All tools can be used for good or ill. Even a broom can be used to sweep the floor or hit someone over the head. The more powerful the tool, the greater the benefit or damage it can cause. The last few months have brought this into stark relief when it comes to computer-assisted facial recognition – the ability of a computer to recognize people's faces from a photo or through a camera. This technology can catalog your photos, help reunite families or potentially be misused and abused by private companies and public authorities alike. Facial recognition technology raises issues that go to the heart of fundamental human rights protections like privacy and freedom of expression. These issues heighten responsibility for tech companies that create these products.

Microsoft Corp., which has come under fire for a U.S. government contract that was said to involve facial recognition software, said it will more carefully consider contracts in this area and urged lawmakers to regulate the use of such artificial intelligence to prevent abuse. The company, one of the key makers of software capable of recognizing individual faces, said it will take steps to make those systems less prone to bias; develop new public principles to govern the technology; and will move more deliberately to sell its software and expertise in the area. While Microsoft noted that the tech industry bears responsibility for its products, the company argued that government action is also needed. "The only effective way to manage the use of technology by a government is for the government proactively to manage this use itself," Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith said Friday in a blog post. "And if there are concerns about how a technology will be deployed more broadly across society, the only way to regulate this broad use is for the government to do so. This in fact is what we believe is needed today -- a government initiative to regulate the proper use of facial recognition technology, informed first by a bipartisan and expert commission."

Regulatory and compliance issues are some of the most important, complex and resource-consuming problems to solve for any organization, especially for startups with limited resources. Over decades of development, regulatory requirements and documentation have grown into a matter of special expertise and skills to decode. Globally, $80 billion is spent on governance, risk and compliance, and the market is only expected to grow, reaching $120 billion in the next five years . According to ANZ, National Australia Bank has estimated that the cost of regulatory compliance has risen from $A86 million annually in 2012 to $A177 million in 2013 and $A265 million in 2014. Westpac was reported to spending $A300 million on compliance last year.

Microsoft is calling for government regulation on facial-recognition software, one of its key technologies, saying such artificial intelligence is too important and potentially dangerous for tech giants to police themselves. On Friday, company president Brad Smith urged lawmakers in a blog post to form a bipartisan and expert commission that could set standards and ward against abuses of face recognition, in which software can be used to identify a person from afar without their consent. "This technology can catalog your photos, help reunite families or potentially be misused and abused by private companies and public authorities alike," Smith wrote. "The only way to regulate this broad use is for the government to do so." Could that be used against immigrants?]

Microsoft is calling for government regulation on facial-recognition software, one of its key technologies, saying such artificial intelligence is too important and potentially dangerous for tech giants to police themselves. On Friday, company president Brad Smith urged lawmakers in a blog post to form a bipartisan and expert commission that could set standards and ward against abuses of face recognition, in which software can be used to identify a person from afar without their consent. "This technology can catalog your photos, help reunite families or potentially be misused and abused by private companies and public authorities alike," Smith wrote. "The only way to regulate this broad use is for the government to do so." Could that be used against immigrants?]

A recent survey by LexisNexis revealed that around 75% of lawyers recognise that the sector is changing faster than ever – yet only around one in five of those surveyed agree that their own firm needs to evolve. Do 80% of the survey respondents really work for firms who are already at the cutting edge of the profession? Or are they just complacent? And what are the implications for newly qualified lawyers embarking on their careers? Probably the biggest single driver of change in the industry is the increasing advance of technology. Everyone has read about the perceived threat of artificial intelligence (AI) and how it's set to take lawyers' jobs – and although Michael Skapinker of the Financial Times wrote recently that, like plumbers, lawyers are not yet approaching their'Uber' moment and remain largely a "disruption-free profession", other commentators take a slightly different view.

Over the past year, Silicon Valley has been grappling with the way it handles our data, our elections, and our speech. Now it's got a new concern: our faces. In just the past few weeks, critics assailed Amazon for selling facial recognition technology to local police departments, and Facebook for how it gained consent from Europeans to identify people in their photos. Microsoft has endured its own share of criticism lately around the ethical uses of its technology, as employees protested a contract under which US Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses Microsoft's cloud-computing service. Microsoft says that contract did not involve facial recognition. When it comes to facial analysis, a Microsoft service used by other companies has been shown to be far more accurate for white men than for women or people of color.

We introduce a new entity typing task: given a sentence with an entity mention, the goal is to predict a set of free-form phrases (e.g. skyscraper, songwriter, or criminal) that describe appropriate types for the target entity. This formulation allows us to use a new type of distant supervision at large scale: head words, which indicate the type of the noun phrases they appear in. We show that these ultra-fine types can be crowd-sourced, and introduce new evaluation sets that are much more diverse and fine-grained than existing benchmarks. We present a model that can predict open types, and is trained using a multitask objective that pools our new head-word supervision with prior supervision from entity linking. Experimental results demonstrate that our model is effective in predicting entity types at varying granularity; it achieves state of the art performance on an existing fine-grained entity typing benchmark, and sets baselines for our newly-introduced datasets. Our data and model can be downloaded from: http://nlp.cs.washington.edu/entity_type

Thursday, Thomson Reuters launched Westlaw Edge, an updated, artificial intelligence-assisted legal research platform. The updates include new warnings for invalid or questionable law, litigation analytics, a tool to analyze statutory changes and an improved AI-enhanced search called WestSearch Plus. Wednesday, Thomson Reuters hosted a group of journalists at its Times Square office to demo and illustrate the new version of Westlaw. "We're swinging for the fences, we're going after harder problems," said Mike Dahn, senior vice president of Westlaw product management. Company representatives would not disclose the cost of the new offering.

LONG hours have been the bane of the legal profession for ages; few of them involve thrilling courtroom antics. As a junior corporate lawyer at Davis Polk & Wardwell, a law firm in New York, John Bick remembers spending most of his waking hours poring over contracts looking for clauses that could complicate or kill off a deal. Even once he became a partner he still had to pitch in on due diligence for large transactions. In 2015 nearly a third of British lawyers were looking to leave the profession, according to the job searches of more than 1,000 of them by Life Productions, a career-change consultancy, perhaps because of the drudgery. Such dissatisfaction may recede in future.