David Lewis: Artificial Intelligence in Legal Discovery

Abstract: In December 2006, a change to the US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure made “electronically stored information” – effectively every bit of storage in an enterprise – fair game for discovery requests in civil litigation. The result was a multi-billion dollar electronic discovery industry, a remarkable embrace by lawyers and judges of the artifacts of experimental machine learning (learning curves, effectiveness estimates, active learning,...), and a torrent of technical challenges for machine learning, natural language processing, information retrieval, and statistics. I will discuss the state of e-discovery science and technology, and its spread to new applications such as internal investigation and breach response. Biography: David D. Lewis, Ph.D. is Chief Data Scientist at Brainspace, a Cyxtera business, where he leads their research efforts as well as the machine learning software development team. Prior to joining Brainspace, he was variously a freelance consultant, corporate researcher (Bell Labs, AT&T Labs), research professor, and software company co-founder. Dave has published more than 40 peer-reviewed scientific publications and 9 patents. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science in 2006 for foundational work in text categorization, and won a Test of Time Award from ACM SIGIR in 2017 for his paper w/ Gale introducing uncertainty sampling