In computing, a human-readable medium or human-readable format is any encoding of data or information that can be naturally read by humans, resulting in human-readable data. It is often encoded as ASCII or Unicode text, rather than as binary data. In most contexts, the alternative to a human-readable representation is a machine-readable format or medium of data primarily designed for reading by electronic, mechanical or optical devices, or computers. For example, Universal Product Code (UPC) barcodes are very difficult to read for humans, but very effective and reliable with the proper equipment, whereas the strings of numerals that commonly accompany the label are the human-readable form of the barcode information. Since any type of data encoding can be parsed by a suitably programmed computer, the decision to use binary encoding rather than text encoding is usually made to conserve storage space. Encoding data in a binary format typically requires fewer bytes of storage and increases efficiency of access (input and output) by eliminating format parsing or conversion. With the advent of standardized, highly structured markup languages, such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), the decreasing costs of data storage, and faster and cheaper data communication networks, compromises between human-readability and machine-readability are now more common-place than they were in the past. This has led to humane markup languages and modern configuration file formats that are far easier for humans to read. In addition, these structured representations can be compressed very effectively for transmission or storage. Human-readable protocols greatly reduce the cost of debugging. Various organizations have standardized the definition of human-readable and machine-readable data and how they are applied in their respective fields of application, e.g., the Universal Postal Union. Often the term human-readable is also used to describe shorter names or strings, that are easier to comprehend or to remember than long, complex syntax notations, such as some Uniform Resource Locator strings. Occasionally "human-readable" is used to describe ways of encoding an arbitrary integer into a long series of English words. Compared to decimal or other compact binary-to-text encoding systems, English words are easier for humans to read, remember, and type in.
Bandhan Tod
Bandhan Tod is a mobile app to stop child marriage in India's Bihar state through SOS button in the app. When the SOS on Bandhan Tod is activated, the nearest small NGO will attempt to resolve the issue. If the family resists, then the police gets notified. Till now so many child marriages has been cancelled through Bandhan Tod interventions. Bandhan Tod is an initiative of Gender Alliance managed by Prashanti Tiwari to support the state government's efforts to end child marriage and dowry.
Taylor Swift deepfake pornography controversy
In late January 2024, sexually explicit AI-generated deepfake images of American musician Taylor Swift were proliferated on social media platforms 4chan and X (formerly Twitter). Several artificial images of Swift of a sexual or violent nature were quickly spread, with one post reported to have been seen over 47 million times before its eventual removal. The images led Microsoft to enhance Microsoft Designer's text-to-image model to prevent future abuse. Moreover, these images prompted responses from anti-sexual assault advocacy groups, US politicians, Swifties, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, among others, and it has been suggested that Swift's influence could result in new legislation regarding the creation of deepfake pornography. A similar controversy emerged in August 2025, when The Verge reported AI image and video tool Grok Imagine generated sexually explicit images and videos of Swift from an otherwise innocuous text prompt. == Background == American musician Taylor Swift has been the target of misogyny and slut-shaming throughout her career. American technology corporation Microsoft offers AI image creators called Microsoft Designer and Bing Image Creator, which employ censorship safeguards to prevent users from generating unsafe or objectionable content. Members of a Telegram group discussed ways to circumvent these censors to create pornographic images of celebrities. Graphika, a disinformation research firm, traced the creation of the images back to a 4chan community. == Reactions == For some, the deepfake images of Swift immediately became a source of controversy and outrage. Other internet users found them humorous and absurd, such as the image making it appear as though Swift was to engage in sexual intercourse with Oscar the Grouch. The images drew condemnations from Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network and SAG-AFTRA. The latter group, who had been following issues regarding AI-generated media prior to Swift's involvement, considered the images "upsetting, harmful and deeply concerning." Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, whose company's products were believed to be used to make these images, responded to the controversy as "alarming and terrible", further stating his belief that "we all benefit when the online world is a safe world." === Taylor Swift === A source close to Swift told the Daily Mail that she would be considering legal action, saying, "Whether or not legal action will be taken is being decided, but there is one thing that is clear: These fake AI-generated images are abusive, offensive, exploitative, and done without Taylor's consent and/or knowledge." === Politicians === White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre expressed concern over the counterfeit images, deeming them "alarming", and emphasized the obligation of social media platforms to curb the dissemination of misinformation. Several members of American politics called for legislation against AI-generated pornography. Later in the month, a bipartisan bill was introduced by US senators Dick Durbin, Lindsey Graham, Amy Klobuchar and Josh Hawley. The bill would allow victims to sue individuals who produced or possessed "digital forgeries" with intent to distribute, or those who received the material knowing it was made without consent. The European Union struck a deal in February 2024 on a similar bill that would criminalize deepfake pornography, as well as online harassment and revenge porn, by mid-2027. === Social media platforms === X responded to the sharing of these images on their own website with claims they would suspend accounts that participated in their spread. Despite this, the photos continued to be reshared among accounts of X, and spread to other platforms including Instagram and Reddit. X enforces a "synthetic and manipulated media policy", which has been criticized for its efficacy. They briefly blocked searches of Swift's name on January 27, 2024, reinstating them two days later. === Swifties === Fans of Taylor Swift, known as Swifties, responded to the circulation of these images by pushing the hashtag #ProtectTaylorSwift to trend on X. They also flooded other hashtags related to the images with more positive images and videos of her live performances. == Cultural significance == Deepfake pornography has remained highly controversial and has affected figures from other celebrities to ordinary people, most of whom are women. Journalists have opined that the involvement of a prominent public figure such as Swift in the dissemination of AI-generated pornography could bring public awareness and political reform to the issue.
Speech synthesis
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech. The reverse process is speech recognition. Synthesized speech can be created by concatenating pieces of recorded speech that are stored in a database. Systems differ in the size of the stored speech units; a system that stores phones or diphones provides the largest output range, but may lack clarity. For specific usage domains, the storage of entire words or sentences allows for high-quality output. Alternatively, a synthesizer can incorporate a model of the vocal tract and other human voice characteristics to create a completely "synthetic" voice output. The quality of a speech synthesizer is judged by its similarity to the human voice and by its ability to be understood clearly. An intelligible text-to-speech program allows people with visual impairments or reading disabilities to listen to written words on a home computer. The earliest computer operating system to have included a speech synthesizer was Unix in 1974, through the Unix speak utility. In 2000, Microsoft Sam was the default text-to-speech voice synthesizer used by the narrator accessibility feature, which shipped with all Windows 2000 operating systems, and subsequent Windows XP systems. A text-to-speech system (or "engine") is composed of two parts: a front-end and a back-end. The front-end has two major tasks. First, it converts raw text containing symbols like numbers and abbreviations into the equivalent of written-out words. This process is often called text normalization, pre-processing, or tokenization. The front-end then assigns phonetic transcriptions to each word, and divides and marks the text into prosodic units, like phrases, clauses, and sentences. The process of assigning phonetic transcriptions to words is called text-to-phoneme or grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. Phonetic transcriptions and prosody information together make up the symbolic linguistic representation that is output by the front-end. The back-end—often referred to as the synthesizer—then converts the symbolic linguistic representation into sound. In certain systems, this part includes the computation of the target prosody (pitch contour, phoneme durations), which is then imposed on the output speech. == History == Long before the invention of electronic signal processing, some people tried to build machines to emulate human speech. There were also legends of the existence of "Brazen Heads", such as those involving Pope Silvester II (d. 1003 AD), Albertus Magnus (1198–1280), and Roger Bacon (1214–1294). In 1779, the German-Danish scientist Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein won the first prize in a competition announced by the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts for models he built of the human vocal tract that could produce the five long vowel sounds (in International Phonetic Alphabet notation: [aː], [eː], [iː], [oː] and [uː]). There followed the bellows-operated "acoustic-mechanical speech machine" of Wolfgang von Kempelen of Pressburg, Hungary, described in a 1791 paper. This machine added models of the tongue and lips, enabling it to produce consonants as well as vowels. In 1837, Charles Wheatstone produced a "speaking machine" based on von Kempelen's design, and in 1846, Joseph Faber exhibited the "Euphonia". In 1923, Paget resurrected Wheatstone's design. In the 1930s, Bell Labs developed the vocoder, which automatically analyzed speech into its fundamental tones and resonances. From his work on the vocoder, Homer Dudley developed a keyboard-operated voice-synthesizer called The Voder (Voice Demonstrator), which he exhibited at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Franklin S. Cooper and his colleagues at Haskins Laboratories built the pattern playback in the late 1940s and completed it in 1950. There were several different versions of this hardware device; only one currently survives. The machine converts pictures of the acoustic patterns of speech in the form of a spectrogram back into sound. Using this device, Alvin Liberman and colleagues discovered acoustic cues for the perception of phonetic segments (consonants and vowels). === Electronic devices === The first computer-based speech-synthesis systems originated in the late 1950s. Noriko Umeda et al. developed the first general English text-to-speech system in 1968, at the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Japan. In 1961, physicist John Larry Kelly, Jr and his colleague Louis Gerstman used an IBM 704 computer to synthesize speech, an event among the most prominent in the history of Bell Labs. Kelly's voice recorder synthesizer (vocoder) recreated the song "Daisy Bell", with musical accompaniment from Max Mathews. Coincidentally, Arthur C. Clarke was visiting his friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility. Clarke was so impressed by the demonstration that he used it in the climactic scene of his screenplay for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the HAL 9000 computer sings the same song as astronaut Dave Bowman puts it to sleep. Despite the success of purely electronic speech synthesis, research into mechanical speech-synthesizers continues. Linear predictive coding (LPC), a form of speech coding, began development with the work of Fumitada Itakura of Nagoya University and Shuzo Saito of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) in 1966. Further developments in LPC technology were made by Bishnu S. Atal and Manfred R. Schroeder at Bell Labs during the 1970s. LPC was later the basis for early speech synthesizer chips, such as the Texas Instruments LPC Speech Chips used in the Speak & Spell toys from 1978. In 1975, Fumitada Itakura developed the line spectral pairs (LSP) method for high-compression speech coding, while at NTT. From 1975 to 1981, Itakura studied problems in speech analysis and synthesis based on the LSP method. In 1980, his team developed an LSP-based speech synthesizer chip. LSP is an important technology for speech synthesis and coding, and in the 1990s was adopted by almost all international speech coding standards as an essential component, contributing to the enhancement of digital speech communication over mobile channels and the internet. In 1975, MUSA was released, and was one of the first Speech Synthesis systems. It consisted of a stand-alone computer hardware and a specialized software that enabled it to read Italian. A second version, released in 1978, was also able to sing Italian in an "a cappella" style. Dominant systems in the 1980s and 1990s were the DECtalk system, based largely on the work of Dennis Klatt at MIT, and the Bell Labs system; the latter was one of the first multilingual language-independent systems, making extensive use of natural language processing methods. Handheld electronics featuring speech synthesis began emerging in the 1970s. One of the first was the Telesensory Systems Inc. (TSI) Speech+ portable calculator for the blind in 1976. Other devices had primarily educational purposes, such as the Speak & Spell toy produced by Texas Instruments in 1978. Fidelity released a speaking version of its electronic chess computer in 1979. The first video game to feature speech synthesis was the 1980 shoot 'em up arcade game, Stratovox (known in Japan as Speak & Rescue), from Sun Electronics. The first personal computer game with speech synthesis was Manbiki Shoujo (Shoplifting Girl), released in 1980 for the PET 2001, for which the game's developer, Hiroshi Suzuki, developed a "zero cross" programming technique to produce a synthesized speech waveform. Another early example, the arcade version of Berzerk, also dates from 1980. The Milton Bradley Company produced the first multi-player electronic game using voice synthesis, Milton, in the same year. In 1976, Computalker Consultants released their CT-1 Speech Synthesizer. Designed by D. Lloyd Rice and Jim Cooper, it was an analog synthesizer built to work with microcomputers using the S-100 bus standard. Synthesized voices typically sounded male until 1990, when Ann Syrdal, at AT&T Bell Laboratories, created a female voice. Ray Kurzweil predicted in 2005 that as the cost-performance ratio caused speech synthesizers to become cheaper and more accessible, more people would benefit from the use of text-to-speech programs. === Artificial intelligence === In September 2016, DeepMind released WaveNet, which demonstrated that deep learning models are capable of modeling raw waveforms and generating speech from acoustic features like spectrograms or mel-spectrograms, starting the field of deep learning speech synthesis. Although WaveNet was initially considered to be computationally expensive and slow to be used in consumer products at the time, a year after its
India AI Impact Summit 2026
The India AI Impact Summit 2026 (also abbreviated as the AI Impact Summit) was an international summit on artificial intelligence held at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, India, from 16 to 21 February 2026. It is the fourth in a series of global AI summits following the Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit in 2023, the AI Seoul Summit in 2024, and the AI Action Summit in Paris in 2025. Organised under the IndiaAI Mission by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, it is the first summit in the series to be hosted by a Global South nation. This series of AI summits will continue with the AI Summit in Geneva to be hosted by Switzerland in 2027. The summit was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 19 February 2026. The opening ceremony was also addressed by French President Emmanuel Macron and United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. The summit was attended by over 20 heads of state and a delegation of global technology leaders including Sundar Pichai (Google), Sam Altman (OpenAI), and Demis Hassabis (DeepMind). The event faced criticism for organisational issues, misrepresentation of non-Indian products as Indian, and a perceived focus on trade fair activities over substantive governance. == Background == The AI Impact Summit was an international summit on artificial intelligence (AI) held in New Delhi from 16 to 20 February 2026. It followed the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025, the AI Seoul Summit in 2024 and the Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit in 2023. According to Crowell & Moring, the changing summit titles seemed to reflect a broader shift in focus away from AI safety and governance toward practical impact, implementation, and measurable outcomes. Ahead of the summit, an international panel of experts published the second International AI Safety Report. The summit was structured around three foundational pillars, termed "Sutras": People, Planet, and Progress. Seven thematic working groups were established to deliver outcomes across these pillars, covering AI for economic growth and social good; democratising AI resources; inclusion for social empowerment; safe and trusted AI; human capital; science; and resilience, innovation, and efficiency. == Programme == The summit ran over five days, later extended to six following overwhelming public response. Originally scheduled to conclude on 20 February, the event was extended to 21 February with expanded evening hours for the exhibition. === India AI Impact Expo === The India AI Impact Expo, inaugurated by Prime Minister Modi on 16 February, featured over 300 exhibitors from 30 countries across more than 10 thematic pavilions. Pavilions were organised across thematic zones aligned with the summit's three pillars, showcasing AI applications in healthcare, agriculture, education, and sustainable industry. === Leaders' Plenary and CEO Roundtable === The Leaders' Plenary on 19 February brought together heads of state, ministers, and representatives from multilateral institutions to outline national and global priorities on AI governance, infrastructure, and international cooperation. A CEO Roundtable, held the same evening, convened senior executives from global technology and industry firms with government leaders to discuss investment, research collaboration, and deployment of AI systems. === Research Symposium === A Research Symposium on AI and its Impact was held on 18 February, with the IIIT Hyderabad as knowledge partner. Discussions covered sovereign AI infrastructure, global adoption challenges, research breakthroughs, and policy priorities. == Participants == The summit drew delegations from over 100 countries, including more than 20 heads of state and 60 ministers. Notable attendees from the technology industry included Sundar Pichai (Google), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), and Mukesh Ambani (Reliance Industries). Representatives from multilateral institutions included Sangbu Kim of the World Bank. == Announcements and outcomes == === Indian AI models === Several Indian AI models and products were unveiled during the summit. Sarvam AI, an Indian AI laboratory, launched a new generation of large language models, including 30-billion and 105-billion parameter models using a mixture of experts architecture, as well as text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and vision models. Sarvam also introduced the Kaze smartglasses, described as the company's first hardware product, which Prime Minister Modi tested at the expo. The government-backed BharatGen Param2 model, a 17-billion parameter model supporting 22 Indian languages with multimodal capabilities, was also launched at the summit. === Infrastructure commitments === Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw outlined India's "whole-of-nation" AI strategy, describing plans to build a "frugal, sovereign and scalable" AI ecosystem. The government announced plans to add more than 20,000 GPUs to India's existing base of 38,000 under the IndiaAI Compute Portal. Microsoft announced at the summit that it was on track to invest US$50 billion by the end of the decade to bring AI to lower-income countries. Goa reaffirmed its commitment to artificial intelligence at the India AI Impact Summit 2026. === Guinness World Record === During the summit, India set a Guinness World Record for the most pledges received for an AI responsibility campaign in 24 hours, with 250,946 valid pledges collected between 16 and 17 February 2026. The campaign, conducted in partnership with Intel India as part of the IndiaAI Mission, exceeded its initial target of 5,000 pledges. == Controversies and criticisms == === Galgotias University incident === On 18 February, Galgotias University faced widespread criticism after a representative presented a robot dog at the university's exhibition pavilion as an indigenous development. Social media users identified the robot as the Unitree Go2, a commercially available product manufactured by Chinese company Unitree Robotics. IT Secretary S. Krishnan stated that the government did not want exhibitors to showcase items that were not their own, and the university was directed to vacate its stall. Galgotias University issued an apology, stating that the representative had been "ill-informed" and was not authorised to speak to the press. The incident drew political reactions, with the Indian National Congress using it to criticise the government. The controversy was amplified after Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw had earlier shared a video clip of the robot on social media, which was subsequently deleted. === Organisational issues === On day 1 of the Summit, Dhananjay Yadav, a Bengaluru-based entrepreneur had alleged that his product was stolen in the Summit. He called it as a pain for the people in an X post. He further wrote, "Think about this: We paid for flights, accommodation, logistics and even the booth. Only to see our wearables disappear inside a high-security zone". Later, the stolen devices were recovered by The Delhi Police. Bloomberg reported that delegates were left stranded without food or water during a security lockdown ahead of the Prime Minister's visit on 19 February. The summit venue was closed to the public on 19 February for the Prime Minister's visit, leading to criticism from attendees who had registered for that day. === Protests by the Indian Youth Congress (IYC) === On 20 February, some members of the Indian Youth Congress (IYC) carried out protests inside the venue with slogans such as "PM is compromised" and the criticism of the recent trade deal between India and the US. 4 of these members were sent to police custody by the court on 22 February. While Bharatiya Janta Party condemned these protests, with its spokesperson Shehzad Poonawalla saying, "From being anti-BJP, you have gone to being anti-national? If you have a problem with the BJP, then protest at the BJP office, Jantar Mantar, or outside the PM's office. But the people of the country and their alliance partners condemn them for their attempt to defame India in front of the entire world at the AI Summit." Congress leader Harish Rawat defended the protests, saying "it's also a fact that AI might become a tool in the hands of a few individuals… It's the opposition's job to warn against that… It's not the first time such international events have been opposed. I know how the BJP protested during the Commonwealth Games… To say that such opposition has happened for the first time is not correct. The BJP has been doing this while in the opposition." These protestors were granted bail by the Delhi high court on 2 March. == Reception and analysis == Bloomberg News reported that Prime Minister Modi used the summit to assert India's global AI ambitions following a challenging year in foreign policy. TechPolicy.Press published several critical analyses of the summit. One article argued that the summit's structure granted "multinational corporations parity with sovereign governments
Visual descriptor
In computer vision, visual descriptors or image descriptors are descriptions of the visual features of the contents in images, videos, or algorithms or applications that produce such descriptions. They describe elementary characteristics such as the shape, the color, the texture or the motion, among others. == Introduction == As a result of the new communication technologies and the massive use of Internet in our society, the amount of audio-visual information available in digital format is increasing considerably. Therefore, it has been necessary to design some systems that allow us to describe the content of several types of multimedia information in order to search and classify them. The audio-visual descriptors are in charge of the contents description. These descriptors have a good knowledge of the objects and events found in a video, image or audio and they allow the quick and efficient searches of the audio-visual content. This system can be compared to the search engines for textual contents. Although it is relatively easy to find text with a computer, it is much more difficult to find concrete audio and video parts. For instance, imagine somebody searching a scene of a happy person. The happiness is a feeling and it is not evident its shape, color and texture description in images. The description of the audio-visual content is not a superficial task and it is essential for the effective use of this type of archives. The standardization system that deals with audio-visual descriptors is the MPEG-7 (Motion Picture Expert Group - 7). == Types == Descriptors are the first step to find out the connection between pixels contained in a digital image and what humans recall after having observed an image or a group of images after some minutes. Visual descriptors are divided in two main groups: General information descriptors: contain low level descriptors which give a description about color, shape, regions, textures and motion. Specific domain information descriptors: give information about objects and events in the scene. A concrete example would be face recognition. === General information descriptors === General information descriptors consist of a set of descriptors that covers different basic and elementary features like: color, texture, shape, motion, location and others. This description is automatically generated by means of signal processing. ==== Color ==== It's the most basic quality of visual content. Five tools are defined to describe color. The three first tools represent the color distribution and the last ones describe the color relation between sequences or group of images: Dominant color descriptor (DCD) Scalable color descriptor (SCD) Color structure descriptor (CSD) Color layout descriptor (CLD) Group of frame (GoF) or group-of-pictures (GoP) ==== Texture ==== It's an important quality in order to describe an image. The texture descriptors characterize image textures or regions. They observe the region homogeneity and the histograms of these region borders. The set of descriptors is formed by: Homogeneous texture descriptor (HTD) Texture browsing descriptor (TBD) Edge histogram descriptor (EHD) ==== Shape ==== It contains important semantic information due to human's ability to recognize objects through their shape. However, this information can only be extracted by means of a segmentation similar to the one that the human visual system implements. Nowadays, such a segmentation system is not available yet, however there exists a serial of algorithms which are considered to be a good approximation. These descriptors describe regions, contours and shapes for 2D images and for 3D volumes. The shape descriptors are the following ones: Region-based shape descriptor (RSD) Contour-based shape descriptor (CSD) 3-D shape descriptor (3-D SD) ==== Motion ==== It's defined by four different descriptors which describe motion in video sequence. Motion is related to the objects motion in the sequence and to the camera motion. This last information is provided by the capture device, whereas the rest is implemented by means of image processing. The descriptor set is the following one: Motion activity descriptor (MAD) Camera motion descriptor (CMD) Motion trajectory descriptor (MTD) Warping and parametric motion descriptor (WMD and PMD) ==== Location ==== Elements location in the image is used to describe elements in the spatial domain. In addition, elements can also be located in the temporal domain: Region locator descriptor (RLD) Spatio temporal locator descriptor (STLD) === Specific domain information descriptors === These descriptors, which give information about objects and events in the scene, are not easily extractable, even more when the extraction is to be automatically done. Nevertheless, they can be manually processed. As mentioned before, face recognition is a concrete example of an application that tries to automatically obtain this information. == Descriptors applications == Among all applications, the most important ones are: Multimedia documents search engines and classifiers. Digital library: visual descriptors allow a very detailed and concrete search of any video or image by means of different search parameters. For instance, the search of films where a known actor appears, the search of videos containing the Everest mountain, etc. Personalized electronic news service. Possibility of an automatic connection to a TV channel broadcasting a soccer match, for example, whenever a player approaches the goal area. Control and filtering of concrete audiovisual content, like violent or pornographic material. Also, authorization for some multimedia content.
Computational law
Computational law is the branch of legal informatics concerned with the automation of legal reasoning. What distinguishes Computational Law systems from other instances of legal technology is their autonomy, i.e. the ability to answer legal questions without additional input from human legal experts. While there are many possible applications of Computational Law, the primary focus of work in the field today is compliance management, i.e. the development and deployment of computer systems capable of assessing, facilitating, or enforcing compliance with rules and regulations. Some systems of this sort already exist. TurboTax is a good example. And the potential is particularly significant now due to recent technological advances – including the prevalence of the Internet in human interaction and the proliferation of embedded computer systems (such as smart phones, self-driving cars, and robots). There are also applications that do not involve governmental laws. The regulations can just as well be the terms of contracts (e.g. delivery schedules, insurance covenants, real estate transactions, financial agreements). They can be the policies of corporations (e.g. constraints on travel, expenditure reporting, pricing rules). They can even be the rules of games (embodied in computer game playing systems). == History == Speculation about potential benefits to legal practice through applying methods from computational science and AI research to automate parts of the law date back at least to the middle 1940s. Further, AI and law and computational law do not seem easily separable, as perhaps most of AI research focusing on the law and its automation appears to utilize computational methods. The forms that speculation took are multiple and not all related in ways to readily show closeness to one another. This history will sketch them as they were, attempting to show relationships where they can be found to have existed. By 1949, a minor academic field aiming to incorporate electronic and computational methods to legal problems had been founded by American legal scholars, called jurimetrics. Though broadly said to be concerned with the application of the "methods of science" to the law, these methods were actually of a quite specifically defined scope. Jurimetrics was to be "concerned with such matters as the quantitative analysis of judicial behavior, the application of communication and information theory to legal expression, the use of mathematical logic in law, the retrieval of legal data by electronic and mechanical means, and the formulation of a calculus of legal predictability". These interests led in 1959 to the founding a journal, Modern Uses of Logic in Law, as a forum wherein articles would be published about the applications of techniques such as mathematical logic, engineering, statistics, etc. to the legal study and development. In 1966, this Journal was renamed as Jurimetrics. Today, however, the journal and meaning of jurimetrics seems to have broadened far beyond what would fit under the areas of applications of computers and computational methods to law. Today the journal not only publishes articles on such practices as found in computational law, but has broadened jurimetrical concerns to mean also things like the use of social science in law or the "policy implications [of] and legislative and administrative control of science". Independently in 1958, at the Conference for the Mechanization of Thought held at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, Middlesex, UK, the French jurist Lucien Mehl presented a paper both on the benefits of using computational methods for law and on the potential means to use such methods to automate law for a discussion that included AI luminaries like Marvin Minsky. Mehl believed that the law could by automated by two basic distinct, though not wholly separable, types of machine. These were the "documentary or information machine", which would provide the legal researcher quick access to relevant case precedents and legal scholarship, and the "consultation machine", which would be "capable of answering any question put to it over a vast field of law". The latter type of machine would be able to basically do much of a lawyer's job by simply giving the "exact answer to a [legal] problem put to it". By 1970, Mehl's first type of machine, one that would be able to retrieve information, had been accomplished but there seems to have been little consideration of further fruitful intersections between AI and legal research. There were, however, still hopes that computers could model the lawyer's thought processes through computational methods and then apply that capacity to solve legal problems, thus automating and improving legal services via increased efficiency as well as shedding light on the nature of legal reasoning. By the late 1970s, computer science and the affordability of computer technology had progressed enough that the retrieval of "legal data by electronic and mechanical means" had been achieved by machines fitting Mehl's first type and were in common use in American law firms. During this time, research focused on improving the goals of the early 1970s occurred, with programs like Taxman being worked on in order to both bring useful computer technology into the law as practical aids and to help specify the exact nature of legal concepts. Nonetheless, progress on the second type of machine, one that would more fully automate the law, remained relatively inert. Research into machines that could answer questions in the way that Mehl's consultation machine would picked up somewhat in the late 1970s and 1980s. A 1979 convention in Swansea, Wales marked the first international effort solely to focus upon applying artificial intelligence research to legal problems in order to "consider how computers can be used to discover and apply the legal norms embedded within the written sources of the law". Considerable progress on the development of the second type of machine was made in the following decade, with the development of a variety of expert systems. According to Thorne McCarty, "these systems all have the following characteristics: They do backward chaining inference from a specified goal; they ask questions to elicit information from the user; and they produce a suggested answer along with a trace of the supporting legal rules." According to Prakken and Sartor the representation of the British Nationality Act as a logic program, which introduced this approach, was "hugely influential for the development of computational representations of legislation, showing how logic programming enables intuitively appealing representations that can be directly deployed to generate automatic inferences". In 2021, this work received the Inaugural CodeX Prize as "one of the first and best-known works in computational law, and one of the most widely cited papers in the field." In a 1988 review of Anne Gardner's book An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Legal Reasoning (1987), the Harvard academic legal scholar and computer scientist Edwina Rissland wrote that "She plays, in part, the role of pioneer; artificial intelligence ("AI") techniques have not yet been widely applied to perform legal tasks. Therefore, Gardner, and this review, first describe and define the field, then demonstrate a working model in the domain of contract offer and acceptance." Eight years after the Swansea conference had passed, and still AI and law researchers merely trying to delineate the field could be described by their own kind as "pioneer[s]". In the 1990s and early 2000s more progress occurred. Computational research generated insights for law. The First International Conference on AI and the Law occurred in 1987, but it is in the 1990s and 2000s that the biannual conference began to build up steam and to delve more deeply into the issues involved with work intersecting computational methods, AI, and law. Classes began to be taught to undergraduates on the uses of computational methods to automating, understanding, and obeying the law. Further, by 2005, a team largely composed of Stanford computer scientists from the Stanford Logic group had devoted themselves to studying the uses of computational techniques to the law. Computational methods in fact advanced enough that members of the legal profession began in the 2000s to both analyze, predict and worry about the potential future of computational law and a new academic field of computational legal studies seems to be now well established. As insight into what such scholars see in the law's future due in part to computational law, here is quote from a recent conference about the "New Normal" for the legal profession: "Over the last 5 years, in the fallout of the Great Recession, the legal profession has entered the era of the New Normal. Notably, a series of forces related to technological change, globalization, and the pressure to do more with less (in both corpo