Nine great industry news stories from this week you may have missed.
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CRA resumes online services after cyberattacks, adds new security feature
The Canada Revenue Agency has resumed all online services after fraudsters used thousands of pilfered usernames and passwords to obtain government services. The agency disabled the services Saturday after discovering more than 5,000 accounts had been the target of three cyberattacks. Online access to “My Business Account” resumed Monday and all others were brought back online Wednesday evening. Read the full story on Global News.
Quietly waiting in the background of the pandemic, AI is about to become a big part of our lives
Way back in December, a Toronto-based company called BlueDot Inc. noticed the first hints that something was amiss from COVID-19. By applying an artificial intelligence algorithm to analyze news reports and airline ticket data, BlueDot noted a significant disease outbreak brewing before even the World Health Organization raised the alarm. According to a recent Financial Post article, the company’s use of artificial intelligence was the sort of application where the technology can shine: taking in large amounts of data to then find subtle patterns beyond what humans can come up with themselves.
ACEDS Partners with Relativity to Offer Structured eDiscovery Training for the Relativity Fellows Program
The Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists (ACEDS) has joined forces with legal technology leader Relativity for the company's new Relativity Fellows program. The Relativity Fellows program welcomes motivated individuals from traditionally-overlooked communities to learn the Relativity platform and build a career in legal technology. Through this partnership, ACEDS will provide foundational eDiscovery training to participants in the Relativity Fellows program as well as provide speakers for the program's Fellows Forums.
Telegram rolls out end-to-end encrypted video calls
Telegram has officially rolled out end-to-end encrypted video calls for iOS and Android. The popular messaging app notes that anyone can verify encryption through the four emoji shown on their screen during a video call. Telegram says that video calls will receive more features and improvements in future versions, as it’s currently working to launch group video calls soon.
What Happens When AI is Used to Set Grades?
How would you feel if an algorithm determined where your child went to college? A recent Harvard Business Review article takes a look at how the the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) opted to use artificial intelligence (AI) to help set overall scores for high-school graduates based on students’ past work and other historic data in response to missed exams because of COVID-19. The experiment was not a success, and thousands of unhappy students and parents have since launched a furious protest campaign. Learn what went wrong and what we can learn from this example here.
The trends future lawyers should look out for
A recent Legal Cheek article shares what three experts based in Sheffield predict will happen for new lawyers in a post-COVID world. Amidst this pandemic, the firms represented in the article are striving to maintain client relationships. The speakers advised students to be mindful of practice areas that tend to see a surge in work during times of economic uncertainty. These practice areas include litigation, restructuring and insolvency, as evidenced by the last major financial recession in 2008, but also family, public and employment law and wills and probate.
Can AI understand poetry?
Language processing is entering a kind of golden age, in which once impossible tasks are increasingly within reach. New systems are already starting to transform how businesses operate — and they stand poised to do so in a much bigger way in the coming years. The most discussed breakthrough in recent months has been OpenAI's GPT-3, which can generate long passages of coherent prose from a human-written prompt of just a line or two. While the technology is still being fine-tuned, one company is creating a system that will generate complete emails from just a few bullet points and a legal technology firm is experimenting with GPT-3 to see if it can aid in litigation discovery and compliance.
Interestingly, to answer the question of Fortune's recent article, GPT-3 isn't half bad at writing poetry. But that doesn't mean it has any real understanding of what it's writing. Click here to learn more about this emerging AI.
Survey Finds Lag in Crisis Response Planning
A recent survey from security firm Immersive Labs found that many organizations don’t hold crisis simulations more than once a year, and the majority of organizations when holding such exercises only do so with IT teams. Security Boulevard reports a survey of senior security professionals at 402 organizations based in the US and UK has shown that 40 per cent of respondents are not confident that their organization would be able to handle an imminent data breach. A quarter of those surveyed said that they run crisis exercises without including senior cybersecurity leadership, and only 20 per cent included communication teams.
Ontario Launches Consultations as it Looks to Create New Policy Framework on Privacy Protection
The Ontario government has launched consultations aimed to improve the province’s privacy protection laws. According to Betakit, the consultations will be conducted through an online survey, written submissions and web conferences. The consultations will include individuals and businesses from the province’s tech, finance and service sectors, as well as the information and privacy commissioner of Ontario. All parties have been asked to provide input on how the province can improve transparency concerning the collection, use, and protection of personal information online.
