The Meet a Data Scientist series is a chance to get up close and personal with top-level data science professionals. Join us for a talk on AI Law with Professor Joseph Avery from the Miami Herbert Business School. Prof. Avery conducts research at the intersection of the behavioral, computer, and management sciences.

Wednesday 9/28, 4:00-5:00 PM via Zoom

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TALK TITLE: Artificial legal intelligence: Case studies and experiments exploring successes and hurdles in this nascent subset of AI

Artificial intelligence (AI)- and machine learning (ML)-based technologies have the potential to transform the law, addressing bias, access-to-justice, efficiency, consistency, and other important issues. Yet adoption has been slow, lagging adoption in adjacent professional spheres like medicine and finance. In this talk, I present two examples of high-value AI-law applications, one in the public sector (AI to improve prosecutorial plea-bargaining decisions) and one in the private sector (AI for civil settlement decisions). In both applications, I encountered significant hurdles, one that was more psychological in nature and one that was of a more technical nature. The psychological hurdle concerned how legal matters impinge moral ones. The technical hurdle concerned data silos, data sharing, and privacy. I unpack the former through four experiments, and I unpack the latter largely through explication of a proposed solution. I conclude by mapping the way forward in artificial legal intelligence, both in terms of research and application.

About Joseph Avery

Joseph J. Avery is an Assistant Professor at the University of Miami Herbert Business School, a Faculty Member of Miami’s Institute for Data Science and Computing, and an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. Dr. Avery’s primary line of research employs the methods and tools of the computer, behavioral, and management sciences, as well as those of experimental jurisprudence, to consider artificial intelligence (AI) in three contexts: (1) perception of AI behavior, especially AI failures; (2) the intersection of AI and moral decision making; and (3) artificial legal intelligence.

Prior to joining Miami’s faculty, Dr. Avery received a PhD from Princeton University, and a JD from Columbia Law School. In addition, he completed a postdoctoral resident fellowship at Yale Law School. Dr. Avery has practiced law, co-created an artificial legal intelligence named Claudius, and co-founded a National Science Foundation-supported legal technology company.

About the Meet a Data Scientist Lecture Series

The purpose of this series is to introduce the people behind the data, their lives, interests, career choices, their work, and their passion for how they use data to solve grand challenges in their respective fields. This lecture series is co-sponsored by the Miami Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and is free and open to the public.