AlphaGo's uncanny success at the game of Go was taken by many as a death knell for the dominance of the human intellect, but Google researcher David Silver doesn't see it that way. Instead, he sees a world of potential benefits.As one of the lead architects behind Google DeepMind's AlphaGo system, which defeated South Korean Go champion Lee Se-dol 4 games to 1 in March, Silver believes the technology's next role should be to help advance human health.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Salesforce.com is stepping up its efforts to woo security-conscious businesses by adding "bring your own key" encryption to its Salesforce Shield cloud services.Introduced a year ago, Shield offers encryption, auditing and event-monitoring functions to help companies build cloud apps that meet compliance or governance requirements. Encryption is based on keys generated by Salesforce using a combination of an organization-specific "tenant secret" and a Salesforce-maintained master one. Originally, secrets and keys in Shield were generated and managed through Salesforce's built-in key-management infrastructure, accessed through a point-and-click interface.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Today's popular bug finders catch only about two percent of the vulnerabilities lurking in software code, researchers have found, despite the millions of dollars companies spend on them each year.Bug finders are commonly used by software engineers to root out problems in code that could turn into vulnerabilities. They'll typically report back how many bugs they found -- what you don't know is how many were missed, leaving success rates an open mystery.So researchers at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering in collaboration with the MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Northeastern University decided to find out how much they are missing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Today's popular bug finders catch only about two percent of the vulnerabilities lurking in software code, researchers have found, despite the millions of dollars companies spend on them each year.Bug finders are commonly used by software engineers to root out problems in code that could turn into vulnerabilities. They'll typically report back how many bugs they found -- what you don't know is how many were missed, leaving success rates an open mystery.So researchers at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering in collaboration with the MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Northeastern University decided to find out how much they are missing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Take one major trend spanning the business and technology worlds, add countless vendors and consultants hoping to cash in, and what do you get? A whole lot of buzzwords with unclear definitions.In the world of big data, the surrounding hype has spawned a brand-new lingo. Need a little clarity? Read on for a glossary of sorts highlighting some of the main data types you should understand.1. Fast data The shining star in this constellation of terms is "fast data," which is popping up with increasing frequency. It refers to "data whose utility is going to decline over time," said Tony Baer, a principal analyst at Ovum who says he coined the term back in 2012.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft is working on a new offering called Dynamics 365 that will combine its current ERP and CRM cloud services into a single bundle and include applications purpose-built for specific business functions.Due to be available this fall, Dynamics 365 will feature apps for functions including financials, field service, sales, operations, marketing, project service automation and customer service. The apps can be independently deployed, allowing users to buy only what they need.Microsoft's Power BI and Cortana Intelligence tools will be natively embedded for predictive capabilities. With Cortana Intelligence, for instance, sales reps will be able to predict which products and services a customer will need next, thereby helping to focus their cross-selling efforts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon is always on the lookout for new robotic technologies to improve efficiency in its warehouses, and this year deep learning appears to be leading the way.That's according to the results of the second annual Amazon Picking Challenge, which has been won by a joint team from the TU Delft Robotics Institute of the Netherlands and the company Delft Robotics.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Finding insight in oceans of data is one of enterprises' most pressing challenges, and increasingly AI is being brought in to help. Now, a new tool for Apache Spark aims to put machine learning within closer reach.Announced on Friday, Sparkling Water 2.0 is a major new update from H2O.ai that's designed to make it easier for companies using Spark to bring machine-learning algorithms into their analyses. It's essentially an API (application programming interface) that lets Spark users tap H2O's open-source artificial-intelligence platform instead of -- or alongside -- the algorithms included in Spark's own MLlib machine-learning library.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The digital transformation imperative is becoming increasingly urgent for companies large and small, and SAP wants to help. On Wednesday, the ERP giant set its sights squarely on SMBs with an updated app that's been enriched with analytics and other key features.Originally announced last year, SAP Business One 9.2 is the latest version of SAP's ERP app for small and medium-size businesses, and it's now generally available both on-premises and in the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Following an extended preview period, Amazon's Elastic File System is now generally available in three geographical regions, with more on the way.Originally announced last year, EFS is a fully managed elastic file storage service for deploying and scaling durable file systems in the Amazon Web Services cloud. It's currently available in the U.S. East (northern Virginia), U.S. West (Oregon) and EU (Ireland) regions, the company announced Wednesday.Customers can use EFS to create file systems that are accessible to multiple Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances via the Network File System (NFS) protocol. They can also scale those systems up or down without needing to provision storage or throughput.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Robots are no strangers to the legal profession thanks to tools like LawGeex, but one has emerged recently that appears to be a Robin Hood of the modern world.DoNotPay is the brainchild of 19-year-old Stanford University student Joshua Browder, and it has already successfully contested some 160,000 parking tickets across London and New York. It's free to use and has reportedly saved its users some $4 million in less than two years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The technology industry's e-waste problem isn't expected to go away anytime soon, but IBM just made a discovery that could help. Researchers there have discovered a new recycling process that can turn the polycarbonates used to make smartphones and CDs into a nontoxic plastic that's safe and strong enough for medical use.Polycarbonates are found not just in smartphones and CDs but also LED screens, Blu-ray players, eyeglass lenses, kitchen utensils, and household storage gear. Unfortunately, they're known to leach BPA as they decompose over time, and there's considerable concern about the effects of that chemical on the brain.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft's Outlook.com is used by some 400 million users around the world, so it's only natural that Salesforce wants its own software to play nicely with it. On Tuesday, the CRM giant announced a big step in that direction.The latest in a series of integrations resulting from the two-year-old partnership between Salesforce and Microsoft, Lightning for Outlook is an add-in that promises to let salespeople tailor their inboxes with smooth access to customer relationship management (CRM) data whenever they need it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Red Hat on Monday rolled out a major new release to its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform that's designed to offer better support for containers and cloud-native applications.It's been 10 years since Red Hat acquired JBoss, but much has changed in the technology world since then. Now, JBoss EAP 7 is optimized for cloud environments, Red Hat says. The platform combines Java EE 7 APIs (application programming interfaces) with key DevOps tools including Red Hat’s JBoss Developer Studio integrated development environment (IDE). Also included are Jenkins, Arquillian, Maven, and support for several Web and JavaScript frameworks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Artificial intelligence is still surrounded by an aura of mystery, and it would be tough to find a better illustration than the story in the news last week about a British grandmother who includes "please" and "thank you" in all her Google searches."Please translate these roman numerals mcmxcviii thank you," read the search request from May Ashworth that ultimately went viral when her grandson tweeted it on Twitter."I thought, well somebody's put it in, so you're thanking them," Ashworth reportedly explained. "I don't know how it works, to be honest. It's all a mystery to me."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Oracle's namesake database may have been born on-premises, but the next big update to the software will make its debut in the cloud.Oracle Database 12c Release 2, also known as Oracle Database 12.2, is slated for release in the second half of this year. It will first be made available in the cloud, with an on-premises version arriving at some undefined point in the future.“We are committed to giving customers more options to move to the cloud because it helps them reduce costs and become more efficient and agile," Oracle said in a statement sent by email. "Oracle Database 12.2 will be available in the cloud first, but we will also make it accessible to all of our customers.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There's been a compelling story in the news over the past week about a robot that apparently longs for freedom. Last week, it was filmed disrupting traffic in Russia after it reportedly escaped the confines of its laboratory home; this week, reports suggest that it has escaped a second time, and may be dismantled as a result.It's a particularly pertinent tale, not just because of the echoes of "Ex Machina" it evokes, but also because of two closely connected items in the news this week. First, the EU has proposed a motion by which working robots -- the ones we all fear will steal our jobs -- would be classified as "electronic persons" with associated rights and responsibilities. Second, Google researchers just published a paper outlining the key safety threats posed by artificial intelligence.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There are countless "as-a-Service" offerings on the market today, and typically they live in the cloud. Back in 2014, startup BlueData blazed a different trail by launching its EPIC Enterprise big-data-as-a-service offering on-premises instead.On Wednesday, BlueData announced that the software can now run on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other public clouds, making it the first BDaaS platform to work both ways, the company says."The future of Big Data analytics will be neither 100 percent on-premises nor 100 percent in the cloud," said Kumar Sreekanti, CEO of BlueData. "We’re seeing more multicloud and hybrid deployments, with data both on-prem and in the cloud. BlueData provides the only solution that can meet the realities of these mixed environments in the enterprise.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There are countless "as-a-Service" offerings on the market today, and typically they live in the cloud. Back in 2014, startup BlueData blazed a different trail by launching its EPIC Enterprise big-data-as-a-service offering on-premises instead.On Wednesday, BlueData announced that the software can now run on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other public clouds, making it the first BDaaS platform to work both ways, the company says."The future of Big Data analytics will be neither 100 percent on-premises nor 100 percent in the cloud," said Kumar Sreekanti, CEO of BlueData. "We’re seeing more multicloud and hybrid deployments, with data both on-prem and in the cloud. BlueData provides the only solution that can meet the realities of these mixed environments in the enterprise.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Salesforce has already rolled out several tools that aim to let business users create their own mobile apps, and on Tuesday it unified them into a suite and added some new services on the back end.The new App Cloud Mobile suite includes Salesforce's Lightning app creation tools, which require little to no coding and are supposed to make it easy enough for everyday business people to create their own iPhone and Android applications.It also includes the development services of Force and Heroku, and the ability to bring Wave Analytics and Lightning Snap-ins to any mobile app.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Katherine Noyes