Claim: fin(tech) offers lessons for many areas in law 163.

Someday you might have a significant relationship with your toaster. With a few silicon chips and the right programming, it'll use its considerable downtime to compose original musical interludes to play while your English muffin is browning. It'll text you Haikus designed to make you smile: This change won't happen by itself. Students are working hard to master the art and science of designing machines that learn, make decisions, create, think. Starting this fall, the Illinois Institute of Technology -- in recent years branding itself as the more brawny "Illinois Tech" -- became the only college in the Midwest to offer an undergraduate major in artificial intelligence, creating the systems that will guide everything from robots to trucks to medical care.

The Department of Computer Science will host a workshop on Big Data Analytics at Illinois Tech from October 1-2 (10 a.m.–4 p.m.). This workshop will introduce scalable data analytics and machine learning. It is a two-day, hands-on workshop using Hadoop, Spark and TensorFlow. There are no prerequisites, although some familiarity with Python would be helpful. The event is free of charge, but seating is limited, so registration is first-come.

This fall, students at the Illinois Institute of Technology will be among the first in the country to have the option of pursuing an undergraduate degree in AI. We want to train a workforce that can tackle the challenges and opportunities of the future, which includes AI and machine learning," said Aron Culotta, associate professor of computer science and director of Illinois Tech's Bachelor of Science in Artificial Intelligence program. Historically, AI has been taught at the graduate level because it was more of a research area rather than a core component of computer science. But as the field has matured, Illinois Tech decided it was time to offer an undergraduate degree course. "We thought it was time to move some of these courses and concepts down to the undergraduate level so that when they graduate they will have both the traditional computational and design aspects as well as a good command of a number of these AI approaches," said Culotta.

When you think about it, not a lot has changed in the legal world from the days of To Kill A Mockingbird to the latest John Grisham thriller. Sure, literature snobs may insist that Atticus Finch's flawless moral heroism should never be compared to the conflicted protagonists of contemporary legal page-turners, but in terms of the substance of how lawyers do their lawyering, the fundamentals have barely changed in 80 years, from the career track of a young lawyer to the set-up of a law firm. The same cannot be said of virtually any other profession. Indeed, the legal industry seems more dusty than dynamic; the robes and wrinkles that mark those at the top of the field hardly scream modernity. But change is afoot, as a couple of powerful market forces are driving law firms to adopt modern corporate efficiency.