E-discovery is typically considered a niche area within the practice of law. But at its core, e-discovery is just the science of finding the proverbial data needle in increasingly large sets of information. In the modern landscape, organizations are not only concerned with finding relevant data, but finding it fast.
This charge, however, is sometimes difficult to accomplish on a government budget. While corporations are technologically capable of flying through data, many government agencies lag behind.
Artificial intelligence software company Veritone is hoping to bring some of the data culling and practices that have worked well in their legal division into the public sector, forming a new government and local agency-oriented division of their organization. Called Veritone Government, this division will help agencies analyze audio and video data for use in ongoing records requests and investigations.
John Newsom, executive vice president at Veritone Enterprise, explained that the company s AI software can help law enforcement officials move through security video footage to identify key facial features or comply with records requests seeking all available information on a given topic.
Government agencies are required to be accountable to the public, so the technology they use is subject to considerable scrutiny. Recently, predictive algorithm-based technology employed by criminal justice agencies has come under fire following civil liberties advocates concerns about law enforcement surveillance tactics and a ProPublica investigation of racial bias in predictive algorithms in risk assessment tools used by county agencies.
While Veritone s tools perhaps fall into a separate category within government technology, Newsom believes that many public concerns around law enforcement and technology are somewhat exacerbated by a fear of the unknown.
I think the privacy concern is a really big deal, but it s frustrating when people don t have an understanding of what it is. That s probably the tech world s fault, he said, adding that the technology community can potentially do more to demystify algorithmic learning.
To date, Newsom said, AI technology s use in government agencies is a far cry from the Minority Report-like scenarios that critics may envision. At this stage, this is nothing different than I could do with a large group of humans, he said. Veritone s technology, he said, is simply intended look through tons of data to essentially identify whether a given key search term is present or not, something he referred to as narrow AI.