The availability of large idea repositories (e.g., the U.S. patent database) could significantly accelerate innovation and discovery by providing people with inspiration from solutions to analogous problems. However, finding useful analogies in these large, messy, real-world repositories remains a persistent challenge for either human or automated methods. Previous approaches include costly hand-created databases that have high relational structure (e.g., predicate calculus representations) but are very sparse. Simpler machine-learning/information-retrieval similarity metrics can scale to large, natural-language datasets, but struggle to account for structural similarity, which is central to analogy. In this paper we explore the viability and value of learning simpler structural representations, specifically, "problem schemas", which specify the purpose of a product and the mechanisms by which it achieves that purpose. Our approach combines crowdsourcing and recurrent neural networks to extract purpose and mechanism vector representations from product descriptions. We demonstrate that these learned vectors allow us to find analogies with higher precision and recall than traditional information-retrieval methods. In an ideation experiment, analogies retrieved by our models significantly increased people's likelihood of generating creative ideas compared to analogies retrieved by traditional methods. Our results suggest a promising approach to enabling computational analogy at scale is to learn and leverage weaker structural representations.

Uber's culture problems appear far from solved. Board member David Bonderman resigned Tuesday after making sexist comment at a meeting that took place a day after the release of a report into allegations of a hostile work environment at Uber. CEO Travis Kalanick is on an indefinite leave of absence. When he returns, he'll likely have a completely new management team. SAN FRANCISCO -- Uber now has 47 detailed recommendations from an exhaustive internal investigation on how to overhaul its company culture, from making its board more independent to keeping records of human resources complaints.

One of the very hot topics so far in 2017 is artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential disruptive impact on the legal profession. Questions ranging from, "Will AI replace lawyers?" to "Does it make sense to attend law school with the rise of AI?" to "How will AI impact the delivery, cost, and quality of legal services?" IN FACT, THE INTERSECTION OF AI AND THE LAW HAS recently captured the attention of major media outlets including The New York Times ("A.I. is Doing Legal Work. In addition, nowadays you would be hardpressed to attend a legal conference without a session, panel, or presentation on AI. This article reviews the basics of AI, key use cases for AI in the legal profession, some primary AI-related legal issues, and steps that your law firm or in-house legal department may want to take to become AI-ready. In his book "The Fourth Industrial Revolution,"3 Klaus Schwab, executive chairman and founder of The World Economic Forum, begins by briefly reviewing the three earlier industrial revolutions that transformed our society and then devotes the remainder of the book to describing how our world recently entered a whole new era in which we will witness unprecedented major and rapid technological innovations. AI has the potential to be a disruptive force in our "Fourth Industrial Revolution." Like many newer and transformational technologies, there is no uniform definition for AI. An October 2016 report issued by the White House called "Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence" states the following: "Some define AI loosely as a computerized system that exhibits behavior that is commonly thought of as requiring intelligence.

Who thought that the laws of robotics described by famous science fiction author Isaac Asimov would one day resonate with real life issues on robots? Last week's summit on artificial intelligence sought to imagine a world increasingly manned by machines and robots, even self-taught ones, and explore the legal, ethical, economic, and social consequences of this new world. And some panellists underlined a need to establish frameworks to manage this new species. The AI (Artificial Intelligence) for Good Global Summit took place from 7-9 June. It does not take a big stretch of imagination to realise that life with robots will change quite a few things, and the global summit looked at privacy, security, ethics and societal challenges brought by AI to the future society during a panel held on 8 June.

Since the plagues of the Old Testament, we have contemplated the Apocalypse, the world rising in vengeance as men, women and children scurry across the brutal landscape of a lost paradise. Our doomsday stories and how they scroll and flash before us have changed since the parchment days of the Bible. But we remain fascinated by the specter of our demise, whether the end is wrought by deities, our own folly or imposed by outside forces like monsters, asteroids and aliens that have haunted us since Orson Welles' 1938 "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast. Few of our dystopias, however, are as frightening as the planet gone asunder, polluted and destroyed by humanity's amorality, recklessness and greed. Film and literature -- to say nothing of our private insecurities -- resound with a world that freezes, boils, chokes, cracks with earthquakes, dwindles with resources and succumbs to pestilence and disease.

BEIJING, June 16, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Gridsum Holding Inc. ("Gridsum" or the "Company") (NASDAQ:GSUM), a leading provider of cloud-based big-data analytics, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence solutions in China, today announced the debut of the Intelligent Voice Recognition System jointly developed with Tencent Cloud to help improve the efficiency of the legal system across China. The advanced AI-enabled Intelligent Voice Recognition System converts voice into text in real time during court proceedings. Gridsum adapted the Tencent speech recognition technology to create a high-accuracy and high-reliability speech-to-text and text-to-speech application for the highly specialized legal space. This technology was surrounded and integrated with/into a comprehensive Software as a Service (SaaS) suite of solutions for the juridical system including judges, courts, law firms and corporates. Gridsum is working in collaboration with the Supreme Court Press to disseminate these solutions throughout the Chinese juridical system.

India should encourage research and innovation in establishing a legal infrastructure on the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI), says an Assocham-PwC study report titled'Leveraging artificial intelligence and robotics for sustainable growth.' The report highlighted the areas of application for AI techniques in large-scale public endeavours such as Make in India, Skill India and other crop insurance schemes, tax fraud schemes, detecting subsidy leakage and defence and security strategy. "The Make in India initiative focussing on twin goals of strengthening the country's in-house innovation and production capabilities with added creation of employment opportunities may not end up creating as many jobs as it is poised to at this point in time," the report said. Also, information technology (IT), manufacturing, agriculture and forestry are certain sectors that are expected to experience shrinkage of employment demand as robotic systems and machine learning algorithms take up several tasks, it noted.

U.S. Representative Bob Latta, who chairs a key panel overseeing automobile regulation, called the draft legislation "an important step in establishing a framework to allow innovators to safely develop and test autonomous vehicles." He said Republicans want "to continue working with all parties in a bipartisan manner as we refine language and move toward a consensus package."

Starship Technologies' delivery bots have been dropping off lunches in Europe and the US with increasing regularity, and governments are slowly warming to the idea. State legislatures in Virginia and Idaho recently granted official permission for small delivery robots to operate on sidewalks, and now Estonia(!) has offered its approval as well. The measure passed 86 to 0 in the country's parliament yesterday, making Estonia the first country in the EU to officially bless these adorable, food-slinging robots. There are, obviously, a few stipulations. The robots in question can't be taller than one meter, longer than 1.2 meters, or weigh more than 50 kilograms.

Artificial intelligence can predict Supreme Court decisions better than some experts. Decision outcomes included whether the court reversed a lower court's decision and how each justice voted. The model then looked at the features of each case for that year and predicted decision outcomes. "Every time we've kept score, it hasn't been a terribly pretty picture for humans," says the study's lead author, Daniel Katz, a law professor at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.