A court case may take months to conclude but searching details about one will only take seconds! A new artificial intelligence (AI) enabled search tool allows users to browse through millions of legal case records and provides them the most relevant results in seconds, its makers say. LegitQuest, a website launched earlier this week on the eve of National Law Day, is the latest in the line of ventures aiming to integrate technology with legal research. According to its creators - a team of tech-savvy attorneys, engineers and designers - the platform has a unique searching feature, called iSearch, which is powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning and data analytics. The feature browses through millions of records and gives users the most relevant results in seconds, its makers told .

When Waymo, the autonomous car company once known as Google's self-driving car outfit, announced it was suing Uber for trade secret theft in February, the action seemed to center on a single person: Anthony Levandowski. According to Waymo, the former Google engineer downloaded 14,000 secret documents from its system and used the contents to launch his own self-driving truck startup, Otto, in January 2016. By August, Uber had acquired Otto for an alleged $680 million, and Waymo says the ridehailing giant was in on the theft from the start. Well forget Levandowski and say hello to the litigation's newest and most unlikely star: former Uber intelligence employee Richard Jacobs. Last weekend, the US Attorney's Office pulled the very unusual move of forwarding a piece of evidence to Judge William Alsup, who is overseeing the lawsuit in the Northern District Court of California.

Demands by a former Uber Technologies Inc. employee Ric Jacobs, who was granted $4.5 million this year in a settlement agreement over his claims about the company's secrecy measures, were "clearly extortionist," said one of Uber's top attorneys Wednesday. "Given the huge sums of money that Mr. Jacobs was demanding at the outset, I felt it was clearly extortionist, especially given the low value of his claims," said Angela Padilla, Uber's deputy general counsel, testifying at a hearing in federal court related to Google parent Alphabet Inc.'s suit against Uber over trade secrets allegedly stolen from Alphabet's Waymo unit, which is developing self-driving cars. But the judge challenged Ms. Padilla's claims regarding Mr. Jacobs's demands. "People don't pay that kind of money for'B.S.,'" he said. Mr. Jacobs has been retained by Uber to help investigate his own claims, in conjunction with law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr LLP.

This report sets out a series of strategic recommendations to the government, based on core pillars including data supply and exchange, skills and education and developing an artificial intelligence infrastructure in the UK, with a view to growing the country's AI sector, something which was also augmented by the recent Budget and government's Industrial Strategy White Paper this week. The professional panel included speakers such as Westminster Senior Lecturer and journalist Dr Mercedes Bunz, Westminster Business School Senior Lecturer Dr Steven Cranfield, and well known journalist and technology author Joanna Goodman, a Visiting Fellow at Westminster Law School's Centre on the Legal Profession. Speakers dissected the report and its implications for the future and were then questioned by the audience on the matter for nearly one and a half hours. Convener and Westminster Senior Lecturer in Law, as well as artificial intelligence, robotics and the law researcher, Dr Paresh Kathrani, who chaired the event, said: "2017 was undoubtedly an important year for artificial intelligence in the United Kingdom, not least with the House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence's work on AI, this report and the recent Industrial Strategy White Paper. The University of Westminster and Westminster Law School will continue putting on LawTech and AI events in 2018 looking at these vital developments."

The futurist and inventor believes that we have no more than "a five to 10 per cent chance" of successfully making artificial intelligence safe enough not to wipe out the human race. Musk seeks a proactive approach to what he sees as a potentially deadly worldwide AI crisis, which means that governments must become well-versed in the concepts before such understanding becomes a matter of life and death. "Normally the way regulations are set up is when a bunch of bad things happen, there's a public outcry, and after many years a regulatory agency is set up to regulate that industry," he said. That, in the past, has been bad but not something which represented a fundamental risk to the existence of civilization." And Musk is certain that approach will not work for artificially intelligent superweapons: "Once there is awareness, people will be extremely afraid, as they should be… By the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it'll be too late."

SAN FRANCISCO – Top executives at Uber Technologies Inc. used the encrypted chat app Wickr to hold secret conversations, current and former workers testified in court this week, setting up what could be the first major legal test of the issues raised by the use of encrypted apps inside companies. The revelations Tuesday and Wednesday about the extensive use of Wickr inside Uber upended the high-stakes legal showdown with Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo unit, which accuses the ride-hailing firm of stealing its self-driving-car secrets. There is nothing inherently unlawful about instructing employees to use disappearing messaging apps, said Timothy Heaphy, a lawyer at Hunton & Williams and a former U.S. attorney in Virginia. However, companies have an obligation to preserve records that may be reasonably seen as relevant to litigation or that fall under data retention rules set by industry regulators. In Uber's situation, chat logs that could help get to the bottom of the trade secrets case are now inaccessible.

We present the design and implementation of a custom discrete optimization technique for building rule lists over a categorical feature space. Our algorithm produces rule lists with optimal training performance, according to the regularized empirical risk, with a certificate of optimality. By leveraging algorithmic bounds, efficient data structures, and computational reuse, we achieve several orders of magnitude speedup in time and a massive reduction of memory consumption. We demonstrate that our approach produces optimal rule lists on practical problems in seconds. Our results indicate that it is possible to construct optimal sparse rule lists that are approximately as accurate as the COMPAS proprietary risk prediction tool on data from Broward County, Florida, but that are completely interpretable. This framework is a novel alternative to CART and other decision tree methods for interpretable modeling.

Uber's growing string of scandals almost certainly played a role in the discounted valuation. The most recent problem was made public on Tuesday in a federal courtroom in San Francisco. Federal prosecutors are investigating allegations that Uber deployed an espionage team to plunder trade secrets from its rivals. The revelation triggered a delay in a high-profile trial over whether the beleaguered ride-hailing service stole self-driving car technology from a Google spinoff.

Bates was charged in the November 2015 death of Victor Collins, whose body was found in a hot tub at Bates' home. Prosecutors say they requested the dismissal because the evidence supports more than one reasonable explanation.

Amazon could be developing drones that disintegrate mid-air if they get into difficulty to protect people on the ground. The idea is outlined in a patent that describes how a malfunctioning drone could rip itself apart automatically during a delivery. Conditions that could cause the drone to resort to such drastic Mission Impossible-style measures include extreme heat, cold, wind, rain or high pressure systems. First filed back in June 2016, the patent has a release system that includes'attachment mechanisms, such as clips, latches, hooks'. The idea is outlined in a patent that describes how a malfunctioning drone could rip itself apart automatically halfway through its delivery.