Presented at the AIHelsinki kickoff 2015-12-16

1. The societal impact of
artificial intelligence
– What artificial intelligence can do in
the legal system and how
Anna Ronkainen
Chief Scientist, TrademarkNow
@ronkaine
AIHelsinki kickoff 2015-12-16

5. $200–300B USD/year!

6. A lot of difficult conversations to be
had about AI and society
- will full employment be just a pipe dream – and
is it even desirable anymore
- will income equality increase even more if
people are divided into those who tell
computers what to do and those who do what
computers tell them to do
- will we still allow people to drive cars
- will big data and omnipresent data gathering
make privacy a thing of the past
- ...oh, and about those autonomous weapons...

7. Presuming we’re a more solution-
oriented bunch in this room...
- commercially AI is now where mobile was in
the ~1980s: the only way is up
- probably no new N-word in sight, instead
many smaller Finnish companies doing quite
well (look around you)
- AI potentially affecting 100–200k jobs in
Finland alone by 2025, and that tech has to
come from somewhere

8. What’s law got to do with it?
- one of the very first application domains for AI
(1950s)
- back in the day, law was at the forefront of the
automatic data processing revolution in general
(e.g. the great Pennsylvania Health Code
search-and-replace)
- kind of a structural isomorphism between law
(as commands from the legislator to be carried
out by a judge or a citizen) and software
(commands from the programmer to be carried
out by the CPU), superficially correct but
misleading

9. In ye olden days (and still in Finland)
there were legal informatics
- everything having to do with computers and
the law lumped into one discipline
- software copyright, patents, privacy...
- computational legal theory
- theory of legal information
- originally a 50/50 mix of people with a
(often practical) legal background and a CS
background, until the 1990s

10. More and less recent trends in AI &
law
- 1980s: expert systems (and logics)
- 1990s: ontologies (and logics)
- 2000s: argumentation (and logics)
- 2010s: outside interest/wake-up call from e-
discovery (and logics)
- a research community of ~500 people
- main confs ICAIL and JURIX; AI&law journal
published by $pringer

11. A couple of real-life examples

17. (Ronkainen (2010): Mosong, a Fuzzy Logic Model
of Trade Mark Similarity)

22. What we do at TrademarkNow
- trademark search: making sure your new
brand isn’t too close to earlier trademarks to
give your problems
- trademark watch: alerting you about new
filings too close to your own marks to help
you take the necessary steps to protect them
(by filing an opposition against the new
mark)
- globally, now >60 jurisdictions fully covered

23. How we do it
- data acquisition, import
- inbound processing of individual marks, storage
- search and watch UIs
- likelihood of confusion algorithm
- similarity of trademarks
- phonetical, graphical, semantic, animal, mineral
- similarity of goods and services
- registrability (absolute grounds) analysis and other
useful information (e.g. dictionary results)
- reporting
- ...all using all kinds of AI techniques from GOFAI to
deep learning as appropriate

24. Why Finland needs more AI & law
- fewest lawyers per capita in the OECD
- court system struggles esp. with processing
times (many, many ECHR judgements)
- most solutions have to be jurisdiction-
specific (because the law is so different)
- small country = small market, not all that
interesting for outsiders

25. Why AI & law needs Finland
- the AI & law research community has been
rather insular (focus on just a couple of
special topics at a time, no new ideas
coming from the outside)
- little focus on building systems with a
practical impact (or even validation, or even
doing work that can be validated)
- ...and (of course) lots of amazeballs AI
people with mad skillz in Finland

26. Thank you!