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A recent post highlighted how artificial intelligence (AI) is already playing important roles in health care, and concluded that expanded use of AI may be ready for us before we are ready for it. One example of the kind of problem we'll face is: who would we sue if care that an AI recommended or performed went wrong? Because, you know, always follow the money. Last week Stanford's One Hundred Year Study On Artificial Intelligence released its 2016 report, looking at the progress and potential of AI, as well as some recommendations for public policy. The report urged that we be cautious about both too little regulation and too much, as the former could lead to undesirable consequences and the latter could stifle innovation.

After graduating with a law degree from the University of Saskatchewan, Andrew identified a problem amid the legal hierarchy – by experiencing it first-hand. "I worked at a small law firm to pay my way through university and law school. When I started out I did a lot of the grunt work that senior lawyers don't do. Legal research takes about 30% of a lawyer's time. Currently legal research works by inputting keywords to search a massive databases of cases – you type in a query and get thousands of results, which a lawyer has to trawl through to pick out key meanings. I was doing that, and I can tell you that it's a mess and takes a long time".

Motivated by electricity consumption metering, we extend existing nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) algorithms to use linear measurements as observations, instead of matrix entries. The objective is to estimate multiple time series at a fine temporal scale from temporal aggregates measured on each individual series. Furthermore, our algorithm is extended to take into account individual autocorrelation to provide better estimation, using a recent convex relaxation of quadratically constrained quadratic program. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world electricity consumption datasets illustrate the effectiveness of our matrix recovery algorithms.

Healthcare organizations are struggling to find ways to manage the risks of massive data breaches, which have proven hard to detect, often taking months to discover. In 1996 the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted. The Accountability portion of the law requires that healthcare providers protect the privacy of patient health information and includes security measures that must be followed. Provider success has been mixed and has recently come under intense scrutiny due to the number and size of reportable breaches of health information. There are several major contributors to this increase. The first is the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Is your firm prepared to welcome in an era of legal practice using artificial intelligence (AI)? Where is this technology headed and why must law firm leaders fully understand how cognitive computing works in order to benefit from it? With the vast amounts of structured and unstructured data firms have to deal with, there is increasing pressure from nimble technologies and clients to attract AI and cognitive technologies. Understanding the market implications of digital business information and trends is now key to attaining the best possible performance, revenue gains and cost savings. Berwin Leighton Paisner was one of the first firms to embrace AI in the UK, developing its'contract robot' which promised to complete work in seconds that would have otherwise taken a team of paralegals months to do.

Remember that endangered anteater-esque ball of scales from Favreau's recent film, The Jungle Book? Over one million pangolins have likely been poached and illegally traded in the last decade, especially because of their importance in Chinese medicine and food. And the internet hasn't exactly helped its plight. As wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC reports, their researchers investigated 39 Chinese e-commerce websites over June and July 2016; a single survey in the first month alone detected 153 ads for pangolin scales and meat and live specimen from 94 traders across six sites. Virtual wildlife trafficking poses a serious threat to not just the pangolin.

Five major technology companies said Wednesday that they had created an organization to set the ground rules for protecting humans -- and their jobs -- in the face of rapid advances in artificial intelligence. The Partnership on AI, unites Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft in an effort to ease public fears of machines that are learning to think for themselves and perhaps ease corporate anxiety over the prospect of government regulation of this new technology. The organization has been created at a time of significant public debate about artificial intelligence technologies that are built into a variety of robots and other intelligent systems, including self-driving cars and workplace automation. The industry group introduced a set of basic ethical standards for engineering development and scientific research that its five members have agreed upon. In a conference call on Wednesday, five artificial intelligence researchers representing the companies said they thought the technology would be a major force in the world for social and economic benefits, but they acknowledged the potential for misuse in a wide variety of ways.

With artificial intelligence (AI) in law, the question gets particularly interesting, as on the one hand, the technology could in theory mean easier access to legal services for those who cannot afford it. On the other, lower costs mean less resources to spend on new attorneys and on maintaining those whose work could be done faster, cheaper and arguably better by a machine. Some law firms are already making the transition to AI . Among them are Reed Smith (which adopted RAVN's document analysis tool), Baker & Hostetler (which adopted ROSS for legal research), DLA Piper and Clifford Chance (which both entered contractual agreements with Kira Systems this summer). And while some partners and clients may rejoice in the benefits of stacking AI against some of the biggest challenges facing law firm budgets today, some find the technology to be a threat to the profession.

This year legal tech companies and law firms that have developed legal AI applications will have a dedicated category for the 2nd'Global Annual Achievement Awards for Artificial Intelligence'. Those developing legal AI technology can join the competition under the: 'Best use of AI in Legal Tech' category, which is defined as an: 'Application of AI in the Legal Tech Industry. This can be applications developed by law firms themselves, technology companies or consultancies providing products and services to the legal sector.' The legal tech category is one of 20 main AI prize categories this year following a successful first year. The awards are organised by UK-based Home.AI, a forum for AI and machine learning across the entire sector, including legal tech, fin tech and more specific areas such as Natural Language Processing and AI in robotics.