Nine great industry news stories from this week you may have missed.
Tidy up your company’s data Marie Kondo-style
Organizing “stuff” has always been a challenge which may explain why Marie Kondo has become a household name in the art of cleaning up and organizing one’s personal effects. Over the years, most large enterprises have accumulated several petabytes of dark data — web logs, old emails and out-of-date customer profiles all collected in the regular course of business that will probably never be used again — with each petabyte being equivalent to 20 million completely filled four-drawer filing cabinets.
Does the data you keep "spark joy"? Learn how to apply Marie Kondo's principles to your company's database in Harvard Business Review's recent article.
Strengthen your eDiscovery processes to be pandemic and recession-ready
While many organizations look to cut costs in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and recession, there's one solution a recent Credit Union Times article urges businesses to keep: eDiscovery. Find out why making eDiscovery a standard business process in your organization can help centralize and streamline processes, navigate limitations and plan for the worst case scenario here.
Family lawyers, pandemic jump-start 'technological revolution' in criminal courts
COVID-19 is catapulting the criminal justice system to adopt technology and measures that will speed up trials and possibly clear the looming backlog that the pandemic has created. Daniel Brown, defense lawyer and VP of the Criminal Lawyers' Association, told the Toronto Sun, "Necessity is the mother of invention and this pandemic has jump-started a technological revolution in the (criminal) courts that will save time, money and reduce the backlog." Read the full article here.
Here are the companies leading the work-from-home revolution
Though many areas have begun lifting social distancing protocols, a number of top executives are allowing their employees to continue working from home. While some critics of the work-from-home trend contend that companies will lose their identity and culture, others are embracing the change. Twitter, Facebook and Shopify are just a few of the brands that have announced they will become digital companies and allow their employees to work remotely for good. Learn how some of the biggest corporations are dealing with the hot topic in Forbes' new article.
AI can battle coronavirus, but privacy shouldn’t be a casualty
As Europe and the United States struggle to cope with the coronavirus, many governments are turning to AI tools to both advance medical research and manage public health. While the technologies which include contact tracing, symptom tracking and immunity certificates are certainly promising, they must be implemented in ways that do not undermine human rights. Learn why the implications for human rights and data privacy reach far beyond the containment of COVID-19 on Tech Crunch.
Tech strategies to keep your distributed teams on track
A key element of any successful eDiscovery project is ensuring that your review team is on the same page and working productively. While keeping tabs on geographically dispersed teams isn’t easy, according to Relativity, it's not impossible. If you're already working in their program, you likely have some powerful tools at your disposal that you can use right now to help you meet the challenges of keeping your distributed teams on track. Learn how you can monitor productivity, the quality of reviewer coding and get a second opinion with Machine Learning here.
Google AI researchers want to teach robots tasks through self-supervised reverse engineering
A pre-print paper published by Stanford University and Google researchers proposes an AI technique that predicts how goals were achieved, effectively learning to reverse-engineer tasks. They say it enables autonomous agents to learn through self-supervision, which some experts believe is a critical step toward truly intelligent systems. The researchers’ proposed approach — time reversal as self-supervision (TRASS) — predicts “reversed trajectories” to create sources of supervision that lead to a goal or goals. Learn all the details of this industry development on Venture Beat.
No slacking allowed: Companies keep careful eye on work-from-home productivity during COVID-19
If you thought your new work arrangement was a licence to slack off — think again. The boom in people doing their jobs off site during the COVID-19 lockdown has led to rising interest in services that help employers remotely monitor their workers' productivity. Tools like ActivTrak, Teramind, Hubstaff and Time Doctor allow bosses to use a dashboard that shows data about individual workers, including their screen time, the activity of their computer mouse, screenshots of what they're looking at and even their GPS location. Read the full story on CBC.
4 ways work will change after the COVID-19 pandemic
In a matter of weeks, we’ve gone from a society that sees remote work as a luxury, or even a “freelancer lifestyle,” to realizing the vast majority of jobs today can be done from home. Companies that hadn’t moved the majority of their assets to the cloud are now doing so at a rapid rate.
According to a recent Fast Company article, we'll be observing the following changes in the coming months:
- When we go back to the office, we will now understand how things can work when people are purely focused on productivity and communication
- Companies will work hard to become more efficient using software tools that cater to both remote and in-office employees
- Companies will seek to provide new, emotionally supportive benefits to employees
- Communication habits will continue to trend in the direction of fast and immediate conversation