Uber has hit back at claims a key sensor on its self driving car was stolen from arch rival Waymo. It said its self-driving sensor technology was'fundamentally different' from Waymo's, blasting the Alphabet unit's claim that it profited from stolen files in the race to roll out the first driverless car. Uber said in a federal court filing that 14,000 of Waymo's computer files on autonomous technology never ended up on its servers, despite Waymo's claim that its former executive, Anthony Levandowski, stole them before joining Uber. Waymo sued Uber in February, seeking a preliminary injunction to stop it from using trade secrets and other intellectual property at the center of the case. High-profile: Levandowski, a'swaggering' six-foot-seven tech leader, is one of Silicon Valley's most significant figures in the development of self-driving cars In lidar -- or light detection and ranging -- scanning, one or more lasers sends out short pulses, which bounce back when they hit an obstacle, whether clouds, leaves or rocks.

Uber has begun to mount its defense against allegations that the ride-hailing company is using technology stolen from Waymo, the self-driving car company spun out of Google. Uber claimed in a federal court filing Friday that it began developing its own self-driving technology in 2015, before it acquired Otto, a self-driving trucking startup founded by several former Google employees. The filing, which opposes a Waymo motion for a preliminary injunction against Uber, contains Uber's most detailed defense to date since Waymo accused it of the "calculated theft" of its LiDAR technology in February. "Both of [Waymo's] central premises – that former Waymo employees brought thousands of confidential Waymo documents to Uber to build a copycat LiDAR and that Uber's LiDAR closely mimics Waymo's single-lens design – are demonstrably false," the filing states. "A cursory inspection of Uber's LiDAR and Waymo's allegations fall like a house of cards."

Uber has finally responded via the courts to Waymo's allegation that it's using the Alphabet company's Lidar technology. The ride-hailing company called Waymo's injunction motion to stop using technology that was allegedly misappropriated from Google servers a "misfire." It also insisted that because it's developing multi-lens LiDAR technology instead of the single-lens that Waymo uses, it's not using stolen technology. Waymo's lawsuit against Uber claims that former Google engineer, Anthony Levandowski stole 14,000 confidential documents pertaining to the search giant's LiDAR tech and that Uber is using the technology found in those documents. After he left Google Levandowski went on to form the self-driving trucking company Otto that was acquired by Uber for $680 million.

We present an algorithm that can anticipate tax evasion by modeling the co-evolution of tax schemes with auditing policies. Malicious tax non-compliance, or evasion, accounts for billions of lost revenue each year. Unfortunately when tax administrators change the tax laws or auditing procedures to eliminate known fraudulent schemes another potentially more profitable scheme takes it place. Modeling both the tax schemes and auditing policies within a single framework can therefore provide major advantages. In particular we can explore the likely forms of tax schemes in response to changes in audit policies.

Legal services are notoriously complicated, not to mention costly for those who need to access them. However, Chrissie Lightfoot, a leading futurist, entrepreneur and lawyer, has come up with an innovative solution. Instead of forking out for a human advisor, clients can now use Robot Lawyer LISA, an impartial Legal Intelligence Support Assistant, to draw up Non-Disclosure Agreements. The artificially intelligent platform can create legally binding documents in under seven minutes at absolutely no cost to the user. Allowing individuals and businesses to use LISA to protect themselves without any prior legal knowledge. LISA is also the first law robot to provide unbiased and objective assistance to both parties, allowing users to avoid having to engage traditional human lawyers on either side.

A lively discussion is currently under way in the business world regarding possible applications of intelligent IT systems and autonomous machines and equipment. Rapid technical development in these areas has spurred the imagination of users. The application areas are extremely diverse, and include production robots in industry, drones and self-driving delivery robots in logistics and warehousing, healthcare robots and driverless vehicles. What sounds like science fiction has already become reality in some cases, with intelligent robots being particularly common in production and logistics. From a legal viewpoint, there are still a host of unanswered questions around robotics and the artificial intelligence (AI) incorporated into robots. The European Parliament accordingly passed a resolution with recommendations to the European Commission on civil law rules on robotics (2015/2103(INL)) on 16 February 2017; the resolution was adopted with 396 votes in favour, 123 against and 85 abstentions.

Robots are the technology of the future. But the current legal system is incapable of handling them. This generic statement is often the premise for considerations about the possibility of awarding rights (and liabilities) to these machines at some, less-than clearly identified, point in time. Discussing the adequacy of existing regulation in accommodating new technologies is certainly necessary, but the ontological approach is incorrect. The recent Resolution of the European Parliament (henceforth Resolution) has great political relevance and strategic importance in the development of a European Robotic Industry.

The global scientific community has come a long way since the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a concept to its modern-day appeal as a field with near-limitless potential in turning around the way activities are performed in society. The ultimate frontier for AI systems continues to be achieving a level of sophistication that matches that of the human mind. There appears to be a lot of optimism around the potential of AI in enhancing government initiatives such as Make in India, Skill India, and Digital India which have put India on the path of a technological revolution. Since the effectiveness of AI, machine learning, robotics and cognitive automation increases with a rise in the quality and quantity of training data that the systems are exposed to, conditions are ripe for India to leverage Big Data for intelligent decisions and emerge as a leader in AI. AI techniques can be applied in large-scale public initiatives ranging from crop insurance schemes to tax fraud detection to enhancing our security strategy.

One of the main arguments the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari makes in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is that humans differ from other species because we can cooperate flexibly in large numbers, united in cause and spirit not by anything real, but by the fictions of our collective imagination. Examples of these fictions include gods, nations, money, and human rights, which are supported by religions, political structures, trade networks, and legal institutions, respectively. As an entrepreneur, I'm increasingly appreciative of and fascinated by the power of collective fictions. Building a technology company is hard. Lost deals, fragile egos, impulsive choices, bugs in the code, missed deadlines, frantic sprints to deliver on customer requests, the doldrums of execution: Any number of things can temper the initial excitement of starting a new venture. Mission is another fiction required to keep a team united and driven when the proverbial shit hits the fan. While a strong, charismatic group of leaders is key to establishing and sustaining a company mission, companies don't exist in a vacuum -- they exist in a market, and they participate in the larger collective fictions of the zeitgeist in which they operate.

LONDON • Machines or software may eventually replace a third of graduate-level jobs worldwide, with legal frameworks for regulating employment and safety becoming rapidly outdated, says a new report by the International Bar Association (IBA), a global forum for the legal profession set up in 1947. The innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics could force governments to order quotas of human workers, upend traditional working practices and pose new dilemmas for insuring driverless cars, says the report, released this week. The IBA's survey found that the previous manufacturing model of poorer, emerging economies having a competitive advantage due to cheaper workforces will soon be eroded by robot production lines and intelligent computer systems. To illustrate, a German car worker costs more than £40 (S$70) an hour, but a robot costs only between £5 and £8 an hour. "A production robot is thus cheaper than a worker in China," the report notes.