The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Should you always do what other people tell you to do? Clearly not. So should future robots always obey our commands? At first glance, you might think they should, simply because they are machines and that's what they are designed to do. But then think of all the times you would not mindlessly carry out others' instructions--and put robots into those situations.

The dinner speech at the Fischerhuette was given by Jörg Siekmann (University of Saarbrücken). The poster session, consisting of 18 posters and demos, was jointly organized as a get-together with the Berlin Semantic Web Meetup. At the session, wine, beer, and finger food were provided in the greenhouses of the Computer Science Department at The Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence the Freie Universität Berlin. The organizers also used (AAAI-17) and the Twenty-Ninth Conference on Innovative this unique opportunity to hold a joint public Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-17), will be RuleML and RR business meeting as well as an invited held in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, during the mid-January dinner with all chairs, and invited keynote speakers to mid-February timeframe. AAAI-17 August 1, a boat sightseeing tour from lake Wannsee will arrive in New Orleans just prior to Mardi Gras and festivities to the Reichstag on Sunday, August 2, the CADE exhibitions will already be underway.

The 15th International Conference on AI and Law (ICAIL 2015) will be held in San Diego, California, USA, June 8-12, 2015, at the University of San Diego, at the Kroc Institute, under the auspices of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL), an organization devoted to promoting research and development in the field of AI and law with members throughout the world. The conference is held in cooperation with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and with ACM SIGAI (the Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence of the Association for Computing Machinery).

Taylor Vinters has invested an undisclosed amount in ThoughtRiver, which will be co-located at the firm's offices in Cambridge, London and Singapore, as well as providing testing and other support services. Tim Pullan, Chief Executive of ThoughtRiver, was formerly Taylor Vinters' Head of Technology & Outsourcing in Asia when he founded the company in 2011 and has subsequently been developing the technology business with support from Taylor Vinters. This marks the second such Legal Tech equity investment by Taylor Vinters, as part of its strategy to develop innovative solutions that streamline how legal businesses operate. Four months ago, Taylor Vinters announced its first equity investment into Legal Tech start-up, Pekama - thought to be the first of its kind in the industry – which is a cloud-based lawyer collaboration software. ThoughtRiver's Contract Intelligence software uses artificial intelligence (AI) to scan and interpret information from written contracts used in commercial risk assessments, and produces visualisations of the potential risks and other issues.

A week later, she was accidentally activated during testing, and within minutes had succumbed to a "kush" induced freakout. Tay is now offline, and her account made private, much like any parent will do when their teenager gets into trouble on the internet. What went wrong with Tay? No one should find it surprising that releasing a machine learning chatbot on social media, in the guise of a teenage girl no less, would result in a wave of interactions designed to test the limits of the technology -- and anyone who has ever spoken to Siri, Cortana or any other virtual assistant knows that one of the first tests involves saying the most profane statements you can think of. Microsoft was certainly aware of this; their VA, Cortana, is often subject to sexual harassment, and so she has been designed to fight back.

Sensitive details held by police and prosecutors in England are being lost because evidence is still being shared on computer discs, watchdogs say. Police and prosecution watchdogs looked at criminal justice computer systems and found the testimonies of underage and vulnerable victims and witnesses had been kept on portable discs. In one case a DVD interview of a 12-year-old sex offence victim was lost. The CPS said it and the police were reviewing their handling of such data. The joint report from HM Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate and HM Inspectorate of Constabulary said there was a "widespread issue" involving the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) "misplacing discs containing sensitive evidence and information".

The universal scope of Internet advertising makes it an ideal way to attract customers and lure young participants into human trafficking activities including sex and prostitution. But behind those ads are layers of online data that can help investigators track down the criminals who organize and profit from such exploitation. A fledgling Pittsburgh startup, Marinus Analytics, has a software product, Traffic Jam, that mines the so-called "deep Web" for information and clues about trafficking operations. It is being used by law enforcement officials, including the FBI, to identify offenders and rescue victims. Emily Kennedy, the founder of Marinus founder and its chief executive, began developing the product while she was a student at Carnegie Mellon University.

"The robots are coming" is not something Paul Revere said during the American Revolution, but it is certainly something many people have uttered over the years. So have we finally reached the tipping point where artificial intelligence and robots will begin to take over human jobs en masse? Perhaps not, but we are closer to the time when they will be even more essential assets and presences in the workforce, explains Martin Ford, the author of the book "Rise of the Robots." I caught up with Ford at The Economist magazine's Innovation Forum event, which was held earlier this month. He pointed out that artificial intelligence is making its way into sectors that were once manned by only man, including the legal profession, where computer systems such as Watson could muscle in on human territory to provide legal counsel, and even journalism where stories are being written without direct human input about some articles.

The general public shows great potential for utilizing scientific research. For example, a singer discovered her ectopic pregnancy by looking up clinical case reports. However, an exorbitant paywall impedes the public’s access to scientific literature. Our case study on a social network demonstrates a growing need for non-open access publications, especially for biomedical literature. The challenge is that non-open access papers are protected by copyright licenses that bar free distribution. In this paper, we propose a technical framework that leverages the doctrine of "idea-expression dichotomy" to bring ideas across paywalls. Idea-expression dichotomy prevents copyright holders from monopolizing ideas, theories, facts, and concepts. Therefore facts may pass through paywalls unencumbered by copyright license restrictions. Existing fact extraction methods (such as information extraction) require either large training sets or domain knowledge, which is intractable for the diverse biomedical scope spanning from clinical findings to genomics. We therefore develop a rule-based system to represent and extract facts. Social networkers and academics validated the effectiveness of our approach. 7 out of 9 users rated the paper’s information from the facts to be above average (≥6/10). Only 7% of the extracted facts were rated misleading.

A key front for ethical questions in artificial intelligence, and computer science more generally, is teaching students how to engage with the questions they will face in their professional careers based on the tools and technologies we teach them.  In past work (and current teaching) we have advocated for the use of science fiction as an appropriate tool which enables AI researchers to engage students and the public on the current state and potential impacts of AI. We present teaching suggestions for E.M. Forster's 1909 story, "The Machine Stops," to teach topics in computer ethics.  In particular, we use the story to examine ethical issues related to being constantly available for remote contact, physically isolated, and dependent on a machine --- all without mentioning computer games or other media to which students have strong emotional associations. We give a high-level view of common ethical theories and indicate how they inform the questions raised by the story and afford a structure for thinking about how to address them.