UK-based legal AI company, Luminance, is to open an office in Singapore to meet increasing demand in the Asia-Pacific for doc review automation. The fast-growing legal AI venture said that this move follows winning several clients in Singapore and Australia. Luminance has also released Version 3.0 of its contract review technology and bagged UK law firm, Bird & Bird, as a new client. Bird & Bird would appear to be the second UK law firm to publicly announce it is using Luminance. The other is Slaughter and May, which owns a financial stake in the company. Although, it is understood several other UK firms are currently piloting the AI platform.

As I tried to imagine what a world completely governed by unexplainable AI processes would look like, I was reminded of Jorge Luis Borges' "The Lottery in Babylon". In this story Borges describes how a simple Lottery eventually became a complex (and secret) institution. At first, like every other lottery, it defined which participant would win the jackpot. Over time every inhabitant of Babylon was forced to participate, and the lottery became more complex: people could lose (or gain) a job, a position amongst the nobles, the love of their lives, life itself, honor… "The complexities of the new system are understood by only a handful of specialists (…) the number of drawings is infinite. No decision is final; all branch into others."

The tech worker is on the front lines of a major breakthrough in work productivity and business performance: artificial intelligence (AI). The role of AI in the future of almost every industry is practically a given. Business and technology analysts the world over have agreed that AI will have an impact across all industries. For the IT profession, the future could involve being called upon to work with AI, develop AI solutions, and potentially help their customers strike the perfect balance between technology and humanity. Almost every new technology arrives with a fan base claiming it will revolutionise life on Earth.

An ex-YouTube insider reveals how its recommendation algorithm promotes divisive clips and conspiracy videos. Did they harm Hillary Clinton's bid for the presidency? Fri 2 Feb 2018 07.00 EST Last modified on Fri 2 Feb 2018 08.54 EST It was one of January's most viral videos. The 22-year-old, who is in a Japanese forest famous as a suicide spot, is visibly shocked, then amused. "Dude, his hands are purple," he says, before turning to his friends and giggling. "You never stand next to a dead guy?" Paul, who has 16 million mostly teen subscribers to his YouTube channel, removed the video from YouTube 24 hours later amid a furious backlash. It was still long enough for the footage to receive 6m views and a spot on YouTube's coveted list of trending videos. The next day, I watched a copy of the video on YouTube. Then I clicked on the "Up next" thumbnails of recommended videos that YouTube showcases on the right-hand side of the video player. This conveyor belt of clips, which auto-play by default, are designed to seduce us spending more time on Google's video broadcasting platform. I was curious where they might lead.

January 31, 2018 Cleveland--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. Not long ago, the presiding judge would have decided Mr. Shepherd's near-term future based on a reading of court files and his own intuition. But in Cleveland and a growing number of other local and state courts, judges are now guided by computer algorithms before ruling whether criminal defendants can return to everyday life, or have to stay locked up awaiting trial.

Sex tech is huge, and getting bigger. Patent trolls have been sitting on (sorry) a famous 2002 patent on vibrators connected to other devices and each other--the so-called teledildonics patent--using it to extract licensing fees from sex tech startups. But the patent expires in August, which means that hot tension you feel is the prelude to a pulsing, ecstatic explosion (less sorry now) of internet-connected sex devices yet to come (sorry again). Most of the world is ready to accept algorithm-enabled, internet-connected, virtual-reality-optimized sex machines with open arms (arms! The technology is evolving fast, which means two inbound waves of problems.

Where is China headed in 2018? President Xi Jinping promised "world peace" for the new year - but his 2017 track record suggests otherwise. Remember the singular stain of the July death of 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, surrounded by state security? Many condemned China's conduct, but such interventions are fewer and further between these days. Increasingly, abusive Chinese authorities are garnering international support for their principles and policies.

Forecasts suggest that by 2022 there's an outside chance we'll experience temperatures that exceed a target of the Paris climate agreement. Warming as usual: The Met Office, the UK's weather and climate forecasting organization, says its latest forecasts suggest that annual global average temperatures are likely to exceed 1 C above preindustrial levels over the next five years. A troubling outlier: The forecasts also give a 10 percent chance at least one of the next five years will see a global average temperature 1.5 C above preindustrial levels. Such an occurrence is likely to coincide with an El Niño weather event. Why it matters: The Paris agreement aims to limit average global temperature rises to less than 2 C, or ideally 1.5 C, above preindustrial levels.

A bipartisan group in Congress wants to build a resource to guide policymakers as they confront the mammoth challenge of regulating artificial intelligence. The FUTURE of AI Act would establish a federal advisory committee to examine a wide range of questions surrounding how technologies like automation, machine learning and other forms of AI would impact society. The legislation would also empower the committee with making recommendations to the secretary regarding implementation and regulation in the public and private sector. The bill was introduced in the Senate by Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), A companion bill in the House is sponsored by Reps.

Literature reviews can be time-consuming and tedious to complete. By cataloging and refactoring three state-of-the-art active learning techniques from evidence-based medicine and legal electronic discovery, this paper finds and implements FASTREAD, a faster technique for studying a large corpus of documents. This paper assesses FASTREAD using datasets generated from existing SE literature reviews (Hall, Wahono, Radjenovi\'c, Kitchenham et al.). Compared to manual methods, FASTREAD lets researchers find 95% relevant studies after reviewing an order of magnitude fewer papers. Compared to other state-of-the-art automatic methods, FASTREAD reviews 20-50% fewer studies while finding same number of relevant primary studies in a systematic literature review.