Please describe your proposed solution.
As a first use case of the AI lawyer, we have been funded by the Swiss government to create a smart knowledge base of privacy laws, where we can match people's questions about privacy with privacy laws and privacy policies, in order to provide them an answer. This knowledge base is to be used inside our existing Profila app which helps you control your data and access to your personal information.
However, once the model works with one set of documents, it is easy to replicate. Under this proposal, we want to use our learnings from our existing privacy research project for the benefit of the Cardano community, who have to navigate an often difficult legal landscape while working on groundbreaking technology.
As a second use case of the AI lawyer - which we start building under this proposal - , we will collect additional laws relevant to people and entrepreneurs on Cardano (e.g. taxation, financial laws, corporate laws etc), and feed it to our smart knowledge base. The community will have one source of legal documentation relevant for their activities in the Cardano space, which they can query for brief, concise and useable answers. It will be a repository of useful information for the Cardano community about financial and legal documents.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
<u>introduction - the pioneering Innosuisse project </u>
Before we go into detail in the proposal "AI lawyer on Cardano - Profila & HSLU", we need to explain the preparation work that we are already doing with HSLU for the first use case. Please find below the first use case for privacy knowledge and privacy laws, explaining how people's personal data can (or cannot be) processed:
“Are They Allowed To Do That?” — Profila and HSLU Developing An “AI Lawyer” For Legal Questions so that people can finally understand the privacy and cookie policies they are forced to accept when browsing the internet
What is the problem that Profila and HSLU are solving?
People interact with digital services and purchase products from companies (Brands) globally. Each interaction you have online is regulated by a privacy policy that you are forced to accept. Thereby, you agree to share your personal data, without knowing how they Brands use it.
But what can you do if Brands use your data against your expectations? Do you actually know what terms you agreed to when you accepted to share your personal data?
A real-life example
Meet Maria (46) and Daniel (48), with their kids, Mia (16) and Noah (21). Daniel subscribed online to his local newspaper (let call the company “The Newspaper”) and accepted the privacy policy, which specifies that different The Newspaper-affiliated companies could send offers by E-Mail and SMS (I agree that The Newspaper and companies of the Newspaper Group may inform me in the future about other interesting offers by e-mail and SMS).
Maria registers an account for an online pick-up service from her local supermarket (let call the company “The Supermarket”) and is asked to confirm the privacy policy (I confirm that I have read and understood the privacy policy and the processing of my personal data described therein). According to the 10-page privacy policy, The Supermarket can share Maria’s data with The Supermarket-linked companies.
The family now starts receiving messages more frequently than expected and via different channels (email, SMS, mail), but also from brands they have never shared data with. Maria receives 15 emails/week with newsletters from The Supermarket. The family letter box is full of flyers from “The Spa”, “The Nightshop” and “The Movies” (also part of The Supermarket Group).
The problem here is: Almost all of the info on how companies use personal data is (albeit not in plain language) included in their privacy policies the family “accepted”. However, people generally don’t understand what they agree to, and do not know how to act when they want to alter the terms of their relationship with brands.
Today - How Profila solves a consumers' understanding of how a brand uses your data today
Profila is a platform (mobile IOS/Android application for individuals and a web-based dashboard for companies, organizations, governments, and other legal entities, we call “Brands”) that enables individuals to communicate with various organizations in their lives, privately, one-to-one, and without supervision or surveillance.
Through it, Brands can subscribe to personal data that consumers keep in their Profila (one source of truth with a consumer’s contact details, communication-, product preferences), after a consumer accepts the (privacy and legal) terms of such contract.
Using our example above:
Migros pays Maria 10 CHF/year to access her (i) personal data (email, phone), (ii) preferences about food (vegetarian, bio-products, lactose intolerant) and (iii) communication preferences (Maria would like to receive discounts/product info via WhatsApp). If Migros listens to Maria, she will be a happy consumer.
AI Lawyer tomorrow - How the AI lawyer innovation project on Cardano will improve your understanding of privacy policies you are forced to accept outside of the Profila platform
Supporting customer’s comprehension of the term of a privacy agreement they are accepting by interacting with a website or concluding a contract for an online service is the core point of this Innovation project. Our privacy solution tomorrow will help you better understand the terms that brand propose to you when they ask you for your personal data while you are browsing the internet (outside of the protection of the profila platform).
A typical user perceives this legal document as complicated and therefore the privacy statement will be simply accepted without reading it throughout. Nevertheless, by supporting the average user in understanding it, we expect a better awareness of the impact such an agreement acceptance can have with respect of the personal data usage by the companies.
Under the Innosuisse Project, Profila and HSLU are developing a ”smart knowledge base” (KB) composed of questions and answers (Q&A) that can be matched with the specific doubt or question a user has. This will work as the intelligence behind a conversational agent, proposed as a self-help tool.
A chatbot answers the user’s query by scanning the knowledge base for the best matches to propose. This should be able to solve the most common and standard aspects but will fail for more specific needs. In order to provide an advanced service, a match between the specific request and experts will be provided, in order to give a rapid and low-cost option to clarify the subject with a legal expert.
Additionally, by collecting user feedback about the perceived quality of the information and the experts suggested, the system will improve its own performance, taking into account these metrics.
The vision is to provide a one-stop-solution for every user privacy-oriented question of online services. The creation of the KB (on the top left in the illustration) and the matching algorithm will be based on Natural Language Processing (NLP), in order to support the adoption of natural language in the interaction with the user, thus reducing the entry barrier for customers.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
<u>Next step - commercial real life use case of our AI lawyer project for the Cardano community</u>
As the challenge shows, there is a need to build effective solutions to explore and provide legal & financial services and support to funded Proposers.
If you receive funding to build out your DEX, your token offering, your financial service, your NFT offering, or even your meme token (love to Hosky!), you are faced with a variety of legal questions around regulatory compliance, taxation, AML/KYC, payment services, etc, and this potentially in many jurisdictions considering you are offering your product or service on the internet. The only way to navigate this web of legal obligations is to consult lawyers, who are expensive, often only specialized in one aspect of your business, and only able to provide you an answer for one jurisdiction.
Via this project, we are looking to collect a wide variety of legal documents, laws, regulations, recommendations, court cases, company policies, industry whitepapers, etc, that contain the answer to most of the legal questions you may have as an innovative entrepreneur on Cardano. By making the knowledge base "smart" (=following our research with HSLU as explained above) and easy to query (=ask answers to), you will be able to get an automated answer in seconds and at a price of 2-10 USD per relevant answer. In case the answer to your question is not found in the knowledge base or if its not entirely clear, you can connect to a group of legal experts in our network who provide you a more detailed response.
This solution will let you gain time, confidence and legal certainty to operate and expand your blockchain activities at a lower cost and higher speed.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
As the challenge shows, there is a need to build effective solutions to explore and provide legal & financial services and support to funded Proposers.
First, our solution will improve access to legal knowledge for proposers (and others in the Cardano ecosystem), at the mere cost of 2-10 USD per question you ask the AI lawyer.
As part of this innovation projects first work package, we are building the first steps of our AI-lawyer which can automatically answer certain questions from the industry. Instead of the need to contact a real-life lawyer each time you have a specific legal question, our AI-lawyer will allow you to query the smart-knowledge base and almost instantaneously get the most relevant answer which it has matched against more than 1.000.000 legal documents. Only when your answer is not sufficient, or cannot be found in the knowledge base, will the AI lawyer refer you to a legal expert who can answer more complex questions.
Second, our solution will improve access to actual lawyers for people, without any retainers or large legal fees. We are building up a network of blockchain lawyers that will be able to give you understandable answers to your legal questions (not solved by the knowledge base automatically), at a cost of approx. 25 USD per question (up to 150 USD per question).
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
We have attached a "risk matrix", which gives a very detailed overview of 20 individual risks we identified, including the description, the responsible person, the indicators or occurrence, the probability, impact and preventive measures.
As an illustration, we included 3 challenges below (without the detailed information from the matrix, which you can find in the matrix in attachment, titled "Profila and HSLU - Innovation Project - Risk Matrix v. 2.1"):
Document collection - Behind the “AI lawyer” is an intelligent database developed at the HSLU. Alexander Denzler’s research team from the HSLU’s School of Information Technology is “feeding” the database’s algorithm with almost one million documents, including legal cases, court rulings and data usage guidelines issued by authorities and associations to companies’ general terms and conditions of business. The more data the system has at its disposal, the better it learns to respond to specific cases, explains Denzler. We are currently well on our way in the document collection effort, with a.o. 600.000 privacy policies collected.
Speech recognition - Speech recognition represents a particular challenge for IT researchers. This is because most users are not familiar with the legal terminology. “Nevertheless, our artificial intelligence must be able to understand the legal issues behind a question,” says Denzler. “When it comes to legal questions, the answers have to be precise.” However, the HSLU team have the required extensive experience in NLP and speech recognition projects.
Database testing & accuracy - To ensure that the “AI lawyer” works as intended by giving appropriate answers, Profila’s lawyers are putting the database through its paces using test questions. An initial version capable of understanding and answering questions should launch in summer 2022. The more the program is used, the more new cases, and thus new data, it will be able to leverage. This is an exercise that is taking a lot of time and effort from the legal team. Profila has already hired an intern who is working the entire summer on testing the database accuracy.