Ipro renamed their conference from Ipro Innovations to the Ipro Tech Show this year.  As always, it was held at the Talking Stick Resort in Arizona and it was very well organized.  It started with a reception on April 29th that was followed by two days of talks.  There were also training days bookending the conference on April 29th and May 2nd.  After the keynote on Tuesday morning, there were five simultaneous tracks for the remainder of the conference, including a lot of hands-on work in computer labs.  I was only able to attend a few of the talks, but I’ve included my notes below. You can find my full set of photos here.  Videos and slides from the presentations are available here.

Dean Brown, who has been Ipro’s CEO for eight months, opened the conference with some information about himself and where the company is headed.  He mentioned that the largest case in a single Ipro database so far was 11 petabytes from 400 million documents.  Q1 2019 was the best quarter in the company’s history, and they had a 98% retention rate.  They’ve doubled spending on development and other departments.

Next, there was a panel where three industry experts discussed artificial intelligence.   AI can be used to analyze legal bills to determine which charges are reasonable.  Google uses AI to monitor and prohibit behaviors within the company, such as stopping your account from being used to do things when you are supposed to be away.  Only about 5% of the audience said they were using TAR.  It was hypothesized that this is due to FRCP 26(g)’s requirement to certify the production as complete and correct.  Many people use Slack instead of e-mail, and dealing with that is an issue for e-discovery.  CLOC was mentioned as an organization helping corporations get a handle on legal spending.

The keynote was given by Kevin Surace, and mostly focused on AI.  You need good data and have to be careful about spurious correlations in the data (he showed various examples that were similar to what you find here).  An AI can watch a video and supplement it with text explaining what the person in the video is doing.  One must be careful about fast changing patterns and black swan events where there is no data available to model.  Doctors are being replaced by software that is better informed about the most recent medical research.  AI can review an NDA faster and more accurately than an attorney.  There is now a news channel in China using an AI news anchor instead of a human to deliver the news.  With autonomous vehicles, transportation will become free (supported by ads in the vehicle).  AI will have an impact 100 times larger than the Internet.

I gave a talk titled “Technology: The Cutting Edge and Where We’re Headed” that focused on AI.  I started by showing the audience five pairs of images from WhichFaceIsReal.com and challenged them to determine which face was real and which was generated by an AI.  When I asked if anyone got all five right, I only saw one person raise their hand.  When I asked if anyone got all five wrong, I saw three hands go up.  Admittedly, I picked image pairs that I thought were particularly difficult, but the result is still a little scary.

I also gave a talk titled “TAR Versus Keyword Challenge” where I challenged the audience to construct a keyword search that worked better than technology-assisted review.  The format of this exercise was very different from previous iterations, making it easy for participants to test and hone their queries.  We had 1,924 queries submitted by 42 participants.  They achieved the highest recall levels seen so far, but still couldn’t beat TAR.  A detailed analysis is available here.