A Kansas Tinder user was recently kidnapped, beaten and held against her will for six days by a man she met via the app. Shane Steven Allen faces one charge of kidnapping and four of aggravated battery. Should the convictions go through, Allen could serve a 32 year prison sentence. The woman, a 20 year-old student at the University of Kansas, was kidnapped on April 12th and was returned to her sorority on April 18th with multiple injuries including a pair of black eyes, broken blood vessels in her eyes and multiple bruises and abrasions, according to local news outlet Lawrence Journal World.

Clients at the law firm BakerHostetler will now be served by a computerized lawyer. Called ROSS, it's designed to process normal speech, and give a sensible reply to questions. The bankruptcy team, comprised of almost 50 people, would use it to quickly power through time-consuming legal research, Fortune reports. It's kind of like a search engine, but meant to be smarter, providing the only most relevant answers to queries. ROSS also keeps tabs on any new court decisions that could affect a legal team's case.

The law firm BakerHostetler officially hired the first artificial intelligence lawyer. IBM makes the robot lawyer, and apparently, it will work in the firm's bankruptcy practice -- because what better way to test out a robot lawyer than by putting people with their lives crumbling around them in its virtual hands. Look, once I watched the entirety of "I, Robot" without sound on another guy's screen on a flight, so, yeah, you could say I already know a lot about artificial intelligence. But not even I, with my extensive experience in the subject, could predict robotics would have already developed so far, a law firm would actually hire an artificially intelligent lawyer. IBM named this lawyer robot "ROSS" because, even though he is a robot, he is first and foremost a lawyer and, therefore, very boring.

A century ago, more than 60,000 tigers roamed the wild. Today, that number has dwindled to around 3,200. Poaching is one of the main drivers of this steep decline. Humans have pushed tigers to near-extinction, whether for their skins, medicine or for trophy hunting. The same applies to other large animal species like elephants and rhinoceros that play unique and crucial roles in the ecosystems where they live. Human patrols serve as the most direct form of protection of endangered animals, especially in large national parks.

The first job after law school can be horrendous--not simply because of the intense workload and long hours, but also the drudgery. A huge amount of legal work given to those on the lowest rung of the ladder consists of reading through hundreds of pages of notes, articles, and case precedents, to provide senior lawyers with legal details that can help build their case. Fortunately, artificial intelligence is up to the task. So much so that century-old law firm BakerHostetler has formally hired its first "digital attorney," ROSS, as an artificially intelligent legal researcher. ROSS is working with BakerHostetler's bankruptcy team as part of a partnership first announced last month, at Vanderbilt Law School's "Watson, Esq." conference on law and artificial intelligence.

If there's one thing that Australia's two main political parties agree on, it's that replicating Silicon Valley on local shores is a Very Good Thing. The governing Liberal/National coalition and opposition Labor party are both advocating more spending on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) teaching and back tax tweaks to replicate American arrangements felt to foster startups. If we do these things, we're told, a few weeks from now a new generation of coding-capable kids will come up with lots of great ideas that put a rocket under Australia's economy. Casey penned the piece containing that quote in response to the surfacing of the old Tweet below. And she follows up with the "overthrow of capitalism".

"The legal industry is ripe for innovation," says attorney and journalist Robert Ambrogi, who covers the role of technology in law. In an influential April 13 blog post, Ambrogi proclaimed a boom in legal tech startups based on a more than doubling of listings on startup directory AngelList. Ambrogi has since produced his own streamlined listing that currently has nearly 500 companies offering technologies to the legal industry. Several are courting attorneys who need better, cheaper ways to sort through the avalanche of legal filings, rulings, and spiderwebs of citations between cases, from the local to federal level. The innovation upsurge may in part be generational.

Law firm Baker & Hostetler has announced that they are employing IBM's AI Ross to handle their bankruptcy practice, which at the moment consists of nearly 50 lawyers. According to CEO and co-founder Andrew Arruda, other firms have also signed licenses with Ross, and they will also be making announcements shortly. Ross, "the world's first artificially intelligent attorney" built on IBM's cognitive computer Watson, was designed to read and understand language, postulate hypotheses when asked questions, research, and then generate responses (along with references and citations) to back up its conclusions. Ross also learns from experience, gaining speed and knowledge the more you interact with it. "You ask your questions in plain English, as you would a colleague, and ROSS then reads through the entire body of law and returns a cited answer and topical readings from legislation, case law and secondary sources to get you up-to-speed quickly," the website says.

A federal judge in California has ruled that three Illinois men can proceed with their class-action lawsuit challenging Facebook's facial recognition software used to identify people in uploaded photos. Adam Pezen, Carlo Licata and Nimesh Patel, all of the Chicago area, separately sued the social media giant last year, the Chicago Tribune reported (http://trib.in/1USAw5s The cases were combined and transferred last summer to the Northern District of California court. The men allege that Facebook was illegally collecting biometric data from people "tagged" in photos posted by other users and that its use of facial recognition software violates Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act. In 2008, Illinois enacted the Biometric Information Privacy Act to regulate how individuals, companies and organizations can collect and use biometric data, which determine a person's identity based on unique biological or physical characteristics.

Steven Hawking and Elon Musk are pretty smart guys. So when they say the Terminator movie franchise might be a preview of coming attractions, people take notice. But while these mega-brains spar against futurists such as Raymond Kurzweil, who welcome the coming of the age of the machines, it's important to understand the technology elements that are coming together to make Artificial Intelligence not only a reality, but ubiquitous in our daily lives. Cloud Computing is transforming the notion that individuals and companies have to own the physical equipment and space their data is housed in. A recent article in the Financial Times titled, Artificial Intelligence In the Cloud, The Next Great Disruptor, featured the idea that A.I. and Cloud are a match made in heaven.