This article describes the ExpertCop tutorial system, a simulator of crime in an urban region. In ExpertCop, the students (police officers) configure and allocate an available police force according to a selected geographic region and then interact with the simulation. The student interprets the results with the help of an intelligent tutor, the pedagogical agent, observing how crime behaves in the presence of the allocated preventive policing. The interaction between domain agents representing social entities as criminals and police teams drives the simulation. ExpertCop induces students to reflect on resource allocation.

This is a continuation of my previous blog, "Natural Language Understanding – Application Notes with Context Discriminant". Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a subtopic of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Successful implementations of NLU are difficult because of limitations in prevailing technology. SiteFocus solved these limitations with a new approach to NLU. This approach has been successfully implemented into a commercial solution called Communications in Focus (CIF).

On this week's If Then, Slate's April Glaser and Will Oremus talk about a key detail in the new tax plan that could have a huge effect on gig workers in the tech sector--and maybe even robots. They also discuss Apple's "batterygate" iPhone situation: What happened, and what can we take from their unusual apology? The hosts are also joined by Slate's Future Tense editor Torie Bosch to talk about the anthology she co-edited What Future: The Year's Best Ideas to Reclaim, Reanimate & Reinvent Our Future.

With intelligent automation marching steadily toward broader adoption, media coverage of this historic technology disruption is turning increasingly alarmist. "New study: Artificial intelligence is coming for your jobs, millennials,"1 announced one business news outlet recently. "US workers face higher risk of being replaced by robots,"2 declared another. These dire headlines may deliver impressive click stats, but they don't consider a much more hopeful--and likely--scenario: In the near future, human workers and machines will work together seamlessly, each complementing the other's efforts in a single loop of productivity. And, in turn, HR organizations will begin developing new strategies and tools for recruiting, managing, and training a hybrid human-machine workforce. Notwithstanding sky-is-falling predictions, robotics, cognitive, and artificial intelligence (AI) will probably not displace most human workers. Yes, these tools offer opportunities to automate some repetitive low-level tasks. Perhaps more importantly, intelligent automation solutions may be able to augment human performance by automating certain parts of a task, thus freeing individuals to focus on more "human" aspects that require empathic problem-solving abilities, social skills, and emotional intelligence. For example, if retail banking transactions were automated, bank tellers would be able to spend more time interacting with and advising customers--and selling products.

In the introduction to a recent report by Bird & Bird and LWI titled AI and the new wave of legal services, the author states what ROSS Intelligence and others have known for a long time: "In the provision of legal services, arguably the most significant emerging technology is artificial intelligence (AI), not least because of the benefits that it promises to deliver in cost and efficiency for law firms, alternative service providers and their clients." For this report, 15 general counsels (GCs) were interviewed about their current and potential use of technology, what they think of AI, the opportunities and challenges it presents, and how AI "may ultimately shape their expectations of the law firms they instruct." With insight from GCs at KPMG, WeWork, PwC, MasterCard and MetLife, among others, here's a look at what they said. There are three main points that are unsurprising. One is that the majority -- if not all -- the GCs believe there is an AI revolution underway; two, GCs are more likely to embrace technology if they are pretty darn certain it will make their lives easier and more efficient; and three, the adoption of technology in general is inconsistent not only across countries, but across organizations, as well.

As Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, "the only one constant in life is change". And this is certainly true for anyone working in areas related to or based upon technology (and few don't these days). The pace of technological innovation is such that even the most fantastic of imagined futures seem like they could easily become reality. As existing technologies reach maturity, unforeseen developments arrive ever more quickly, and innovations make the leap from consumer applications to business (and vice versa) it's imperative that we constantly seek to find those that have the potential to add value to our own business and those of our customers. As we look ahead to 2018, I've been working with my colleagues to identify some trends that we think will have an impact on our business and industry.

Legal analysis, something which is done manually is eyeing for better prospects in the field of analytics. The legal sector has been in peril with the new rumors of robot lawyers which are not showing up anytime soon. But this does tell us one thing for sure that the legal structure, which also beholds the big data, is in dire need of analytics and such platforms to function appropriately. A historical data of cases, the summaries, the rulings and the verdicts all pile up to be called together as big data. Although some legal trophy-holders do think otherwise.

As a kid, I saw the 1968 version of Planet of the Apes. As a future primatologist, I was mesmerized. Years later I discovered an anecdote about its filming: At lunchtime, the people playing chimps and those playing gorillas ate in separate groups. It's been said, "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't." And it can be vastly consequential when people are divided into Us and Them, ingroup and outgroup, "the people" (i.e., our kind) and the Others. The core of Us/Them-ing is emotional and automatic. Humans universally make Us/Them dichotomies along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, language group, religion, age, socioeconomic status, and so on. We do so with remarkable speed and neurobiological efficiency; have complex taxonomies and classifications of ways in which we denigrate Thems; do so with a versatility that ranges from the minutest of microaggression to bloodbaths of savagery; and regularly decide what is inferior about Them based on pure emotion, followed by primitive rationalizations that we mistake for rationality. But crucially, there is room for optimism. Much of that is grounded in something definedly human, which is that we all carry multiple Us/Them divisions in our heads. A Them in one case can be an Us in another, and it can only take an instant for that identity to flip. Thus, there is hope that, with science's help, clannishness and xenophobia can lessen, perhaps even so much so that Hollywood-extra chimps and gorillas can break bread together.

We don't know what our customers look like," said Craig Berman, vice president of global communications at Amazon, to Bloomberg News in June 2015. Berman was responding to allegations that the company's same-day delivery service discriminated against people of color. In the most literal sense, Berman's defense was truthful: Amazon selects same-day delivery areas on the basis of cost and benefit factors, such as household income and delivery accessibility. But those factors are aggregated by ZIP code, meaning that they carry other influences that have shaped--and continue to shape--our cultural geography. Looking at the same-day service map, the correspondence to skin color is hard to miss. Such maps call to mind men like Robert Moses, the master planner who, over decades, shaped much of the infrastructure of modern New York City and its surrounding suburbs. Infamously, he didn't want poor people, in particular poor people of color, to use the new public parks and beaches he was ...

For the second year in a row, we surveyed a number of great minds in the legal community for their opinions on legal tech. From bitcoin and blockchain to A.I. and chatbots, there's plenty to get excited about. Respondents to this year's survey included: Here's what they had to say: There were several contenders for the biggest legal tech news story of 2017, with A.I. taking a top spot yet again. "The barista at my local Starbucks who thought about going to law school one time was getting ready to launch a legal tech company that focused on A.I. indigent defense via crowdsourcing along the blockchain," said Keith Lee. "That's how prevalent it's been."