When my wife and I became parents, the most important weapon in our childcare arsenal was an A5-size notebook. In this mighty tome we wrote out every single data point relating to our new baby, from the quantity of milk she drank and duration of sleep through to the volume of excreta. It was, after all, only with this information that we were able, in our sleep-deprived and confused state, to coordinate how to meet her needs. Devices like Nanit's artificially intelligent baby monitor are designed to outsource much of that brainwork. It's a $349 night-vision camera that hangs over a cot, using computer vision and deep learning to monitor your little one's sleep. The little gadget is relatively small, but it packs a microphone, speaker, camera, nightlight and temperature sensor inside its body.

CHICAGO – August 10, 2017 – Seyfarth Shaw LLP in connection with its subsidiary SeyfarthLean Consulting announced today that it is one of the first law firms to select iManage Extract. Seyfarth will use the Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform to perform document review and comparison across all practice areas. Seyfarth will utilize an enhanced feature of the product to train and have complete control of the robot. Using the self-service portal will allow the firm to speed up the data extraction process, increasing productivity within the organization. To read more, visit the full press release here.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is fusing disciplines across the digital and physical worlds, with legal technology the latest example of how improved automation is reaching further and further into service-oriented professions. Casetext for example--a legal tech-startup providing Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based research for lawyers--recently secured $12 million in one of the industry's largest funding rounds, but research is just one area where AI is being used to assist the legal profession.

FaceApp has removed a number of racially themed photo filters after being accused of racism. The app, which uses artificial intelligence to edit pictures, this week launched a number of "ethnicity change filters". They claimed to show users what they'd look like if they were Caucasian, Black, Asian or Indian. FaceApp has attracted fierce criticism for launching the filters, with some users claiming they were racist, and encouraged users to "black up" digitally. Responding to the backlash, FaceApp founder and CEO, Yaroslav Goncharov, said, "The ethnicity change filters have been designed to be equal in all aspects. "They don't have any positive or negative connotations associated with them.

Popular AI-powered selfie program FaceApp was forced to pull new filters that allowed users to modify their pictures to look like different races, just hours after it launched it. The app, which initially became famous for its features that let users edit images to look older or younger, or add a smile, launched the new filters around midday on Wednesday. They allowed a user to edit their image to fit one of four categories: Caucasian, Asian, Indian or Black. Users rapidly pointed out that the feature wasn't particularly sensitively handled: technology site The Verge described it as "tantamount to a sort of digital blackface, 'dressing up' as different ethnicities", while TechCruch said the app "seems to be getting a little too focused on races rather than faces". The company initially released a statement arguing that the "ethnicity change filters" were "designed to be equal in all aspects". "They don't have any positive or negative connotations associated with them," the company's chief executive Yaroslav Goncharov said.

Find out how to optimize your website to give your customers experiences that will have the biggest ROI for your business. Many people wonder why Europe is so keen to protect people's privacy. The reason dates back from WWII, when French and German governments used centralized citizen files to target, and subsequently deport, Jews and other ethnic minorities. Following this, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights included an entire article about the right to privacy, which gave birth to many laws in European countries. The demand for uniform privacy regulations across the continent leads us to the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will take effect in May 2018.

When IBM's Watson triumphed on Jeopardy! in 2011, it was a major validation of the potential of artificial intelligence and a sign of things to come. But Watson didn't stop there, said IBM's Jay Di Silvestri, speaking at a CDW Summit on "Modernizing IT Infrastructure for Digital Transformation" in Las Vegas on Monday. In the six years since, IBM's AI experts have sought to answer the question, What else can Watson do? "That group immediately turned its sights to say, 'What can we do that is as impressive, but different?'" said Di Silvestri, IBM's Watson platform adoption leader. Watson's next challenge, IBM decided, would be unstructured text, and Di Silvestri said that applications are already on the market for organizations that want to leverage AI to improve customer service and operations. The next phase of Watson is a logical one, he said: deconstructing the technology behind Watson into services that help businesses.

An array of ethnic filters on the photo-editing app, FaceApp, has stirred backlash as users decry the options for facial manipulation as racist. The selfie-editing app, FaceApp, was updated earlier this month with four new filters: Asian, Black, Caucasian and Indian. The filters immediately drew criticism on Twitter by users who made comparisons to blackface and yellowface racial stereotypes. In addition to these blatantly racial face filters – which change everything from hair color to skin tone to eye color – other FaceApp users noted earlier this year that the "hot" filter consistently lightens people's skin color. "#FaceApp has a new feature where you can see yourself #CaucasianLiving. Look how privileged I look!" one of the app's users commented on Twitter.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is fusing disciplines across the digital and physical worlds, with legal technology the latest example of how improved automation is reaching further and further into service-oriented professions. Casetext for example--a legal tech-startup providing Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based research for lawyers--recently secured $12 million in one of the industry's largest funding rounds, but research is just one area where AI is being used to assist the legal profession. Others include contract review and due diligence, analytics, prediction, the discovery of evidence, and legal advice. Technology and the law are converging, and where they meet new questions arise about the relative roles of artificial and human agents--and the ethical issues involved in the shift from one to the other. While legal technology has largely focused on the activities of the bar, it challenges us to think about its application to the bench as well.

In May last year, a stunning report claimed that a computer program used by a US court for risk assessment was biased against black prisoners. The program, Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (Compas), was much more prone to mistakenly label black defendants as likely to reoffend – wrongly flagging them at almost twice the rate as white people (45% to 24%), according to the investigative journalism organisation ProPublica. Compas and programs similar to it were in use in hundreds of courts across the US, potentially informing the decisions of judges and other officials. The message seemed clear: the US justice system, reviled for its racial bias, had turned to technology for help, only to find that the algorithms had a racial bias too. How could this have happened?