New York City has created a 5-million fund for women working in the fields of film and theater, becoming the first municipality in the U.S. to finance such an initiative. The fund, announced Thursday by the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment, will provide grants to support film and theater projects by and about women. New York also will hold workshops and a film-financing conference designed to connect women with money for their projects; conduct a screenwriting competition that culminates in a series to air on New York's Channel 25; broadcast an additional block of programming on Channel 25 devoted to women; and fund research about gender in the field of film directing. "We believe we're the first municipality in the country to take on this issue," MOME Commissioner Julie Menin said. "We think by creating these economic pathways of opportunity, that is one of the best ways we can contribute."

UK-based legal AI company RAVN Systems has formally launched a new application to review documents for legal professional privilege (LPP) using its cognitive engine. The new service will be branded the'LPP Robot' and will be offered alongside RAVN's other AI capabilities. The system reduces the time taken in such reviews by over 80% and greatly reduces the level of manpower needed to conduct such a task. Accuracy levels are also improved. This is an important step as the ability to spot LPP documents is of critical importance to lawyers, especially where investigations of large company data sets are involved or when part of a wider discovery process due to litigation. It matters because LPP material represents communications between a lawyer and their client, which could also include privileged material between an inhouse lawyer and an executive in their company.

World-leading tech company IBM is to acquire risk and compliance business Promontory and combine it with its AI division Watson to form a new offering to the corporate sector via Watson Financial Services. US company Promontory has around 600 staff and advises companies on compliance and risk, much as many large UK and US law firms already do. The combination with Watson and its AI capabilities will allow IBM to provide clients with a more automated approach to risk and compliance review, just as some legal AI companies have already been helping some law firms to develop similar capabilities to provide to their clients. Although the company is not branding this as a move into law firm territory, undoubtedly it will have some impact given the increasing focus from lawyers on helping their clients with risk and regulatory compliance. Moreover, since the financial crisis of 2008 the level of investment from large corporates and banks in risk and compliance has growth massively, something that lawyers were quick to target.

It was an accidental discovery. Miami based start up, Premonition, was set up to do legal analytics. They assembled the World's largest litigation database and trained an artificial intelligence system to read it. While primarily focused on finding the performance of individual lawyers before specific judges to determine potential relationships, they noticed that a particularly prolific foreclosure attorney produced an 83% win rate for one of his bank clients, while another was only winning 16% of their foreclosures, essentially the same case types. "We couldn't figure it out and had all kinds of foolish theories why," Premonition co-founder and inventor, Toby Unwin confides.

The first comic that cartoonist Gene Luen Yang ever bought was a two-in-one issue that featured a man made out of rocks and an intergalactic cyborg. He loved comics, especially the kind that featured space aliens. So he started making his own. He and a friend drew comics and sold them for 50 cents each. Among their earliest creations were the "Trans-Smurfers," Smurfs who transformed into robotic fruit. They also flew and fought crime.

Some of the world's largest tech companies are coming together to form a partnership aimed at educating the public about the advancements of artificial intelligence and ensure they meet ethical standards. "We believe that artificial intelligence technologies hold great promise for raising the quality of people's lives and can be leveraged to help humanity address important global challenges such as climate change, food, inequality, health, and education," the group stated in a series of "tenets." Another nexus of interest will be around ethics, with the group inviting academic experts to work with companies on AI for the best of humanity. But it's not clear whether this means opposing working with government surveillance authorities, or opposing forms of online censorship.

It is Friday, Sept. 30. A Mountain View company is teaching robots to make and deliver pizzas. Here's what is happening in the Golden State: The superintendent of Yosemite National Park is stepping down amid an ongoing investigation into allegations of a hostile work environment. Don Neubacher's resignation is effective as of Nov. 1. Kelly Martin, now chief of Fire and Aviation Management at Yosemite, cataloged multiple incidents of alleged gender bias, including sexual harassment, that she encountered in her 32 years of federal service.

IBM has agreed to buy Promontory Financial Group -- a consultancy so influential it has been dubbed the industry's "shadow regulator" -- in a move that could extend artificial intelligence into every aspect of banking. Under the deal, which was announced Thursday, Promontory's stable of ex-regulators and former industry executives will be tasked with teaching IBM's Watson to address risk management and compliance issues at banks. The goal is to create an AI capable of sifting through reams of data collected by banks to find potential problems and suggest solutions. "We can very quickly help financial institutions have a much more complete and continuously updated view of what the landscape is," Alistair Rennie, a general manager for industry solutions at IBM, said in an interview. "There are systems now that throw out alerts all the time. The work of going through which ones need follow-up and documentation is very manual and very inefficient. We believe we can absolutely solve that problem with a cognitive solution. We can make it far more effective, far more automated."

Five of the world's largest technology companies have come together to shed light on the ongoing development of artificial intelligence. The entities involved are Facebook, Google and its DeepMind subsidiary, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM, and the group's new nonprofit organization will grow to include a number of AI research groups and academics. Announced today, the coalition will be known as the Partnership on AI and it will be co-chaired by Microsoft Research chief Eric Horvitz and DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman. Apple is in talks with the group, but has not yet decided to join the organization. The partnership has two main focuses.

While many people have prejudices against certain groups, it can often be easy to hide these in public. But a new computer programme may soon be able to reveal these hidden biases. Researchers have created a programme that scrutinises people's body language for signs of racial prejudice. Researchers have created a programme that scrutinises people's body language for signs of racial prejudice. Researchers from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy wanted to see if an algorithm could accurately predict if someone was racist.