Predicting the future: election results and more

Ken Jennings graciously losing to IBM's "Watson" on Jeopardy

Not only can computers steal our jobs and win at Jeopardy, they can also predict the future with frighteningly accurate results. Yesterday, Professor Daniel Katz gave a fascinating presentation on quantitative prediction in my legal informatics class. His focus was primarily in the legal field but the explanation of how we've arrived at a point in time where legal prediction is possible is applicable to many areas.

His slides are available below. I would highly recommend a quick skim of even just the first 60 or so slides if you're not interested in the legal field for a general overview of the rise of technology. (To my fellow law students, the information contained past slide 60 may disturb you but I urge you to power through!)

CodeHS and Code is Law

Yesterday, we went to the second instalment of Code Is Law* which is sort of an informal crash course on programming for beginners put on by Pieter Gunst, one of the co-founders of LawGives and a Fellow at CodeX. The last time I coded anything that wasn't a website was probably a decade ago when we learned Visual Basic in high school. I'm fairly certain VB became obsolete around the same time we gave up floppy disks. This time around, I'm going to be learning Javascript with the help of CodeHS, a StartX company.

*Aptly named after Lawrence Lessig's dictum in his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.

Jeremy does a pretty good job explaining how CodeHS works in the video above but the basic idea is that the website teaches programming with instructional videos followed by little exercises. CodeHS is great because not only does it teach you how to code, it teaches you how to think like a programmer (so you can pick up other languages), and how to code with style. I think if any professional ever looks at the backend of my websites, they'd be pretty horrified because my coding is all over the place so even if I forget all the javascript and just retain some good coding practices, I'll be very pleased.

Why is programming relevant to law students/lawyers?

1. Programming is about problem solving and using logic - two areas that all legal minds ought to be familiar with. Conditional if/else statements are essential both in law and in coding (and on the LSAT for those of us that still remember that small nightmare). Programming is good exercise for your brain.

2. As we move increasingly into a digital space, understanding the basics of software engineering is an asset in any field. People tend to think that law is an archaic discipline where men in suits sit behind large mahogany desks poring over stacks of documents. While the legal field hasn't been as technology-savvy as say, medicine, legal informatics is a rapidly growing area and chances are that lawyers can't avoid software engineers in the workplace for much longer. For more on this topic, see Richard Susskind's The End of Lawyers.

3. Software and information industries are rapidly expanding making intellectual property law the fastest growing area of legal specialization. I'm perhaps a little biased here but I think intellectual property and technology law is an exciting and flourishing field and this will continue to be true for a long time to come. Having a good grasp on the building blocks of technology i.e. code will thus no doubt be advantageous to a career in technology law.

CodeX Legal Tech Start-Up Showcase

Today, we went to a CodeX Legal Tech Start-Up Showcase. The three companies that presented focused on leveraging technology to increase efficiency in legislation, the legal profession and user privacy. First up was Jason Hegland from Securities Litigation Analytics (SLA), which began as a faculty research project. Through the course of their research, SLA collected data on over 3,000 class action and SEC lawsuits, including information like who the parties of a suit were, the outcomes of the cases and what the settlement payments were. They're thinking that this data would be useful to D&O insurance companies for risk assessment (i.e. probability of a suit) and to law firms for settlement prediction modelling.

Next was Casey Oppenheim of Disconnect, an online privacy tool you can attach to your browser to stop 3rd-party tracking.* As we move more of our lives into a digital space, privacy becomes increasingly important. I really encourage you all to sign up for Disconnect, it's an easy browser extension to add on and if you use Firefox like I do, you can use Collusion which shows you exactly who is trying to track you and where they came from. 

*For anyone who isn't familiar with online tracking ... it basically works like this: When you're logged into Facebook - even when the tab/window is closed - when you visit other websites, Facebook is tracking you with a cookie in order to collect information about your web surfing habits i.e. they know when you're on a news website or online shopping or whatever else you do on the web. 3rd party tracking refers to when a website other than Facebook is tracking you after you visited Facebook. This is mostly for advertising purposes so that vendors can send you targeted ads.

Here's a screenshot of my interactive Collusion web (along with all of the websites I have open):

I think a major aspect of privacy issues lies in awareness. What really makes me uneasy about tracking is that I don't know who's doing it, how it's being done, and what the information is being used for. For me, there's no desire to go "off the grid" like I'm some cyberpunk rebel - I just want to know who's behind the curtain. I'm actually completely okay with websites collecting information like which blogs I follow to send me targeted ads as long as they're upfront about it. I like that Collusion shows you what's going on and gives you the option to whitelist websites that you're cool with. 

Disconnect is also working on a privacy icon project to help simplify website privacy policies which I think is a great idea. Hopefully they become as widespread as the Creative Commons licenses icons.

Last but not least, we had Aaron Greenspan** who founded PlainSite, a huge legal database that catalogues legislation, cases, companies and which law firms they retained, and judges and which attorneys presented before them. Despite Aaron's self-professed hatred of lawyers, PlainSite is useful for both attorneys and for laypeople to help understand and access the law.

**If that name looks familiar, this may be why.

My Picks from StartX Campus Demo Day September 2012

Demo Day is exactly what it sounds like - a bunch of startup companies give short presentations of their product/service in order to showcase their work to the media and to solicit users/investors/people to work for them. This particular demo day was for past and present StartX (and therefore Stanford) affiliates.

The event was very well-attended with over 1000 RSVPs and eventually a waitlist to get in. The room was full of curious students (with quite a few MBAs), fellow entrepreneurs, and interested spectators. The whole thing was livestreamed on the StartX website but unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a recorded version to show you now.

Both keynote speakers, John Lilly and Aaron Levie, were informative and very charismatic. Aaron Levie being 27 years old is simultaneously intimidating and inspiring.

Here's a photo of the room that John Lilly took on his smartphone, instagrammed, and then posted on his tumblr:

I can't remember how many startups presented - it must have been something like two dozen. They span across many different fields - social networking, fashion, travel, health, education, etc. As I was watching, I realized how difficult it is to start a successful company. Some ideas were great but something in the execution was off. Others were just too complicated or superfluous to really catch on with the general public without being mounted on a platform they already use. And then there were those that have already been done. 

Not that I'm an expert on tech innovation - I only jumped on the smartphone bandwagon two years ago and I still don't have a Pinterest. But sometimes, it's easier to evaluate the viability of an app or product from the layperson's point of view.

Without further ado, here are my favourite pitches of the day:

Watchup is an iPad app that generates a personalized video playlist from your favourite news channels. This is a great idea for those who like to catch up on current events over breakfast. This is one I would definitely use myself. It also reminds me of Zite, another app that I'm fond of.

Mindsumo is an experiential education platform that allows organizations to pose real world challenges to college students. Problems range from "Reduce traffic jams in US urban city centers" to "Reduce childhood obesity in your community". Winners are rewarded cash prizes, an invaluable experience, and networking opportunities. 

Pixelee is a tool that provides brand managers a way to collect user-generated photos, use them to promote their brand, and then analyze the photos to learn more about their customers. 

Appfluence created the Priority Matrix which is organizational software that manages your projects and responsibilities to let you know what to work on next. The Priority Matrix evaluates which tasks are most urgent and critical and creates a to-do list. I haven't tried this out yet but it looks promising.

Nutrivise is a nutrition app that creates tailored meal plans. Its best feature is probably the "NutriSCORE" which lists healthy meal options around you, right down to the ordering instructions. My only gripe is that considering how quickly restaurants pop up or go out of business and how often menus and/or ingredients are changed, I'm not sure this app will be able to stay up-to-date with its information. Ideally, I would like the NutriSCORE feature to be on an existing service I already use like Yelp or UrbanSpoon. Still a great idea nonetheless.

Espresso Book Machine

A weekend trip to Santa Cruz uncovered a neat bit of intellectual property-related technology:

The patented Espresso Book Machine^® (EBM) makes a paperback book in minutes, at point of need. Through its EspressNet^® digital catalog of content, books can be ordered online or onsite at bookstores, libraries, and non-bookstore retailers. Over seven million in-copyright and public-domain titles are available on the network. The technology is also ideal for self and custom publishing.

So if you wander into a bookstore (in this case Bookshop Santa Cruz) and the book you want isn't available but it has either a) entered the public domain (i.e. the author passed away 50+ years ago) or b) the book shop has a license to the material, then a few simple clicks, 15 minutes, and a reasonable fee gets you a professional-looking paperback edition of your desired title.

For authors, Espresso Book Machine allows you to self-publish, print, and make available to potential consumers.

What a great idea. Espresso Book Machines are environmentally friendly, increases access to creative works, and supports independent publishing.

There's apparently one in Toronto, at the University of Toronto bookstore as well as all over the United States and the world.