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The tracking tag you just shake to send out a signal
TECHNOLOGY Insight AI and law
–Send in the machines–
AI rules from the bench The law is a messy, human affair. Could computers do better? IF YOU are hoping for parole, you Elterngeld is based on the open better hope the judge has just eaten. source Carneades software, designed A recent study of the behaviour of by Gordon, which takes human claims parole board judges revealed this like “I require government assistance interesting human trait. The law isn’t to support my 5-year-old child” and supposed to put the rumbling of determines whether the statements stomachs above fact and reason, but put forward to support the claim are that’s the problem when those charged justified based on the tenets of the with administering it are human. law. Each statement is broken down Computers may be able to help. and coded in a machine-readable Software tools are already important format which the system then in the legal world, especially for big compares with elements of the cases like company mergers, where law, using this to score the claim. algorithms help people comb through Gordon will present a web-based vast piles of documents. “If new laws were drafted But the application of artificial with machines in mind, intelligence to the law promises to go beyond document mining. It aims to let AI could implement automated systems handle arguments legislation on a wide scale” where the logic is not clear. The first signs of this are starting version of Carneades at the to appear. Last year, Tom Gordon of International Conference on Artificial the Fraunhofer Institute in Munich Intelligence and Law in Rome, Italy, partnered with German company Init this June. to start developing an AI application The developers are now in talks called Elterngeld – German for with the FEA about how to deploy the “parent’s money”. It is designed to system, although it is not yet ready to make automatic decisions on child replace humans. That’s partly because benefit claims to the country’s it still needs the text of each law Federal Employment Agency to be broken down into a structured, (FEA), probably with some human machine-readable format – a auditing of its decisions behind the painstaking process that at present scenes, Gordon says. must be done by hand. Gordon hopes 20 | NewScientist | 18 May 2013
that one day, new laws will be drafted with machines in mind from the start, so that each is built as a structured database containing all of the law’s concepts, and information on how the concepts relate to one another. This would allow artificially intelligent software to implement legislation on a wide scale. Using a method similar to Gordon’s approach, Anna Ronkainen, cofounder of legal tech firm Onomatics in Helsinki, Finland, is building a tool called TrademarkNow. This measures the similarity of new trademarks to those already in existence, to help avoid potential legal issues. It works by mining the databases of the US and European trademark registers, and looking for similarities. These are the simpler legal issues – AI software isn’t yet sophisticated enough to take on the mess of abstruse language and sometimes contradictory logic that tends to plague legal systems. But legal artificial intelligence is poised to take off, driven by the cost savings offered by machine judgement, says Ronkainen. “There is a huge movement brewing,” she says. “Corporations are no longer happy to pay huge legal bills.” Hal Hodson n
WANT to keep tabs on your pet? Just slap a new coin-sized tagging device on it. The tag transmits a radio pulse that can be picked up at least 20 kilometres away – much further than existing tags can signal – and crucially, it needs no batteries to work. Called Agitate, the device was developed by Roke Manor Research of Romsey, UK. It can be fitted to life jackets or used to keep track of livestock or people – for example, those who may become disoriented due to dementia. Because the device transmits whenever jolted, it can also signal damage to structures such as bridges. Agitate contains two plates, one of metal, the other of a charged material. It converts the slightest movement between the two into electrical energy and uses this to transmit a radio pulse. The signal only lasts a few nanoseconds but is more powerful than that from a cellphone, says Peter Lockhart of Roke. The tags are robust enough to be put through a washing machine, so can be integrated into clothing. Even as the device goes into production, the company is working on a follow-up that has a unique signature in its signal. This could replace radio frequency identification tags to allow objects to be identified and tracked at long range. David Hambling n
Max Brouwers/Plainpicture
Paul Taylor/Corbis
The tracking tag you just shake to send out a signal
–Send in the machines–
AI rules from the bench The law is a messy, human affair. Could computers do better? IF YOU are hoping for parole, you Elterngeld is based on the open better hope the judge has just eaten. source Carneades software, designed A recent study of the behaviour of by Gordon, which takes human claims parole board judges revealed this like “I require government assistance interesting human trait. The law isn’t to support my 5-year-old child” and supposed to put the rumbling of determines whether the statements stomachs above fact and reason, but put forward to support the claim are that’s the problem when those charged justified based on the tenets of the with administering it are human. law. Each statement is broken down Computers may be able to help. and coded in a machine-readable Software tools are already important format which the system then in the legal world, especially for big compares with elements of the cases like company mergers, where law, using this to score the claim. algorithms help people comb through Gordon will present a web-based vast piles of documents. “If new laws were drafted But the application of artificial with machines in mind, intelligence to the law promises to go beyond document mining. It aims to let AI could implement automated systems handle arguments legislation on a wide scale” where the logic is not clear. The first signs of this are starting version of Carneades at the to appear. Last year, Tom Gordon of International Conference on Artificial the Fraunhofer Institute in Munich Intelligence and Law in Rome, Italy, partnered with German company Init this June. to start developing an AI application The developers are now in talks called Elterngeld – German for with the FEA about how to deploy the “parent’s money”. It is designed to system, although it is not yet ready to make automatic decisions on child replace humans. That’s partly because benefit claims to the country’s it still needs the text of each law Federal Employment Agency to be broken down into a structured, (FEA), probably with some human machine-readable format – a auditing of its decisions behind the painstaking process that at present scenes, Gordon says. must be done by hand. Gordon hopes 20 | NewScientist | 18 May 2013
that one day, new laws will be drafted with machines in mind from the start, so that each is built as a structured database containing all of the law’s concepts, and information on how the concepts relate to one another. This would allow artificially intelligent software to implement legislation on a wide scale. Using a method similar to Gordon’s approach, Anna Ronkainen, cofounder of legal tech firm Onomatics in Helsinki, Finland, is building a tool called TrademarkNow. This measures the similarity of new trademarks to those already in existence, to help avoid potential legal issues. It works by mining the databases of the US and European trademark registers, and looking for similarities. These are the simpler legal issues – AI software isn’t yet sophisticated enough to take on the mess of abstruse language and sometimes contradictory logic that tends to plague legal systems. But legal artificial intelligence is poised to take off, driven by the cost savings offered by machine judgement, says Ronkainen. “There is a huge movement brewing,” she says. “Corporations are no longer happy to pay huge legal bills.” Hal Hodson n
WANT to keep tabs on your pet? Just slap a new coin-sized tagging device on it. The tag transmits a radio pulse that can be picked up at least 20 kilometres away – much further than existing tags can signal – and crucially, it needs no batteries to work. Called Agitate, the device was developed by Roke Manor Research of Romsey, UK. It can be fitted to life jackets or used to keep track of livestock or people – for example, those who may become disoriented due to dementia. Because the device transmits whenever jolted, it can also signal damage to structures such as bridges. Agitate contains two plates, one of metal, the other of a charged material. It converts the slightest movement between the two into electrical energy and uses this to transmit a radio pulse. The signal only lasts a few nanoseconds but is more powerful than that from a cellphone, says Peter Lockhart of Roke. The tags are robust enough to be put through a washing machine, so can be integrated into clothing. Even as the device goes into production, the company is working on a follow-up that has a unique signature in its signal. This could replace radio frequency identification tags to allow objects to be identified and tracked at long range. David Hambling n
Max Brouwers/Plainpicture
Paul Taylor/Corbis
The tracking tag you just shake to send out a signal