Some Amazon company investors said Monday they are siding with privacy and civil rights advocates who are urging the tech giant to not sell a powerful face recognition tool to police. The American Civil Liberties Union is leading the effort against Amazon's Rekognition product, delivering a petition with 152,000 signatures to the company's Seattle headquarters Monday, telling the company to "cancel this order." They're asking Amazon to stop marketing Rekognition to government agencies over privacy issues that they say can be used to discriminate against minorities. Amazon said it's an object detection tool. The company through a spokesman said it can be used for law enforcement tasks ranging from fighting human trafficking to finding lost children, and that just like computers, it can be a force for good in responsible hands.

IBM pitted a computer against two human debaters in the first public demonstration of artificial intelligence technology it's been working on for more than five years. The company unveiled its Project Debater in San Francisco on Monday, asking it to make a case for government-subsidized space research -- a topic it hadn't studied in advance but championed fiercely with just a few awkward gaps in reasoning. "Subsidizing space exploration is like investing in really good tires," argued the computer system, its female voice embodied in a 5-foot-tall machine shaped like a monolith with TV screens on its sides. Such research would enrich the human mind, inspire young people and be a "very sound investment," it said, making it more important even than good roads, schools or health care. The computer delivered its opening argument by pulling in evidence from its huge internal repository of newspapers, journals and other sources.

Ryan Calo's "law and Technology" Viewpoint "Is the Law Ready for Driverless Cars?" (May 2018) explored the implications, as Calo said, of " ... genuinely unforeseeable categories of harm" in potential liability cases where death or injury is caused by a driverless car. He argued that common law would take care of most other legal issues involving artificial intelligence in driverless cars, apart from such "foreseeability." Calo also said the courts have worked out problems like AI before and seemed confident that AI foreseeability will eventually be accommodated. One can agree with this overall judgment but question the time horizon. AI may be quite different from anything the courts have seen or judged before for many reasons, as the technology is indeed designed to someday make its own decisions.

Artificial Intelligence can seem like it is improving at an often alarming rate but the reality is often less glamorous.

On April 12, at offices of the healthcare incubator MATTER at the Merchandise Mart in downtown Chicago, as well as streamed live online, Andrew Burt, chief privacy officer and legal engineer at the data management company Immuta, delivered a lecture entitled "Regulating Artificial Intelligence: How to Control the Unexplainable" in which he focused on the ethical, legal, and regulatory issues surrounding the deployment of machine learning systems. Sponsored by all three UChicago Graham School Professional Masters degree programs--Biomedical Informatics (MScBMI), Analytics (MScA), and Threat and Response Management (MScTRM)--the catalyst for the occasion was Sam Volchenboum, MD, PhD, MS, director of the Center for Research Informatics at UChicago, and faculty director for the BMI program, whose encounter with Burt at a recent South by Southwest conference led to an exchange of ideas he saw as immediately relevant to the Graham School programs. "As a physician, I'm seeing the use of machine learning algorithms all over the hospital and all over medicine," Dr. Volchenboum said. "We just plow ahead with developing our models and our predictions. But it wasn't until I spoke with Andrew that I really stopped and thought about the implications of these algorithms and how they can be used in both good and also bad ways. It was an eye-opening experience and I've been really excited about bringing Andrew here to talk ever since."

A recruiter contacted me recently via email and encouraged me to apply for several entry-level roles in communications. Why communications, when my background clearly reflects a long career in HR? And why were those positions located in Georgia, when I live in New York City? Curious, I replied to the email explaining that I was not looking for employment, and subsequently learned that the email had been sent by an algorithm that determined I was an entry-level millennial living in Savannah. This inaccurate profiling was formed by scans of my recent Twitter and Facebook posts, which described my new (pro-bono) role handling communications for a first-time senate candidate in Georgia.

"Partnering with innovative companies to test new technology – while also ensuring we uphold privacy laws and in no way violate the rights of others – is critical to us as we work to further keep our community safe," the city and the Orlando Police Department said in a joint statement provided to Floridapolitics.com on Monday.

A significant task of every trademark attorney is to conduct extensive research looking for possible issues with trademarks that companies are considering filing or using. That research has traditionally been a very manual, messy, and sometimes imprecise process. It can (or should) include searches of legal databases, extensive internet searches, searching dictionaries and thesauruses in multiple languages to look at word and phrase meanings, searching local and international e-marketplaces and industry in-use databases. What we've done at TrademarkNow is automate that search process and return results in a matter of seconds using a sophisticated algorithm based on models of trademark law and linguistics to prioritize and rank the most relevant results for lawyers to consider and analyze in developing advice for their internal teams and clients. On top of this, our clients provide feedback on results, so our platform is always learning and improving, based on real feedback from attorneys.

AI, machine learning and deep learning are everywhere nowadays. But can these technologies be applied to protect intellectual property online? How can they be brought to IP enforcement in real life? Red Points has been applying machine-learning technology in features such as keyword monitoring and image recognition. They are great examples of how technology can improve the quality of the brand protection tasks, while decreasing costs over time.

It's been just over 30 years since the last major overall of the U.S. tax code. In that time the world has been transformed - the Soviet Union collapsed, the Berlin Wall fell, dot coms boomed and busted, terrorism struck and launched the U.S. into the longest war in its history. A financial crisis shook the country and the world to its knees, and the rise of big data, artificial intelligence, genomics, new materials, cloud computing, blockchain, the sharing and gig economies, and many other new, advanced technologies and business models signaled the start of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In that time, tax law and accounting practices have struggled to keep pace with innovations, sometimes leading to a wild West free for all for businesses and consumers, some of who managed to profit while others lost or were swindled of their life savings. Even today tax laws still fail to address the issues that the Age of Computer and the Internet brought, such as the internet sales tax, which may be heading to the US Supreme Court in the next year or so. As President Trump and the U.S. Congress are poised to pass and celebrate the passage of reforming the U.S. tax code for the first time in 30 years, missing from the discussion by both parties is how tax law and accounting principles should be altered to account for the realities of how AI, automation and the Fourth Industrial Revolution are reshaping businesses and the labor markets today and will continue to transform them in the years to come.