"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.

Google has said it will ban ads for payday loans because they can be "deceptive or harmful". The ban, which will come into force globally from 13 July, will cover loans that can be due within 60 days and, in the US, loans that carry an annual interest rate of 36% or higher. In a blog post, Google's director of public policy, David Graff, wrote: "Research has shown that these loans can result in unaffordable payment and high default rates for users so we will be updating our policies globally to reflect that. "This change is designed to protect our users from deceptive or harmful financial products." The ban will not cover mortgages, car loans, student loans, commercial loans or credit cards, said Graff, adding: "We'll continue to review the effectiveness of this policy, but our hope is that fewer people will be exposed to misleading or harmful products." In a quote accompanying the announcement, Wade Henderson, the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said: "This new policy addresses many of the longstanding concerns shared by the entire civil rights community about predatory payday lending.

Search giant Google announced Wednesday that it would cut payday loan providers from its advertising platforms, citing the potentially damaging effects to borrowers of short-term, high-interest cash loans. "Research has shown that these loans can result in unaffordable payment and high default rates for users so we will be updating our policies globally to reflect that," Google's head of global product policy, David Graf,f said in an announcement posted to the company's blog. The average payday loan borrower spends five months of the year in debt, paying more in fees than originally received, according to research compiled by the Pew Charitable Trusts. "Our hope is that fewer people will be exposed to misleading or harmful products," Graff said. The policy change, which follows a similar move by Facebook, won plaudits from advocacy groups concerned with the impact of payday loans on low-income borrowers.

IMAGE: The novel approach to making systems forget data is called "machine unlearning " by the two researchers who are pioneering the concept. Instead of making a model directly depend on each training... view more Machine learning systems are everywhere. Computer software in these machines predict the weather, forecast earthquakes, provide recommendations based on the books and movies we like and, even, apply the brakes on our cars when we are not paying attention. To do this, computer systems are programmed to find predictive relationships calculated from the massive amounts of data we supply to them. Machine learning systems use advanced algorithms--a set of rules for solving math problems--to identify these predictive relationships using "training data."

In a development that's likely to make you feel older than MySpace, what may be one of the watershed moments early in the era of the viral Internet has just passed it's 10-year anniversary, and the Twitterverse has been having fun remembering. It's now more than a decade since Congolese job hopeful Guy Goma found himself offering his not-so-expert analysis of a legal dispute between Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and Apple Corp, The Beatles' record label, over trademark rights. Goma, after arriving at the BBC's West London headquarters for an interview for a job in the IT department on May 8, 2006, was mistaken for a studio guest, British technology journalist Guy Kewney, and ushered all the way into a live BBC News 24 studio. Looking baffled and nervously eying the cameras, the wrong Guy proceeded to have a go at answering presenter Karen Bowerman's questions about the future of downloading. Ten years on, his answers seem actually quite prescient. "Actually, if you can go everywhere you're gonna see a lot of people downloading through Internet and the website, everything they want," he said, adding: "It is going to be an easy way for everyone to get something through the Internet."

An alternate version private photo application is now available for users in Europe and Canada, leaving out features that violate privacy laws in those locales. Most notably, the facial-recognition tool isn't included in the software, which means users will have to do a bit more work to tag and identify who's in their snapshots. Facebook says that while it left the facial recognition out, the app will group photos that "appear to include the same face." Sounds kind of like facial recognition, right? Facebook says the app now functions more like object recognition, observing things like the distance between someone's eyes and ears rather than their unique facial features.

PAPIs is the premier forum for the presentation of new machine learning APIs, techniques, architectures and tools to build predictive applications. It is a community conference that brings together practitioners from industry, government and academia to present new developments, identify new needs and trends, and discuss the challenges of building real-world predictive applications. PAPIs '16 is the 3rd International Conference on Predictive APIs and Apps, featuring 3 tracks (Technical, Business, Research) and the 1st AI Startup Battle where the jury is an AI. The audience is a mix of developers, software engineers, all-round data scientists, machine learning specialists, researchers, decision makers, managers, strategists and innovators. Previous editions took place in Sydney (PAPIs '15), Barcelona (PAPIs '14), Paris and Valencia (PAPIs Connect).

WIRE)--Accenture (NYSE:ACN) is expanding its machine learning and operations analytics capabilities by acquiring OPS Rules, a boutique analytics consulting company that specializes in the application of data science to create supply chain and operations analytics solutions. When the acquisition is completed, Accenture will add new operations analytics professionals to its team that apply machine learning and optimization techniques to develop fresh and innovative analytics approaches for clients across many industries. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Founded in 2012, OPS Rules has offices in Waltham, Massachusetts and Richardson, Texas. OPS Rules is led by David Simchi-Levi, a Professor of Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and renowned supply chain and operations analytics expert.

The legal case for using drone strikes outside of armed conflict needs "urgent clarification" from ministers, a cross-party parliamentary committee has said. The government insists it does not have a "targeted killing" policy, but the UK was clearly willing to use lethal force overseas for counter-terrorism, the Joint Committee on Human Rights said. It follows the killing of a UK citizen in Syria last year by an RAF drone. The government says it takes "lawful action" over direct threats to the UK. Reyaad Khan, a British member of the so-called Islamic State group, was killed by an RAF drone in Syria last August.

In the intellectual property plan, the government said it will consider a new registration system to protect rights for AI-created works. The system's coverage would be limited to creations with certain levels of marketability. The plan also called for the establishment of a group of municipal, school and company representatives to support intellectual property education. "We will work to enable everyone to create and use intellectual property," Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said at a meeting of the Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters.