Such is computing's future--to each of our voices. Voice assistants hang on every word we say, when prompted. Their genesis has created an entire family named Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Pepper, Watson, and, most recently, Duplex. One wonders when smart speakers will replace what you're looking at now--this screen. The promise of voice interfaces was demonstrated again in May when Google rolled out Duplex, an AI-driven voice assistant so lifelike and sophisticated that some found it astounding but others deemed it unsettling and wondered if a new era of robocall abuse just dawned.

If it seems like every week there's a new scandal about ethics and the tech industry, it's not your imagination. Even as the tech industry is trying to establish concrete practices and institutions around tech ethics, hard lessons are being learned about the wide gap between the practices of "doing ethics" and what people think of as "ethical". This helps explain, in part, why it raises eyebrows when Google dissolves its short-lived AI ethics advisory board, in the face of public outcry about including a controversial alumnus of the Heritage Foundation on it, or when organized pressure from Google's engineering staff results in the cancellation of military contracts. This gap is important, because alongside these decidedly bad calls by those leading the charge for ethics in industry, we are also seeing the tech sector begin investing meaningful resources in the organizational capacity to identify, track, and mitigate the consequences of algorithmic technologies. We are at a point where it would seem that the academics and critics who had exhorted the industry to make such considerations for decades should be declaring a small victory.

Last year, it was revealed that Amazon's facial recognition software, 'Rekognition' matched Congresspeople's headshots with photos from inside a mugshot database. In total, 28 members of Congress were falsely identified as other people that had previously been arrested for committing criminal offenses. The false matches were disproportionate toward people of color, including six members of the Congressional Black Caucus, among these was civil rights activist Rep. John Lewis. In July of 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union conducted an independent analysis using the same default settings that Amazon's Rekognition software uses. This analysis ran a check on the whole of Congress against 25,000 publicly available arrest photographs. The results showed that 40% of the false matches revealed in this analysis were people of color, even though they account for only 20% of Congress.

Online harassment is a significant social problem. Prevention of online harassment requires rapid detection of harassing, offensive, and negative social media posts. In this paper, we propose the use of word embedding models to identify offensive and harassing social media messages in two aspects: detecting fast-changing topics for more effective data collection and representing word semantics in different domains. We demonstrate with preliminary results that using the GloVe (Global Vectors for Word Representation) model facilitates the discovery of new and relevant keywords to use for data collection and trolling detection. Our paper concludes with a discussion of a research agenda to further develop and test word embedding models for identification of social media harassment and trolling.

Achieving such a massive scale and performance required full stack optimization and multiple strategies to extract maximum parallelism,

A new legal services company has developed an artificial intelligence program to support lawyers during time-consuming and costly research. They said trends show legal departments are scaling back in size and budget, but not in workload. That could mean spending hundreds of hours poring over documents to comply with a discovery request or going line-by-line through contracts to make sure they include all the necessary language. Allensworth said law firms can turn to basic technologies for routine work like spreadsheets, or outsource the work to teams of young lawyers, which is still expensive. One of the technologies used by iNof8 Legal, however, is electronic discovery software powered by continuous active learning.

A comprehensive resource for firms looking to take advantage of the latest time and cost saving legal process automation tools, by LawGeex. What task do you suppose lawyers dread most? If you guessed, 'spending countless hours poring over every word, comma, and period of the fifth iteration of a contract', you nailed it. Contract review might be one of the most important functions of the legal profession, but it's also one of the most error-prone. The need to devote valuable lawyer hours to routine contract and NDA review not only requires expensive headcount, it also keeps those additional heads from focusing on high-value strategic work.

A comprehensive resource for firms looking to take advantage of the latest time and cost saving legal process automation tools, by LawGeex. What task do you suppose lawyers dread most? If you guessed, 'spending countless hours poring over every word, comma, and period of the fifth iteration of a contract', you nailed it. Contract review might be one of the most important functions of the legal profession, but it's also one of the most error-prone. The need to devote valuable lawyer hours to routine contract and NDA review not only requires expensive headcount, it also keeps those additional heads from focusing on high-value strategic work.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published a notice in the Federal Register last month saying it's seeking comments, as spotted by TorrentFreak. "Should authors be recognized for this type of use of their works?" asks the office. Earlier this year, the office similarly asked for public opinion on AI and patents. None of these questions have concrete answers in US law, but people have been debating the potential outcomes for years. The situation might be a little clearer when you're looking at something like an AI-based app where a user has to make a lot of decisions to shape the end result.

POLITICO Pro is our premium policy intelligence service, providing the most distinct coverage of the EU and beyond. Request a trial here and discover why thousands of politics and policy professionals rely on Pro every day to do their jobs.