In one sense, regtech--a recent word invention that stands for regulatory technology--is just a rebranding of an evolutionary process that has been going on for decades. Ever since the first IBM mainframe computers rolled off the assembly line in the 1960s, banks have been deploying technology to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their operations and lower their costs. Of course, technology has come a long way since the dawn of the IBM mainframe--or "Big Iron" as they were sometimes called. Consider for a moment that anyone walking around today with an Apple iPhone 8 has more computer power in the palm of their hand than the Apollo 11 astronauts used on their 238,900-mile journey to the moon. Another example--one with the potential to revolutionize the task of regulatory compliance--is artificial intelligence, or AI.

Farmers, construction industry, inspection, survey, search and rescue are some of the areas where drones are majorly being used. Colleges are also showing an interest in the drone technology, and Grand Rapids Community College (GRCC) will be offering two drone courses that will increase people's skill set and offer more economic opportunities. Topics such as use of navigational charts, aviation weather sources and emergency procedures will also be discussed. Julie Parks, the executive director of workforce training, mentioned, "GRCC President Bill Pink has emphasized the need for the college to have a relevant and responsive curriculum to meet current and future labour demands."

Artificial Lawyer recently caught up with Adam Nguyen (pictured above), co-founder and COO of US legal AI company eBrevia, which in March announced that it had been chosen by Thomson Reuters (TR) to provide AI-driven document review for the global company's managed legal services clients. We discussed what the landmark deal means, how AI will be increasingly used in the legal world and where the company is heading. How significant is this both for TR and for eBrevia? This is an exciting time for TR and eBrevia. TR had carefully evaluated a number of AI-powered contract review softwares and selected eBrevia because we produced the most accurate results, not to mention the ease of tailoring eBrevia to specific industry needs.

Progress in AI has shown tremendous potential for benefitting mankind by improving efficiency and savings in production, commerce, "transport, medical care, rescue, education and farming", as well as for significantly cultivating "the ability and level of social governance".

Andrei Iancu, director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), says that the courts have strayed on the issue of patent eligibility, including signaling he thought algorithms using artificial intelligence were patentable as a general proposition. That came in a USPTO oversight hearing Wednesday (April 18) before a generally supportive Senate Judiciary Committee panel. Both Iancu and the legislators were in agreement that more clarity was needed in the area of computer-related patents, and that PTO needed to provide more precedential opinions when issuing patents so it was not trying to reinvent the wheel each time and to better guide courts. At issue are Supreme Court decisions that Iancu said had injected "a degree of uncertainty" into that area of law. He said PTO would come up with guidelines to help better define what is patent-eligible, but that it was a challenge that needed to be addressed by Congress and stakeholders as well.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most important technologies of this era. Once considered a remote possibility reserved for science fiction, AI has advanced enough to approach a technological tipping point of generating groundbreaking effects on humanity and is "likely to leave no stratum of society …

Contemporary machine learning algorithms are well-suited to the complex, high-dimensional data associated with accounting records. In this short note we apply a simple unsupervised algorithm to find anomalous companies -- those with accounting metrics that don't match the statistical patterns implied by the bulk of the companies. To do this we leverage the SEC structured financial statements data set, a regularly updated collection of the machine-readable numeric core of the financial disclosures regularly filed to the SEC through its EDGAR system. We use the reported company assets as a normalizing factor; while size is of course a variable of interest, we are looking for less obvious, scale-independent patterns and anomalies. Note that axis and values in the graph above are in many ways arbitrary; it's simply a reasonable effort at representing in three dimensions the relative distances between points in the six-dimensional data space for the company fillings.

Apple has created a new robot named Daisy that can take apart a dead iPhone and recover precious materials such as silver and tungsten. The robot can rip apart a dead phone in just 18 seconds and is an update to Liam - the recycling bot the company announced back in 2016. Daisy is made from the same parts as her predecessor and is able to disassemble nine versions of the iPhone, sorting them into usable components. The Cupertino-based robot is able to break down nine different versions of the iPhone - and could get through 200 per hour. By removing and sorting components, Apple can recover high-quality materials that traditional recyclers can't get hold of.

And because of this fact, we're screwed. Due to advances in artificial intelligence, it's now possible to convincingly map anyone's face onto the body of another person in a video. As Vox's Aja Romano has explained, this technique is becoming more common in pornography: An actress's head can be mapped onto a porn actress's body. These "deepfakes" can be generated with free software, and they're different from the photoshopping of the past. This is live action -- and uncannily real. On Tuesday, BuzzFeed published a demonstration featuring the actor and director Jordan Peele.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is penetrating industries from healthcare to advertising, transportation, finance, legal, education, and hospitality. Many of us may have already interacted with a chatbot on platforms like Facebook Messenger, Slack, or We Chat. Chatbots are defined as an automated, yet personalized, conversation between software and human users. The hospitality industry makes heavy use of chatbots to create more compelling customer and employee experiences. Consider Marriott's Chatbotlr, a chatbot that helps customers make service requests from their smartphones.