Greek scientists invent… Robo-Judge

The world of artificial intelligence just got a reality check this week when a team of Greek scientists presented their ground-breaking artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm, which could predict the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg with almost 80% accuracy.

The software, which was developed by the team and legal experts based in the United Kingdom was presented this week at the Free Thinking Zone venue in Athens.

Dr. Nikolaos Aletras from the Computer Science department at University College London and Dr. Dimitris Tsarapatsanis of the Sheffield University School of Law said it could analyse case documents and reach a decision on whether specific articles of the European Convention on Human Rights had been violated. In roughly four out of five cases, the software reached the same decision as real judges, they said.

“We don’t see AI replacing judges or lawyers, but we think they’d find it useful for rapidly identifying patterns in cases that lead to certain outcomes.

“It could also be a valuable tool for highlighting which cases are most likely to be violations of the European convention on human rights,” said Dr Aletras.

The scientists parsed some 584 cases from the ECHR data base and then developed a machine learning algorithm to analyse the English of case text to locate common patterns and use them to predict the outcome of rulings. It also analysed other factors in the text that appeared to assist prediction, such as key words, the topic of the case or its general circumstances and background.