Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are taking artificial intelligence to the next level -- by sending it into space disguised as a robotic snake. With the sun beating down on JPL's Mars Yard, the robot lifts its "head" off a glossy surface of faux ice to scan the world around it. It maps its surroundings, analyzes potential obstacles and chooses the safest path through a valley of fake boulders to the destination it has been instructed to reach. Once it has a plan in place, the 14-foot-long robot lowers its head, engages its 48 motors and slowly slithers forward. Its cautious movements are propelled by the clockwise or counterclockwise turns of the spiral connectors that link its 10 body segments, sending the cyborg in a specific direction.

Arize AI, a machine learning (ML) observability and model monitoring platform, announced it has raised $19 million in Series A financing. The round was led by Battery Ventures with participation from previous investors Foundation Capital, Trinity Ventures, The House Fund, and Swift Ventures. Dharmesh Thakker, general partner at Battery Ventures, will join the Arize AI board. Machine learning is the backbone of modern technology, powering artificial intelligence (AI) systems that touch all aspects of life. But these systems are extremely complicated, and many ML practitioners don't have the right tools or telemetry to understand how or why their creations work.

An academic and a lawyer have teamed up to develop a robot lawyer, which, if successful, will make legal advice affordable to people from all backgrounds, while revolutionizing the legal sector. Robots could take on significant parts of a lawyer's work, reducing the costs and barriers to access to legal services for everyone, rather than just those who can afford the high costs. The project, at the University of Bradford, is initially working on a machine learning-based application to provide immigration-related legal advice, but if successful, it could be replicated across the legal sector. The project was devised by Yash Dubal, immigration lawyer and director at AY&J, and Dhaval Thakker, associate professor at the faculty of engineering and informatics at the University of Bradford. It will harness complex knowledge graph technology and deep learning algorithms to analyse case law and learn from it.

An academic and a lawyer have teamed up to develop a robot lawyer, which, if successful, will make legal advice affordable to people from all backgrounds, while revolutionising the legal sector. Robots could take on significant parts of a lawyer's work, reducing the costs and barriers to access to legal services for everyone, rather than just those who can afford the high costs. The project, at the University of Bradford, is initially working on a machine learning-based application to provide immigration-related legal advice, but if successful, it could be replicated across the legal sector. The idea has received government backing in the form of a £170,000 grant from Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Partnerships. Legal firm AY&J Solicitors is providing a further £70,000 as well as the vital knowledge of lawyers.

AWS held its annual re:Invent customer conference this week -- and as it revealed one new service after another, one thing became clear: the company with a marketshare lead that is by Gartner's estimate 10 times bigger than its 14 closest competitors combined, has no plans to slow down or rest on its laurels. If that market lead isn't enough to shake up the competition, according to data from Gartner, AWS S3 storage is 1.6 times as large in terms of pure data stored on its servers, as all the other object storage services in their Magic Quadrant combined. All of this is bad news for competitors like IBM, Google and Microsoft (not to mention, Oracle and Alibaba), but AWS isn't just dominating because it was first (although that's part of it), it's also continuing to innovate at an astonishing rate, adding around 1000 new features every single year up from 722 just last year, according to a chart posted by CEO Andy Jassy during his re:Invent keynote. The question is, how does the competition catch up in the face of this market dominance and pure power to innovate? Dharmesh Thakker, a general partner with Battery Ventures says one saving grace is fear of vendor lock-in.