According to a recent report in Futurism, US law firm Baker & Hostetler, has become the first law firm to employ the IBM Watson-powered lawyer'ROSS'- the world's first artificially intelligent attorney. ROSS will now be used in the firm's bankruptcy practice; with other firms making similar plans. According to this blog post on the IBM website, all one has to do is ask ROSS a question as a client would to his lawyer. And instead of spending countless hours on going through voluminous documents, ROSS will use a "cognitive computing system" to go through the relevant legislations and judicial pronouncements within a matter of seconds. Not only can ROSS can sort through more than a billion text documents each second, IBM claims that it learns from feedback and gets smarter over time.

On a spring afternoon in 2014, Brisha Borden was running late to pick up her god-sister from school when she spotted an unlocked kid's blue Huffy bicycle and a silver Razor scooter. Borden and a friend grabbed the bike and scooter and tried to ride them down the street in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Coral Springs. Just as the 18-year-old girls were realizing they were too big for the tiny conveyances--which belonged to a 6-year-old boy--a woman came running after them saying, "That's my kid's stuff." Borden and her friend immediately dropped the bike and scooter and walked away. But it was too late--a neighbor who witnessed the heist had already called the police. Borden and her friend were arrested and charged with burglary and petty theft for the items, which were valued at a total of 80. Compare their crime with a similar one: The previous summer, 41-year-old Vernon Prater was picked up for shoplifting 86.35 worth of tools from a nearby Home Depot store. Prater was the more seasoned criminal. He had already been convicted of armed robbery and attempted armed robbery, for which he served five years in prison, in addition to another armed robbery charge. Borden had a record, too, but it was for misdemeanors committed when she was a juvenile.

Artificial intelligence has come a long way since the term was coined in the 1950s, but computers still don't think and feel in quite the same way humans do. Yet rapid progress has the federal government, and others, thinking about new legal and policy issues. Artificial intelligence has been around for decades. Think airplanes that fly on auto-pilot. Today, that technology is developing quickly, thanks to breakthroughs in computer science.

Two's company but three's a crowd according to dating app Tinder, which has launched a legal bid to kill off a rival app aimed at people looking for threesomes. Tinder, owned by global dating firm Match Group, is alleging trademark infringement in the high court against 3nder, an independent app for non-monogamous couples and their potential partners. It wants its smaller competitor to shut down and erase its presence from the web entirely to avoid "confusion" between the two apps, claiming the alleged similarity gives 3nder an "unfair advantage". But 3nder launched its fightback in bizarre fashion on Monday, calling on its users to send Tinder pictures of their socks via Twitter, using the hashtag #TinderSuckMySocks. Founder Dimo Trifonov vowed to fight Tinder, which he accused of "loading a nuclear weapon" against his firm, which employs just eight people.

Drone use across the U.S. is soaring, and the skies may soon get even more crowded, as the Federal Aviation Administration expects sales of these unmanned aerial vehicles to jump to seven million in 2020 from about 2.5 million this year. Interest in drones for both commercial and casual purposes is raising not only safety and privacy concerns, but also thorny legal questions about where and when drones should be allowed to fly--and who gets to decide. On one side are those who say property owners' rights generally extend up about 500 feet, which gives them the right to prevent drones from flying or hovering over their land. They say drones pose a much bigger threat to security and privacy than jets and airplanes, which travel at higher altitudes, in airspace regulated by the FAA. They say drones represent the next frontier in aviation, and as such, decisions about where and when they can fly should be made collectively, not by landowners through tort law.

Washington: The world's first artificial intelligence lawyer has been employed by a law firm in the US, which will use the robot to assist its various teams in legal research. The robot called'ROSS' is built upon Watson, IBM's cognitive computer. With the support of Watson's cognitive computing and natural language processing capabilities, lawyers can ask ROSS their research question and the robot reads through the law, gathers evidence, draws inferences and returns highly relevant, evidence-based answers. ROSS also monitors the law around the clock to notify users of new court decisions that can affect a case. The programme continually learns from the lawyers who use it to bring back better results each time.

This week on TechRepublic's Business Technology Weekly podcast, hosts Dan Patterson and Bill Detwiler discuss how swarm AI won the Kentucky derby, and the real world, practical impact of artificial intelligence. Headlines: Swarm AI predicts the 2016 Kentucky Derby Hope Reese Big news in the AI world this week! HOME NEWS Baidu to Shift to AI After Government Probe Baidu is planning to switch toward developing artificial intelligence after a government probe that affected its core business. BERLIN, GERMANY - SEPTEMBER 04: Visitors look at smartphones at the Lenovo stand at the 2015 IFA consumer electronics and appliances trade fair on September 4, 2015 in Berlin, Germany. The PC maker posted its first loss in six years in 2015.

Paul Herzlich works in Google's legal department and helped develop a special sensor for "pressure sores" by those who use wheelchairs. Paul Herzlich works in Google's legal department and helped develop a special sensor for "pressure sores" by those who use wheelchairs. For most of us, eye tracking technology sounds interesting. Eye tracking allows users to move a cursor around a computer or mobile device simply by moving your eyes and head. Oded Ben Dov initially used eye tracking technology to develop a video game that he showed off on Israeli TV.

Google this week announced a new messaging app with strong encryption, meaning that your communications can't be wiretapped. But there's a catch: You have to turn on that feature yourself. The tech titan's plan to launch Allo this summer without encryption by default has drawn withering criticism from some quarters. Google's decision to disable end-to-end encryption by default in its new #Allo chat app is dangerous, and makes it unsafe. "I, too, would prefer that Allo be encrypted by default," said Kevin Bankston, director of New America's Open Technology Institute.

California has been in a drought for almost five years now, making water an extraordinarily precious resource--one that Californian residents and governments are eager to protect. On Wednesday, California suspended its mandatory drought restrictions, saying that the state is turning over responsibility of the water restrictions to individual communities, letting them set their own restrictions based on their water budgets, with the state only stepping in if the budgets are unrealistically optimistic. But how can a community keep track of its water budget? IBM's Watson program has already beaten Jeopardy!, invented its own recipes, assisted in treating patients with chronic conditions, and is currently used by over 80,000 developers. Now, in partnership with environmental analytics company OmniEarth, Watson will help save the existence of humans on Earth--or at least in California.