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Full-Text Articles in Science and Technology Law

Using Artificial Intelligence In The Law Review Submissions Process, Brenda M. Simon Nov 2022

Using Artificial Intelligence In The Law Review Submissions Process, Brenda M. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

The use of artificial intelligence to help editors examine law review submissions may provide a way to improve an overburdened system. This Article is the first to explore the promise and pitfalls of using artificial intelligence in the law review submissions process. Technology-assisted review of submissions offers many possible benefits. It can simplify preemption checks, prevent plagiarism, detect failure to comply with formatting requirements, and identify missing citations. These efficiencies may allow editors to address serious flaws in the current selection process, including the use of heuristics that may result in discriminatory outcomes and dependence on lower-ranked journals to conduct …


Algorithms In Business, Merchant-Consumer Interactions, & Regulation, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim Jan 2021

Algorithms In Business, Merchant-Consumer Interactions, & Regulation, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim

Faculty Scholarship

The shift towards the use of algorithms in business has transformed merchant–consumer interactions. Products and services are increasingly tailored for consumers through algorithms that collect and analyze vast amounts of data from interconnected devices, digital platforms, and social networks. While traditionally merchants and marketeers have utilized market segmentation, customer demographic profiles, and statistical approaches, the exponential increase in consumer data and computing power enables them to develop and implement algorithmic techniques that change consumer markets and society as a whole. Algorithms enable targeting of consumers more effectively, in real-time, and with high predictive accuracy in pricing and profiling strategies. In …


Patents, Information, And Innovation, Brenda M. Simon Jan 2020

Patents, Information, And Innovation, Brenda M. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Inventors and commercialization partners often rely on patents to facilitate the exchange of sensitive information. Most scholarship in this area has focused on the areas of software and biotechnology. To provide a richer description of the role of patents in the innovative process, this project evaluates the existing literature and sets forth examples drawn from a series of interviews with professionals from the largely-overlooked medical device industry. The limited analysis of the medical device industry has focused on the largest few dozen firms—as publicly-traded entities, a great deal of data about them is readily available. Small medical device companies are …


The Problems With Decision-Making, Joanna K. Sax Jan 2020

The Problems With Decision-Making, Joanna K. Sax

Faculty Scholarship

Our society faces major challenges in numerous areas, including climate change and healthcare. Addressing these problems with technological advances are of great importance. Increasingly, however, consumers are resisting or rejecting such technological interventions based on inappropriate assignment of risk. In other words, the consumer assessment of risk is not in line with evidence-based assessment of risk. This article focuses on two controversial areas, vaccines and genetically engineered food, as examples in which consumers assign a high risk despite an evidence-based assessment of low risk. This article describes how empirically tested decision-making theories explain why consumers inappropriately assign risk. While these …


Artificial Intelligence Inventions & Patent Disclosure, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim Jan 2020

Artificial Intelligence Inventions & Patent Disclosure, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim

Faculty Scholarship

Artificial intelligence (“AI”) has attracted significant attention and has imposed challenges for society. Yet surprisingly, scholars have paid little attention to the impediments AI imposes on patent law’s disclosure function from the lenses of theory and policy. Patents are conditioned on inventors describing their inventions, but the inner workings and the use of AI in the inventive process are not properly understood or are largely unknown. The lack of transparency of the parameters of the AI inventive process or the use of AI makes it difficult to enable a future use of AI to achieve the same end state. While …


National Cybersecurity Innovation, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim Jan 2020

National Cybersecurity Innovation, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim

Faculty Scholarship

National cybersecurity plays a crucial role in protecting our critical infrastructure, such as telecommunication networks, the electricity grid, and even financial transactions. Most discussions about promoting national cybersecurity focus on governance structures, international relations, and political science. In contrast, this Article proposes a different agenda and one that promotes the use of innovation mechanisms for technological advancement. By promoting inducements for technological developments, such innovation mechanisms encourage the advancement of national cybersecurity solutions. In exploring possible solutions, this Article asks whether the government or markets can provide national cybersecurity innovation. This inquiry is a fragment of a much larger literature …


Computational Experimentation, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim Jan 2019

Computational Experimentation, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim

Faculty Scholarship

Experimentation conjures images of laboratories and equipment in biotechnology, chemistry, materials science, and pharmaceuticals. Yet modern day experimentation is not limited to only chemical synthesis, but is increasingly computational. Researchers in the unpredictable arts can experiment upon the functions, properties, reactions, and structures of chemical compounds with highly accurate computational techniques. These computational capabilities challenge the enablement and utility patentability requirements. The patent statute requires that the inventor explain how to make and use the invention without undue experimentation and that the invention have at least substantial and specific utility. These patentability requirements do not align with computational research capabilities, …


Automation And Predictive Analytics In Patent Prosecution: Uspto Implications And Policy, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim Jan 2019

Automation And Predictive Analytics In Patent Prosecution: Uspto Implications And Policy, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim

Faculty Scholarship

Artificial-intelligence technological advancements bring automation and predictive analytics into patent prosecution. The information asymmetry between inventors and patent examiners is expanded by artificial intelligence, which transforms the inventor-examiner interaction to machine-human interactions. In response to automated patent drafting, automated office-action responses, "cloems" (computer-generated word permutations) for defensive patenting, and machine-learning guidance (based on constantly updated patent-prosecution big data), the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) should reevaluate patent-examination policy from economic, fairness, time, and transparency perspectives. By conceptualizing the inventor-examiner relationship as a "patenting market," economic principles suggest stronger efficiencies if both inventors and the USPTO have better information …


Data-Centric Technologies: Patent And Copyright Doctrinal Disruptions, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim Jan 2019

Data-Centric Technologies: Patent And Copyright Doctrinal Disruptions, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim

Faculty Scholarship

Data-centric technologies create information content that directly controls, modifies, or responds to the physical world. This information content resides in the digital world yet has profound economic and societal impact in the physical world. 3D printing and artificial intelligence are examples of data-centric technologies. 3D printing utilizes digital data for eventual printing of physical goods. Artificial intelligence learns from data sets to make predictions or automated decisions for use in physical applications and systems. 3D printing and artificial intelligence technologies are based on digital foundations, blur the digital and physical divide, and dramatically improve physical goods, objects, products, or systems. …


Towards A New California Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access To Digital Assets Act, Michael T. Yu Jan 2019

Towards A New California Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access To Digital Assets Act, Michael T. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

California enacted the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (the California RUFADAA) to govern the disclosure (or nondisclosure) of digital assets when a California resident dies. Digital assets include not just emails and social media accounts but may also include online files and assets, digital currencies, domain names, and blogs. The California RUFADAA ostensibly governs the disclosure of digital assets only when a California resident dies, and it, therefore, does not govern the scenario when a California resident becomes incapacitated and can no longer handle his or her digital assets. This scenario is likely to become more common …


The Value Of Deviance: Understanding Contextual Privacy, Timothy Casey Jan 2019

The Value Of Deviance: Understanding Contextual Privacy, Timothy Casey

Faculty Scholarship

Recent decisions by the Supreme Court in Carpenter v. United States and the Illinois Supreme Court in Rosenbach v. Six Flags Entertainment Corporation signal a shift in the traditional understanding of what exactly is protected by a privacy interest. Carpenter distinguished between a police officer’s observation of a suspect’s location and a perpetual catalogue of a person’s movements obtained through cell site location information (CSLI). The pervasive and vast quantity of information from CSLI exposed a protected privacy interest. In Rosenbach, the Illinois Supreme Court found the unique and personal quality of biometric information meant that consent and disclosure requirements …