit to using the technology with a purpose, which leads to the way of sustainable development. In its recent study, the Allen Institute for AI argued the prioritization of "Green AI" efforts that focus on the energy efficiency of AI systems. The study was based on many high-profile advances in AI that have wavered carbon footprints.