As technology continues to permeate society more and more, companies are exploring how advancements in tech can improve the legal profession. Many of these institutions are researching ways to make the legal system more efficient for all stakeholders through information technology. Where can lawyers who are interested in this growth industry learn about the progress being made from thought leaders in the field? In this episode of Law Technology Now, host Monica Bay speaks with Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology Executive Director Roland Vogl about the upcoming 2016 CodeX FutureLaw Conference. Roland reflects on his time as a student in The Stanford Program in International Legal Studies (SPILS) and how that path led him to work as an intellectual property lawyer and ultimately a Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School.

Baker & Hostetler is the first law firm to announce that it will use a ground-breaking artificial intelligence product for legal research. The law firm will license Ross Intelligence in its bankruptcy practice, report the Am Law Daily (sub. The research product uses IBM's Watson technology, which is designed to get smarter as it is used. Ross responds to lawyers' questions in natural language by reading through the law, gathering evidence and drawing inferences. The program learns from the lawyers who use it to refine its search results.

A judge ruled last week that a US class-action lawsuit arguing that Facebook's use of its facial recognition tech violates Illinois law will go ahead, despite the company's attempts to dismiss it. The company has used this data to develop powerful artificial intelligence that can identify individual's faces in photos with more than 97 per cent accuracy. This lets Facebook automatically tag people in your newly uploaded images. Not everyone is happy with the feature, however. Last year, a group of Facebook users in Illinois filed a civil complaint, claiming that it violated the state's Biometric Information Privacy Act.

Greece is making a renewed move for the Parthenon Marbles. The Museum of Modern Art is offering buyouts. A board member for L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art is going to work for Donald "Build the Wall" Trump. Plus, a gun sculpture is censored at a Texas university, gender in museums, Moscow's terrible art, a history of female robots and the historic photography of L.A. forefather Charles Lummis. There's a ton to read in today's Roundup: Related: The Metropolitan Museum of Art's chief digital officer, Sree Sreenivasan, says he will not participate in all-male panels.

AI has already made a lasting impact in the practice of law. Contracts, e-discovery and overall legal research have all changed thanks to AI, but as computers driven by ever-increasing processing power exhibit extraordinarily intelligent behaviour we can only assume such advances are far from over. Whether within the enterprise, partners, customers, opposing litigants or elsewhere, legal assets cannot hide from the likes of Watson, HAL, or other budding or to-be-conceived AI platforms. Empirical evaluation has found that a continuously adaptive machine learning approach can help lawyers keep an eye on ever-changing legal data, according to Jeremy Pickens, senior applied research scientist, Catalyst Repository Systems, which hosts and services document repositories for large-scale discovery and regulatory compliance. "Implementing a continuous protocol involves more than occasionally retraining an existing machine learning classifier, but rather integrating it into the machine learning system at a native level," Pickens says.

In the latest sign that the use of artificial intelligence may eventually become common in Big Law, Baker & Hostetler has emerged as the first law firm to make public that it has licensed the artificial intelligence product developed by ROSS Intelligence for bankruptcy matters. Marketed as "the world's first artificially intelligent attorney," ROSS Intelligence uses International Business Machine's Watson technology to allow users to ask natural language questions and get answers. The process not only constantly monitors the law, but more importantly uses "machine learning" capabilities to continuously improve its search results. ROSS Intelligence CEO and co-founder Andrew Arruda said that a few other firms have also signed licenses, and those announcements will come shortly. Arruda first mentioned that Baker & Hostetler had signed on as a client at Vanderbilt Law School's Watson, Esq.

San Francisco (AFP) - A US judge rejected a request by Facebook to toss out a civil suit accusing it of violating privacy with face-recognition software to help "tag" people in pictures. A lawsuit filed by three Illinois residents under the auspices of the state's Biometric Information Privacy Act can proceed, US District Court Judge James Donato said. "The court accepts as true plaintiffs' allegations that Facebook's face recognition technology involves a scan of face geometry that was done without plaintiffs' consent," he said in the ruling. It appeared that legislators in Illinois passed the act to address emerging biometric technology such as Facebook face-recognition software at issue in the case, according to the judge. Facebook had argued in a motion to dismiss that analyzing uploaded photographs did not qualify as biometric data and that the Illinois law did not apply.

The first commercial spam message was sent in 1994--at least that's the general consensus. Lawrence Canter and Margaret Siegel had a program written that would post a copy of an advertisement for their law firm's green card lottery paperwork service to every Usenet news group -- about 6,000 of them. Because of the way the messages were posted, Usenet clients couldn't filter out duplicate copies, and users saw a copy of the same message in every group. At the time, commercial use of internet resources was rare (it had only recently become legal) and access to Usenet was expensive. Users considered these commercial-seeming messages to be crass--not only did they take up their time, but they also cost them money.

Farooq Bajwa still lives comfortably, up in the hills of San Juan Capistrano in a French chateau-style mansion with views of the Pacific. But his tech company, InfoSpan, and its bustling headquarters in an Irvine office park, are long gone. These days the income from three El Pollo Loco franchises bought two decades ago helps out. The Pakistani immigrant turned entrepreneur earned millions manufacturing computer components in the 1980s and 1990s, but he doesn't blame the dot-com bust for his change of fortune. Rather, he traces it back to a plan he had early last decade for a new business: a text-based payment system that could be used throughout the developing world, particularly for migrant workers to send money home.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Can Artificial Intelligence Create the Next Wonder Material? Nicola Nosengo Nature "Instead of continuing to develop new materials the old-fashioned way -- stumbling across them by luck, then painstakingly measuring their properties in the laboratory -- Marzari and like-minded researchers are using computer modelling and machine-learning techniques to generate libraries of candidate materials by the tens of thousands." COMPUTING: Why Machine Vision Is Flawed in the Same Way as Human Vision MIT Technology Review "If machine vision and human vision work in similar ways, are they also restricted by the same limitations? Do humans and machines struggle with the same vision-related challenges? Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Saeed Reza Kheradpisheh at the University of Tehran in Iran and a few pals from around the world. These guys have tested humans and machines with the same vision challenges and discovered that they do indeed struggle with the same kind of problems."