A customer receives a weekly email from their bank sent on an exact time and day of their choosing and includes the three data points this customer values most: their balance, weekly spending analysis, and savings projection. The email includes ads tailored to that customer's browsing choices, or appears completely free of ads--again, depending on what the customer chooses. Unless the bank senses truly unusual activity on this customer's account, that's the only time each week that the customer will receive a notice from the bank--and that's just the way they like it. Customers today yearn for a personalized human experience tailored to their needs, wants, and expectations – whether they are in your branch, dialing into your call center, or contacting you over social media. Advanced technologies can help banks create such experiences.

Book a flight now, and Google Flights' says they'll make sure you get the best price. The indictment filed by the U.S. attorney's office in San Jose, California, is an offshoot of a lawsuit filed in 2017 by Waymo, a self-driving car pioneer spun off from Google. Uber agreed to pay Waymo $245 million to settle the case last year, but the federal judge overseeing the lawsuit made an unusual recommendation to open a criminal probe after seeing enough evidence to conclude a theft may have occurred. Uber considered having self-driving technology crucial to survive and counter potential competitive threats from Waymo and dozens of other companies working on robotic vehicles. Uber wants to build self-driving cars so it can eliminate the need to have a human behind the wheel, one of the biggest expenses in its still-unprofitable ride-hailing service.

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA – A former Google engineer was charged Tuesday with stealing closely guarded secrets that he later sold to Uber as the ride-hailing service scrambled to catch up in the high-stakes race to build robotic vehicles. The indictment filed by the U.S. Attorney's office in San Jose, California, is an offshoot of a lawsuit filed in 2017 by Waymo, a self-driving car pioneer spun off from Google. Uber agreed to pay Waymo $245 million to settle the case, but the federal judge overseeing the lawsuit made an unusual recommendation to open a criminal probe. Uber considered having self-driving technology crucial to survive. Anthony Levandowski, a pioneer in robotic vehicles, was charged with 33 counts of trade secrets theft.

Federal prosecutors charged Anthony Levandowski, the pioneering self-driving car engineer, with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets from Google on Tuesday. The criminal indictment is the latest twist in a years-long dispute over intellectual property between Google, where Levandowski worked on autonomous vehicles for nearly a decade, and Uber, which purchased a self-driving startup from Levandowski for a reported $680m in August 2016. According to the criminal complaint, Levandowski downloaded approximately 14,000 files from Google and transferred them to his personal laptop in the months preceding his departure from Google – after he had begun discussions with executives at Uber. The files included "critical engineering information" about hardware for self-driving cars and "schematics for the printed circuit boards used in various custom Lidar products". Uber and Google's self-driving car spinoff, Waymo, reached a settlement in a civil lawsuit over the dispute in February 2018, four days into the trial.

Automation has been at the forefront of global accountancy for decades, and professionals are constantly hungry for new tech innovations that will enable them to improve effectiveness and efficiency levels for clients. Yet while demand has continued to grow for the availability of smarter and more dynamic accounting systems, adoption has been pretty slow – particularly when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI). It looks like that's finally starting to change. Computer scientists have been tinkering with AI for more than half a century, and the concept itself is quite simple. By utilising a series of defined algorithms, AI-powered applications are able to draw from big data sources and use deep, machine learning functionality to process data, perform high-volume tasks, recognise patterns and even make decisions – and while that may sound like space-age science fiction to some practitioners, AI-powered apps and modules have already started to make a serious impact across the global accounting sector.

Seven book publishers, including giant players like Penguin Random House and HarperCollins, have filed a lawsuit against Amazon's audiobook company Audible. In a statement received by The Verge, Audible noted that its Captions feature "is not and was never intended to be a book." The lawsuit could have much bigger implications for intellectual property that was created or transformed by machine learning. Over the last month, the U.S. Authors Guild has been fighting more or less the same fight, alleging that its agreements with Audible do not allow the audiobook company the right to create text versions of audio books. READ MORE: Major book publishers sue Amazon's Audible over new speech-to-text feature [The Verge]

Law is a constantly evolving industry, and few things have brought about as much change as the rise of legal tech. From my days at Harvard Law School, to BigLaw, to my current role leading a legal tech company, I've seen first-hand how technology, and AI in particular, have played a critical role in bringing a risk-averse industry into the next wave of the digital era. When I arrived at Harvard Law School in 2005, artificial intelligence was little more than a theoretical concept in the legal industry. Practical applications of AI, machine learning, and natural language processing were still things of the future. It would be years before IBM's Watson would beat Ken Jennings on Jeopardy!

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Our lives are already enhanced by AI – or at least an AI in its infancy – with technologies using algorithms that help them to learn from our behaviour. As AI grows up and starts to think, not just to learn, we ask how human-like do we want their intelligence to be and what impact will machines have on our jobs? We are well on the way to a world in which many aspects of our daily lives will depend on AI systems. Within a decade, machines might diagnose patients with the learned expertise of not just one doctor but thousands. They might make judiciary recommendations based on vast datasets of legal decisions and complex regulations.

The top acclaimed United States Book publishers are suing Audible, an Amazon subsidiary over machine learning feature. The machine learning feature transcripts audio allowing users to read the book along with the narrator. The Big 5 Publishing houses are Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster. Audible is using the feature along with audio recordings however if looked from the perspective of publishers, the physical book and ebooks have separate licenses. While Amazon company has not obtained a license or permission to reproduce the written version of these books. The Big 5 including Chronicle Books and Scholastic have filed a case in the Southern District Court of New York.