This morning, millions of people woke up and impulsively checked Facebook. They were greeted immediately by content curated by Facebook's newsfeed algorithms. To some degree, this news might have influenced their perceptions of the day's news, the economy's outlook, and the state of the election. Every year, millions of people apply for jobs. Increasingly, their success might lie, in part, in the hands of computer programs tasked with matching applications to job openings.

An update to his DoNotPay bot works by asking users a simple set of questions about their circumstances, before advising them on the best course of action--often helping them draft an effective form letter to apply to their local councils for emergency housing. Councils have to take every letter seriously, and using Freedom of Information requests, he's researched the best ways to prompt them into acting on his bot's clients' behalf. The bot's creator, Joshua Browder, a 19-year-old Brit studying at Stanford University in California, told Ars that since the update launched last Wednesday "almost every local government in the UK has signed up for the website." "I can see on the back end that they are actively trying out the service for themselves," he added. He's also working with Centrepoint, one of the UK's largest and most recognisable homelessness charities, with volunteer lawyers helping out to finesse the legal advice his bot provides.

Yes, artificial technology is rapidly improving -- and true, AI will invade the legal business before you know it -- but futuristic AI-infused robot lawyers aren't going to replace legal pros anytime soon. AI-based tools and technologies created and customized for legal work are coming for sure, though. AI-enabled software can use pattern recognition and extreme machine learning algorithms to help legal pros work faster. Their capability digest vast amounts of information and interpret it can help you work smarter, too. The time to start thinking about the first wave of AI legal tools is now.

With the push of a button, 300 drones ascend from a ground station and float over a nearby lake. You can't see them at first--it's well after sundown--but you can hear them falling into formation. The music starts, the drones light up, and the choreography begins. That's the hope for both Disney and Intel, anyway, as they prepare to launch previews of their "Starbright Holidays" extravaganza in Orlando. The drones are Intel's new Shooting Star quadcopters, and while this isn't Intel's biggest air show--the company synced up 500 of them earlier this year in Sydney--it will be the first implementation in which Disney's imagineers helped guide the production.

Recent discussion in the public sphere about algorithmic classification has involved tension between competing notions of what it means for a probabilistic classification to be fair to different groups. We formalize three fairness conditions that lie at the heart of these debates, and we prove that except in highly constrained special cases, there is no method that can satisfy these three conditions simultaneously. Moreover, even satisfying all three conditions approximately requires that the data lie in an approximate version of one of the constrained special cases identified by our theorem. These results suggest some of the ways in which key notions of fairness are incompatible with each other, and hence provide a framework for thinking about the trade-offs between them.

Microsoft's President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith was in town yesterday to share advice for how to boost the entrepreneurial scene and tech industry in Milwaukee and beyond. The Appleton native and Columbia University Law School graduate was here to speak "On the Issues" with Mike Gousha at Marquette University Law School, but his day actually got started before that. In the morning Smith met with the local startup scene. Then came the 12:15 forum when he was interviewed by Gousha. Smith later led a lecture at MU with attorneys as the primary audience on intellectual property law and policy.

This episode brings two esteemed experts to discuss these issues and present guidance for both commercial companies and the public sector policymakers. Dr. David A. Bray began work in public service at age 15, later serving in the private sector before returning as IT Chief for the CDC's Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program during 9/11; volunteering to deploy to Afghanistan to "think differently" on military and humanitarian issues; and serving as a Senior Executive advocating for increased information interoperability, cybersecurity, and civil liberty protections. He serves as a Visiting Executive In-Residence at Harvard University, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Visiting Associate at the University of Oxford. He has received both the Arthur S, Flemming Award and Roger W. Jones Award for Executive Leadership. In 2015, he was chosen to be an Eisenhower Fellow to Taiwan and Australia and in 2016, Business Insider named him one of the top "24 Americans Who Are Changing the World".

The day before the election, as millions of Americans were feeling confident that the vast majority of the country shared their opinions, a pair of researchers at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute published a paper that looked closely at something many of us ignored: the provenance of political tweets. Where do they come from? How many are, in reality, made by humans? And if not, who is designing these crude straw-bots? Analyzing Twitter during three televised debates, they discovered that 20% of all political tweets were made by bots.

UNITED NATIONS – U.N. member states on Tuesday condemned widespread human rights violations in North Korea and expressed concerns that funds needed to ease the dire humanitarian crisis are spent on Pyongyang's missile and nuclear arms programs. A resolution drafted by Japan and the European Union was adopted by a consensus vote in the General Assembly's committee on humanitarian affairs. Following the vote, diplomats from China, Pyongyang's ally, Russia, Syria, Iran and Cuba took the floor to state they were disassociating themselves from the outcome. The full General Assembly is expected to vote on the measure next month. North Korea has conducted two nuclear tests this year and test-fired a series of missiles, even as 18 million North Koreans out of a total population of 25 million are facing food shortages, Japan's ambassador said. "The authorities of the DPRK (North Korea), without regard to the plight of their own citizens, divert their limited resources to develop weapons of mass destruction," said Ambassador Koro Bessho.

For instance, there is legislation that governs the use of citizen data by analysts and policy makers to ensure that privacy is maintained and equal treatment is given to all. This is a crucial aspect of public service, and there have been numerous stories about the implicit bias in AI systems, whether because of biased data used to train the systems, or a bias in the algorithms behind them. For AI to thrive in public service therefore, developers need to understand these legal frameworks and how they might apply to AI based decision support.