Artificial Intelligence and the Law

University of Derby

Venue: N613, University of Derby, Kedleston Road, Derby

Wednesday, 30 November 2016 at 5.30 PM

This talk is dedicated to the memory of David F. Evans.

After years of over-promising and under-delivering, and two so-called “winters”, Artificial Intelligence is aggressively making inroads in the legal and financial markets. Affordable computational power, bandwidth, and storage each played a part in this revival, but adoption is really the result of targeted products that do what machine learning is historically excellent at: domain specific applications. Concerns over lost employment, reduced professional prestige, and the accountability of such approaches (Do algorithms behave ethically? Should they be regulated?) remain a hot topic for the layman and the practitioner alike as the technology finds new niches to occupy.

This talk is about some lessons learned about the application of AI to legal document review and some of the unexpected corner-cases found along the way, including creative system training methods, tackling entrenched cultural beliefs, and the thorny (and multifaceted) issues of information security.

Working on these problems has highlighted the value of human judgement, the limits of computation, and how scaling problems affect both people and machines. More than ever, sound theory, good mathematics, and a well-rounded approach are needed to tackle an increasingly complex and globalized world.