AI technologies such as machine learning will play a key role in shaping the future, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in the company's annual Founders' Letter to stockholders on Thursday."It’s what has allowed us to build products that get better over time, making them increasingly useful and helpful," wrote Pichai, who cited examples such as voice search, translation tools, image recognition and spam filters.The recent victory of DeepMind's AlphaGo software over legendary master Lee Sedol at the ancient game of Go is "game-changing," Pichai added. Far from portending humanity's downfall, however, the victory is ultimately one for the human race, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A peculiar thing happens in northern Florida every year in the springtime. That's harvest season on the many fern farms scattered across the region, and it's also the time when demand for rattlesnake antivenom skyrockets there.
That's no coincidence. Rattlesnakes like to form dens under fern crops, it turns out. That means trouble for those who harvest the plants, and it puts urgent pressure on local hospitals and healthcare providers, which must come up with the highly perishable antivenom on demand.
"A lot of times you never really know how much you're going to need," said Kyle Pudenz, senior director of purchasing for pharmaceutical wholesaler H. D. Smith. "But you also can't stock up and leave it on the shelf."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Oracle is spending $663 million to buy Textura, a company that offers cloud services for the engineering and construction industry.Textura's products will be combined with Oracle's existing Primavera project-management suite -- the result of a 2008 acquisition by the database giant -- in the Oracle Engineering and Construction Global Business Unit, Oracle announced on Thursday. The focus of that unit will be offering a comprehensive cloud-based project control and execution platform that manages all phases of engineering and construction projects."The increasingly global engineering and construction industry requires digital modernization in a way that automates manual processes and embraces the power of cloud computing to easily connect the construction job site, reduce cost overruns and improve productivity," said Mike Sicilia, a senior vice president at Oracle who will lead the newly expanded business unit.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AI has already proved its prowess in chess, Jeopardy and the ancient game of Go, but it's now come out victorious in yet another arena: the classic game of Foosball.A group of computer engineering students at Brigham Young University have spent the past semester creating a robotic, computer-controlled Foosball table with the goal of beating human players. The table is constructed so that a camera mounted above can track the movement of the ball, while an algorithm controls the rods on which the plastic players are attached.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Data science may have dominated recent discussions about IT skills in chronically short supply, but it's not the only area facing a shortage. Cloud computing is another big one, and on Monday the OpenStack Foundation launched a new program it hopes will help.The group's new Certified OpenStack Administrator (COA) exam is designed to give cloud professionals a way to prove their worth while also helping employers identify qualified candidates. Originally announced in October at OpenStack Summit Tokyo, the performance-based exam can now be delivered virtually anywhere in the world through the OpenStack Foundation's training marketplace. It is the foundation's first professional certification offering.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AI may have trounced humanity in the ancient game of Go, but it remains untested in countless other gaming arenas. Case in point: Doom, which, it turns out, will be the technology's next big challenge.Launched in 1993, Doom is widely considered a landmark title in the video-game industry for popularizing the first-person shooter genre. Now, artificial-intelligence researchers will have a chance to pit their creations against others in a contest based on the game at the IEEE Computational Intelligence and Games conference in September.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Meet the new Ubuntu: A Linux release tailor-made for enterprises Image by CanonicalUbuntu Linux 16.04 LTS is now out, and its extended support makes it particularly suitable for businesses. Here's an overview of what you can expect to find.Five years of supportImage by CanonicalTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Neither humans nor AI has proven overwhelmingly successful at maintaining cybersecurity on their own, so why not see what happens when you combine the two? That's exactly the premise of a new project from MIT, and it's achieved some pretty impressive results.
Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and machine-learning startup PatternEx have developed a new platform called AI2 that can detect 85 percent of attacks. It also reduces the number of "false positives" -- nonthreats mistakenly identified as threats -- by a factor of five, the researchers said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Neither humans nor AI has proven overwhelmingly successful at maintaining cybersecurity on their own, so why not see what happens when you combine the two? That's exactly the premise of a new project from MIT, and it's achieved some pretty impressive results.
Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and machine-learning startup PatternEx have developed a new platform called AI2 that can detect 85 percent of attacks. It also reduces the number of "false positives" -- nonthreats mistakenly identified as threats -- by a factor of five, the researchers said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
More than 2,000 machines at schools and other organizations have been infected with a backdoor in unpatched versions of JBoss that could be used at any moment to install ransomware such as Samsam.
That's according to Cisco's Talos threat-intelligence organization, which on Friday announced that roughly 3.2 million machines worldwide are at risk.
Many of those already infected run Follett's Destiny library-management software, which is used by K-12 schools worldwide.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
More than 2,000 machines at schools and other organizations have been infected with a backdoor in unpatched versions of JBoss that could be used at any moment to install ransomware such as Samsam.
That's according to Cisco's Talos threat-intelligence organization, which on Friday announced that roughly 3.2 million machines worldwide are at risk.
Many of those already infected run Follett's Destiny library-management software, which is used by K-12 schools worldwide.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Finding bugs in Web applications is an ongoing challenge, but a new tool from MIT exploits some of the idiosyncrasies in the Ruby on Rails programming framework to quickly uncover new ones.In tests on 50 popular Web applications written using Ruby on Rails, the system found 23 previously undiagnosed security flaws, and it took no more than 64 seconds to analyze any given program.Ruby on Rails is distinguished from other frameworks because it defines even its most basic operations in libraries. MIT's researchers took advantage of that fact by rewriting those libraries so that the operations defined in them describe their own behavior in a logical language.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Finding bugs in Web applications is an ongoing challenge, but a new tool from MIT exploits some of the idiosyncrasies in the Ruby on Rails programming framework to quickly uncover new ones.In tests on 50 popular Web applications written using Ruby on Rails, the system found 23 previously undiagnosed security flaws, and it took no more than 64 seconds to analyze any given program.Ruby on Rails is distinguished from other frameworks because it defines even its most basic operations in libraries. MIT's researchers took advantage of that fact by rewriting those libraries so that the operations defined in them describe their own behavior in a logical language.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
We humans may still be licking our wounds following AI's victory at the ancient game of Go, but it turns out we still have something to be proud of: We're doing a lot better than machines are at solving some of the key problems of quantum computing.Quantum mechanics are notoriously mind-bending because so-called "qubits" -- the atomic-scale building blocks of quantum computers -- can inhabit more than one physical state at once. That's known as superposition, and it's what gives the prospect of quantum computers their exciting potential.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Your clothes could one day monitor your fitness levels or boost your smartphone reception thanks to a new technique that uses ultrathin electronic thread to embroider circuits into fabric.Measuring just 0.1 mm in diameter, the thread comprises seven filaments made of copper and silver. Using it, researchers at Ohio State University have found a way to embroider circuits into fabric with enough precision to integrate electronic components such as sensors and memory devices into clothing. Ultimately, such "e-textiles" could be used to create shirts that act as antennas, bandages that tell your doctor how well a wound is healing, or even caps that sense activity in the brain.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Turning data into insight is one of the top business challenges today, and it becomes especially tricky when the data in question is unstructured. Artificial intelligence has a mixed track record there, but a young startup aims to get better results by bringing humans back into the picture.Spare5 on Wednesday released a new platform that applies a combination of human insight and machine learning to help companies make sense of unstructured data, including images, video, social media content, and text messages. The result, it says, are "game-changing insights delivered cost-effectively and at scale."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Got privacy? You may think you do, but a recent experiment by a Russian photographer suggests otherwise.In a project entitled, "Your face is big data," Rodchenko Art School student Egor Tsvetkov began by photographing about 100 people who happened to sit across from him on the subway at some point. He then used FindFace, a facial-recognition app that taps neural-network technology, to try to track them down on Russian social media site VK.It was ridiculously easy to find 60 to 70 percent of the subjects aged between 18 and 35 or so, he found, although for older people it was more difficult.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Got privacy? You may think you do, but a recent experiment by a Russian photographer suggests otherwise.In a project entitled, "Your face is big data," Rodchenko Art School student Egor Tsvetkov began by photographing about 100 people who happened to sit across from him on the subway at some point. He then used FindFace, a facial-recognition app that taps neural-network technology, to try to track them down on Russian social media site VK.It was ridiculously easy to find 60 to 70 percent of the subjects aged between 18 and 35 or so, he found, although for older people it was more difficult.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SoftBank's Pepper robot may still be the better-known contender, but a new humanoid device from Hitachi aims to be the in-store sales rep of the future.Called EMIEW3, the roughly 3-foot-tall unit can determine when customers need help and then approach them autonomously, Hitachi said on Friday. Using what it calls "remote brain" technology, the company developed the robot with customer service in mind for use in stores and other public venues.EMIEW3 is actually the latest iteration in a series following Hitachi's introduction of the original EMIEW back in 2005. EMIEW2, announced in 2007, featured capabilities such as the ability to move at a brisk human walking pace and to distinguish the human voice from background noise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Tuesday marks the end of support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and that means companies relying on it are just about out of time. There will be no more updates from Microsoft, so staying with the software could open you up to a host of risks.Microsoft encourages users to move to SQL Server 2014 or Azure SQL Database, but those aren't the only options. Either way, the transition is going to take some time. If you haven't already been working on it, the most important thing now is to act quickly to minimize the amount of time your company is left exposed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Katherine Noyes