Entry 1 - Artificial Intelligence in the Courtroom

Topic: 

In late October 2016, computer scientists at University College London successfully developed artificial intelligence (AI) software that is able to accurately (79%)3 predict the same outcome of court cases that had been decided on by the European Court of Human Rights. One interesting theory that this program’s success supported is that many court decisions are more heavily influenced by non-legal factors than the actual laws themselves. While this program (or any others like it) still has a long way to go before it could effectively replace humans in the courtroom, many are hopeful that this technology will be able to help solve inefficiency problems that are slowing down court systems all over the world.

Important Terminology: 

·        European Court of Human Rights – “The ECtHR is an international court set up in 1959 by the ECHR. The court has jurisdiction to rule on the applications of individuals or sovereign states alleging violations of the civil and political rights set out in the Convention. The ECHR is an international treaty for the protection of civil and political liberties in European democracies committed to the rule of law”₁

Relation to Computer Science: 

The possibility of AI playing a role in courtrooms wouldn’t be possible without computer science. The program used to make these predictions utilized algorithms to determine patterns in the court documents of several cases that led to certain verdicts. Due to the complexity and variation of the English language, an algorithm like the ones used in this program rely heavily on, “recent advances in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning provide us with the tools to build predictive models that can be used to unveil patterns driving judicial decisions.”₁ Previously, all predictive outcomes had been calculated based on some human factors like the severity of the crime or certain judges’ political views. This new software, however, is able to take out the “human” aspect of decision-making and output decisions based on keywords found within documents. Not only does this topic relate to computer science on a broad scale, but it also highlights some key topics that we have been discussing in class over the last two weeks such as the complexity of communicating the English language in a way that the CPU is able to understand. 

Works Cited: 

1. Aletras N, Tsarapatsanis D, Preoţiuc-Pietro D, Lampos V. (2016) Predicting judicial decisions of the European Court of Human Rights: a Natural Language Processing perspective. PeerJ Computer Science 2:e93

2. 6 NEW TECHNOLOGIES RAISING QUESTIONS FOR COURTROOMS. Digital image. EDepoze. N.p., n.d. Web.

3. Johnston, Chris. "Artificial Intelligence 'judge' Developed by UCL Computer Scientists." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 23 Oct. 2016. Web. 18 Jan. 2017.