Machine learning is now able to analyze court decisions and predict how judges may respond in certain situations, based on an analysis of existing caselaw. Artificial intelligence technology is currently available to analyze tax and employment caselaw, but it's easy to see how this could be relevant to the insurance space as well – particularly in the claims area. Potential uses could include analysis of decisions around tort liability, for example, or accident benefits cases. A tax law expert recently provided an illustration of how the technology works in a webinar Wednesday. Benjamin Alarie, CEO and co-founder of Blue J Legal, uses the artificial intelligence suite to predict how the courts may decide issues about things such as tax deductions.

The European Union's executive body, the EC, has taken a first pass at drawing up a strategy to respond to the myriad socio-economic challenges around artificial intelligence technology -- including setting out steps intended to boost investment, support education and training, and draw up an ethical and legal framework for steering AI developments by the end of the year. It says it's hoping to be able to announce a "coordinated plan on AI" by the end of 2018, working with the bloc's 28 Member States to get there. "The main aim is to maximise the impact of investment at the EU and national levels, encourage cooperation across the EU, exchange best practices, and define the way forward together, so as to ensure the EU's global competitiveness in this sector," writes the Commission, noting it will also continue to invest in initiatives it views as "key" for AI (specifically name-checking the development of components, systems and chipsets designed to run AI operations; high-performance ...

Meticulous research, deep study of case law, and intricate argument-building--lawyers have used similar methods to ply their trade for hundreds of years. But they'd better watch out, because artificial intelligence is moving in on the field. As of 2016, there were over 1,300,000 licensed lawyers and 200,000 paralegals in the U.S. Consultancy group McKinsey estimates that 22 percent of a lawyer's job and 35 percent of a law clerk's job can be automated, which means that while humanity won't be completely overtaken, major businesses and career adjustments aren't far off (see "Is Technology About to Decimate White-Collar Work?"). "If I was the parent of a law student, I would be concerned a bit," says Todd Solomon, a partner at the law firm McDermott Will & Emery, based in Chicago. "There are fewer opportunities for young lawyers to get trained, and that's the case outside of AI already. But if you add AI onto that, there are ways that is advancement, and there are ways it is hurting us as well."

For sometime now, Apple is believed to be working on its own head-mounted display. The timeline for the project is unknown, but more and more details about the anticipated device have been surfacing online once in a while. This week, a new patent is detailing how the Cupertino giant is exploring the use of eye-tracking technology in virtual reality and augmented reality headsets. The United States Patent and Trademark Office published Thursday a patent application by Apple. The document, which was originally filed by Apple inventors on Oct. 19, 2017, focuses on an "Eye Tracking System" that the iPhone X maker could use for its head-mounted display.

The creation of ethics modules that can be inserted into a variety of classes may help ensure that ethics as a subject is not marginalized and enable professors with little experience in philosophy or with fewer resources to incorporate ethics into their more technical classes. This post will outline some of the topics that professors have decided to cover in this field, as well as suggestions for types of assignments that may be useful. We hope that readers will consider ways to add these into their classes, and we welcome comments with further suggestions of topics or assignments. With regards to ethics, some of the key topics that professors have taught about include: deontology, consequentialism, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, moral responsibility, cultural relativism, social contract, feminist ethics, justice consequentialism, the distinction between ethics and law, and the relationship between principles, standards, and rules. Using these frameworks, professors can discuss a variety of topics, including: privacy, algorithmic bias, misinformation, intellectual property, surveillance, inequality, data collection, AI governance, free speech, transparency, security, anonymity, systemic risk, labor, net neutrality, accessibility, value-sensitive design, codes of ethics, predictive policing, virtual reality, ethics in industry, machine learning, clinical versus actuarial reasoning, issue spotting, and basic social science concepts.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to employ a simulated dataset from Kaggle to build a machine learning model to both predict and explain whether employees will leave their employer or not and the reason(s) why they may do so. The data comprise a wide range of topics which allow to explain employees' leave behavior in relation with A) organizational factors (department); B) employment relational factors (i.e. This tutorial has the objective to inspire you to explore the possibilities of using machine learning for your own research. You will follow several steps to explore the data and build a machine learning model to predict whether an employee will leave or not, and why. You will build this prediction model with the Azure Machine Learning Studio.

Artificial intelligence tools can draft contracts, write answers to legal complaints, or answer simple questions. They may not replace a lawyer's to-do list, but they could save time. Walmart and Nationwide Insurance are among the companies experimenting with how artificial intelligence tools can streamline their in-house legal departments and their work with outside counsel, and save money in the process. The use of more advanced data tools also is a growing cost-saving trend. That ultimately could drive law firms to change their thinking.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that Amazon's Alexa was an amnesiac: it can't remember important long-term info, or even that you started talking to it a few moments ago. Soon, though, it'll be considerably less forgetful. Amazon's Ruhi Sarikaya has detailed a string of upgrades to Alexa that promise more natural conversations, particularly about familiar subjects. Most notably, Alexa devices in the US will soon have a memory: you can tell the voice assistant to remember an important fact (say, a friend's birthday) and bring that up later. You also won't have to use Alexa's hotword every time you ask a follow-up question, much like Google Assistant. In the US, UK and Germany, the helper will soon answer secondary questions more naturally: if you ask "how's the weather," you can ask "how about this weekend" afterward.

The country's biggest seller of police body cameras on Thursday convened a corporate board devoted to the ethics and expansion of artificial intelligence, a major new step toward offering controversial facial-recognition technology to police forces nationwide. Axon, the maker of Taser electroshock weapons and the wearable body cameras now used by most major American city police departments, has voiced interest in pursuing face recognition for its body-worn cameras. The technology could allow officers to scan and recognize the faces of potentially everyone they see while on patrol. A growing number of surveillance firms and tech start-ups are racing to integrate face recognition and other AI capabilities into real-time video. The board's first meeting will likely presage an imminent showdown over the rapidly developing technology. Shortly after the board was announced, a group of 42 civil rights, technology and privacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP, sent members a letter voicing "serious concerns with the current direction of Axon's product development."

SAN FRANCISCO – Alphabet Inc. is pushing efforts to roll back the most comprehensive biometric privacy law in the U.S., even as the company and its peers face heightened scrutiny after the unauthorized sharing of data at Facebook Inc. While Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg were publicly apologizing this month for failing to protect users' information, Google's lobbyists were drafting measures to de-fang an Illinois law recognized as the most rigorous consumer privacy statute in the country. Their ambition: to strip language from a decade-old policy that regulates the use of fingerprints, iris scans and facial recognition technology, and insert a loophole for companies embracing the use of biometrics. Google is trying to exempt photos from the Illinois law at a time when it's fighting a lawsuit in the state that threatens billions of dollars in potential damages. The world's largest search engine is facing claims that it violated the privacy of millions of users by gathering and storing biometric data without their consent.