The code has been copied to your clipboard. Machines powered by artificial intelligence, or AI, are increasingly used to help people perform many different jobs. One area where AI is currently being used is in the American court system. In U.S. courts, defendants appear before a judge shortly after they are arrested. The judge then sets a trial date for the defendant, which could be weeks or months in the future.

My guest Robert Draper says one of the greatest threats to our democracy is gerrymandering, in which the party in power in a state redraws the map of election districts to give the advantage to that party's candidates. Since districts are redrawn only every 10 years following the census, gerrymandering can almost guarantee that the majority party will stay in power. There are a couple of gerrymandering cases currently before the Supreme Court. Draper has reported on gerrymandering, and we'll talk about that a little later. First, we're going to talk about his new article "They Are Watching You - And Everything Else On The Planet" published in this month's National Geographic. It's about state-of-the-art surveillance from closed-circuit TV to drones and satellites and the questions these surveillance technologies raise about privacy. As part of his research, he spent time in surveillance control rooms in London. And he went to a tech company in San Francisco whose mission is to image the entire Earth every day. Draper is a contributing writer for National Geographic and a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine. So let's start with surveillance. Why did you choose England as the place to report on surveillance? ROBERT DRAPER: Well, England has become kind of an obvious focal point to talk about surveillance. It's become, in a way, a petri dish for the subject, I suppose, for a couple reasons. First of all, the U.K. is where George Orwell wrote his dystopian classic "1984" back in 1949 when the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and the USSR were his prime reference points.

New research highlights some of the most important actions available to executives. McKinsey research has long demonstrated the wide gap between productivity levels in different countries. Research in 2015, for example, suggested that if the degree of productivity dispersion among the bottom 75 percent of UK firms matched that of Germany, the United Kingdom would be more than £100 billion better off annually as measured by incremental gross value added (GVA). This analysis also showed that a major reason for that discrepancy is the United Kingdom's relatively slower diffusion of digital technologies and proven business practices among the bulk of its business population. We set out recently to investigate what drives, and holds back, the diffusion of technology-enabled business practices, using a mix of academic literature, studies from multinational organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Economic Forum, and in-depth interviews with business leaders and other experts.

Self-driving cars should be welcomed for their substantial safety and mobility gains for the traveling public, especially the elderly and disabled. But the federal government's failure to modernize auto regulations is already denying consumers safer and superior products, and this problem will only grow larger as automated driving systems near the deployment stage. Marc Scribner (@marcscribner) is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market public policy organization in Washington, D.C., and author of the recent study, Modernizing Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. Congress has long recognized that federal regulations should be informed by technical standards developed outside the government, as officials generally lack engineering expertise. Bipartisan bills--the Self Drive Act (Safely Ensuring Lives Future Deployment and Research in Vehicle Evolution) passed by the House, and the AV Start (American Vision for Safer Transportation through Advancement of Revolutionary Technologies) Act pending in the Senate--both recognize that the federal government should continually update its automated vehicle definitions to reflect the industry's best available technical knowledge.

'It' constantly struggles to cope with emerging trends and technologies; moreover, 'It' struggles and is far behind other fields in doing the same. Do you know who is'It' here? The developments in Science and Technology have taken a toll on the lives of people in this sector. To add to it, developments in AI, have made the task even more daunting for them. The concept of Intellectual Property has become more confusing than ever, because now there are several questions, the answers to which are not straight forward and even with extensive research no feasible answers can be given!

The centuries-old process of releasing defendants on bail, long the province of judicial discretion, is getting a major assist -- courtesy of artificial intelligence. In late August, Hercules Shepherd Jr. walked up to the stand in a Cleveland courtroom, dressed in an orange jumpsuit. Two nights earlier, an officer had arrested him at a traffic stop with a small bag of cocaine, and he was about to be arraigned. Judge Jimmy Jackson Jr. looked at Shepherd, then down at a computer-generated score on the front of the 18-year-old's case file. The scores marked Shepherd as a prime candidate for pretrial release with low bail.

One of the most important issues that Congress will face in 2018 is how and when to regulate our growing dependence on artificial intelligence (AI). During the U.S. National Governors Association summer meetings, Elon Musk urged the group to push forward with regulation "before it's too late," stati...

It's time to admit it: Uber employees sometimes send inartful electronic communications. When former Google employee and now senior Uber engineering director Lior Ron testified, he also got the, "What the hell were you thinking when you sent this?" treatment from Waymo lawyers. If Waymo's opening arguments are to be believed, these messages show that Uber is a company willing to cut corners to win, no matter the cost. Most of them are between Kalanick, Ron, and the man Waymo alleges made off with its intellectual property, Anthony Levandowski. Levandowski is a former Google self-driving car engineer who Waymo says stole vital documents containing proprietary laser tech trade secrets before starting his own autonomous truck company, Otto--which was acquired by Uber just a few months later.

A multivariate Hawkes process is a class of marked point processes: A sample consists of a finite set of events of unbounded random size; each event has a real-valued time and a discrete-valued label (mark). It is self-excitatory: Each event causes an increase in the rate of other events (of either the same or a different label) in the (near) future. Prior work has developed methods for parameter estimation from complete samples. However, just as unobserved variables can increase the modeling power of other probabilistic models, allowing unobserved events can increase the modeling power of point processes. In this paper we develop a method to sample over the posterior distribution of unobserved events in a multivariate Hawkes process. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, and its utility in improving predictive power and identifying latent structure in real-world data.

We demonstrate Water Advisor, a multi-modal assistant to help non-experts make sense of complex water quality data and apply it to their specific needs. A user can chat with the tool about water quality and activities of interest, and the system tries to advise using available water data for a location, applicable water regulations and relevant parameters using AI methods. Figure 1: Sample advisories - by EPA for Flint residents (left) and by state for visitors (right; Washington State).