Robots are no strangers to the legal profession thanks to tools like LawGeex, but one has emerged recently that appears to be a Robin Hood of the modern world. DoNotPay is the brainchild of 19-year-old Stanford University student Joshua Browder, and it has already successfully contested some 160,000 parking tickets across London and New York. It's free to use and has reportedly saved its users some 4 million in less than two years. "DoNotPay has launched the UK's first robot lawyer as an experiment," the site explains. "It can talk to you, generate documents and answer questions. It is just like a real lawyer, but is completely free and doesn't charge any commission."

Robots are already no strangers to the legal profession thanks to tools like LawGeex, but recently one has emerged that appears to be a sort of "Robin Hood" of the modern world. DoNotPay is the brainchild of 19-year-old Stanford University student Joshua Browder, and it has already successfully contested some 160,000 parking tickets across London and New York. It's free to use and has reportedly saved its users some 4 million in less than two years. "DoNotPay has launched the UK's first robot lawyer as an experiment," the site explains. "It can talk to you, generate documents and answer questions. It is just like a real lawyer, but is completely free and doesn't charge any commission."

The idea that Snowden is still walking the American streets, virtually or otherwise, is infuriating to his former employers in the U.S.-intelligence community. Its leaders no longer make ominous jokes about wanting to put him on a drone kill list -- as former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden did in 2013 -- but they still vilify him and maintain that he did real harm to America's safety and international standing. While Snowden's leaks revealed the NSA's controversial and possibly unconstitutional bulk collection of domestic internet traffic and telephone metadata, they also exposed technical details about many other classified activities, including overseas surveillance programs, secret diplomatic arrangements, and operations targeting legitimate adversaries. The spy agencies warn that the public doesn't comprehend the degree of damage done to their protective capabilities, even as events like the Orlando nightclub massacre demonstrate the destructive reach of terrorist ideology. The fallout from Snowden's actions may have prompted a debate about security and privacy that even President Obama acknowledges "will make us stronger," but there has been no such reassessment, at least officially, of Snowden himself. He still faces charges of violating the federal Espionage Act, crimes that could carry a decades-long prison sentence.

A sinister threat is brewing deep inside the technology laboratories of Silicon Valley, according to Professor Stephen Hawking. Artificial Intelligence, disguised as helpful digital assistants and self-driving vehicles, is gaining a foothold, and it could one day spell the end for mankind. The world-renowned professor has warned robots could evolve faster than humans and their goals will be unpredictable. Professor Stephen Hawking (pictured) claimed AI would be difficult to stop if the appropriate safeguards are not in place. During a talk in Cannes, Google's chairman Eric Schmidt said AI will be developed for the benefit of humanity and there will be systems in place in case anything goes awry.

Soteria Intelligence is excited to announce the company's research and development focused on creating the next generation of social media threat intelligence solutions with the power to learn and become more effective over time. Instead of taking an approach that looks at combinations of keywords, conversations on a map or other social media analytics that produce a high number of recurring false positives, Soteria Intelligence is implementing machine learning to use false positives, vetted by analysts, as educational tools that continually improve system accuracy. The company is also training its system with proprietary data on past social media threats and, through the understanding of false positives and integration of historical data, combined with natural language processing, image recognition, sentiment analysis and other functionality, Soteria Intelligence is revolutionizing the way social media threats are identified and assessed. "As someone who has spent the past 10 years guiding large organizations throughout the world on complex social media initiatives while using social media analytics tools along the way, I understand where they shine and fall short. I also see what's needed to accurately identify threatening social media behavior on the horizon," stated Aaron Schoenberger, Founder and CEO of Soteria Intelligence.

The White House wants to hear what you think about the future of artificial intelligence. Earlier this month, the Office of Science and Technology Policy announced it was hosting several public workshops on the technology, part of an effort to promote its use in government. Now, OSTP is asking the members of the public to send in their thoughts about the social and legal implications of artificial intelligence, among other topics. While potentially useful in government, especially in fields such as criminal justice, artificial intelligence "carries risks and presents complex policy challenges," OSTP's call for information says. The public input will help OSTP recommend "directions for research."

With the theme of'artificial intelligence' one of the hot conference topics for 2016, Sue Bramall looks at how it can be used in legal services marketing. In her article, first published in Professional Marketing magazine, Sue explores how law firms currently use data services to obtain performance reviews, and assesses new ways of analyzing performance.

It's a good thing to think about the technology of the future. Especially if you're politicians and the future may have a big impact. Considering how frequently we see politicians ignore future technological change, it might be encouraging that the EU Parliament is at least considering what happens when our new robot overlords enslave us. Except that the report that the EU Parliament has come out with... is ridiculous. The current insufficient legal framework on data protection and ownership is of great concern due to the (expected massive) flow of data arising from the use of robotics and AI.

We have constructed this page in order to sketch how AI is linked to various other disciplines, in both the sciences and humanities. We have done this not only in the hope of helping students and others who are just starting to study AI but also of facilitating further interactions between the AI community and other communities. The set of links is not exhaustive, nor is the explanation given for each individual link. In particular, we do not include all disciplines that do or could use AI tools and/or contribute tools to AI. We concentrate rather on disciplines where there is profound interaction in terms of research ideas.

In 1942, Russian science fiction writer Isaac Asimov drew up his'Three Laws of Robotics': 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2) A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. For 75 years, these clauses have inspired research and thinking on robot rights. They were even taken up in the first'Ethics Charter for Robots' drawn up by South Korea in 2007. However, today Asimov's laws seem rather simplistic and obsolete as they are centred on humans rather than robots. Nowadays ethics and the rights of machines are starting to go further.