Pentesting tools like Metasploit, Burp, ExploitPack, BeEF, etc. are used by security practitioners to identify possible vulnerability points and to assess compliance with security policies. Pentesting tools come with a library of known exploits that have to be configured or customized for your particular environment. This configuration typically takes the form of a DSL or a set of fairly complex UIs to configure individual attacks. There are two major shortcomings with this approach (1) scanning doesn't yield perfect knowledge (2) scanning generates significant network traffic and can run for a very long time on a large network (Sarraute). It is perhaps due to these shortcomings (and maybe 0day exploits) that "most testing tools, provide no guarantee of soundness.

We have seen a fast growing interest in current activities around AI startups and research in the last couple of months. Headlines like "2016 was the year AI came of age", "AI was everywhere in 2016", and "The Great A.I. Awakening" were all over the media in the ending weeks of 2016 and we are curious about what 2017 will bring. I found particularly interesting that the current applications, future potential, and possible risks even attracted interest beyond the tech community through TV shows like Westworld, coverage on traditional media and even Obama's farewell address. Sadly, for many of us tech enthusiasts here in Europe, we sometimes feel like there is way less movement on this side of the Atlantic than in the Silicon Valley. However, with major acquisitions like DeepMind, Magic Pony Technology, Movidius, Vision Factory, and Dark Blue Labs, Europe has shown that it is actually leading the way in AI and machine learning.

Algorithms are instructions for solving a problem or completing a task. Recipes are algorithms, as are math equations. The internet runs on algorithms and all online searching is accomplished through them. Email knows where to go thanks to algorithms. Smartphone apps are nothing but algorithms. Computer and video games are algorithmic storytelling. Online dating and book-recommendation and travel websites would not function without algorithms. GPS mapping systems get people from point A to point B via algorithms. Artificial intelligence (AI) is naught but algorithms. The material people see on social media is brought to them by algorithms. In fact, everything people see and do on the web is a product of algorithms. Every time someone sorts a column in a spreadsheet, algorithms are at play, and most financial transactions today are accomplished by algorithms. Algorithms help gadgets respond to voice commands, recognize faces, sort photos and build and drive cars. Hacking, cyberattacks and cryptographic code-breaking exploit algorithms.

An introduction to the field of computer vision and image recognition, and how Deep Learning is fueling the fire of this hot topic. Computer Vision is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on how machines or computers can emulate the way in which humans' brains and eyes work together to visually process the world around them. Research on Computer Vision can be traced back to beginning in the 1960s. The 1970's saw the foundations of computer vision algorithms used today being made; like the shift from basic digital image processing to focusing on the understanding of the 3D structure of scenes, edge extraction and line-labelling. Over the years, computer vision has developed many applications; 3D imaging, facial recognition, autonomous driving, drone technology and medical diagnostics to name a few.

In much of machine learning, data used for training and inference undergoes a preprocessing step, where multiple inputs (such as images) are scaled to the same dimensions and stacked into batches. This lets high-performance deep learning libraries like TensorFlow run the same computation graph across all the inputs in the batch in parallel. Batching exploits the SIMD capabilities of modern GPUs and multi-core CPUs to speed up execution. However, there are many problem domains where the size and structure of the input data varies, such as parse trees in natural language understanding, abstract syntax trees in source code, DOM trees for web pages and more. In these cases, the different inputs have different computation graphs that don't naturally batch together, resulting in poor processor, memory, and cache utilization.

It's impossible to talk about Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S8 flagship device without mentioning the South Korea tech giant's advanced AI voice assistant, Bixby, that will come with it. Though Apple's biggest rival already had an intelligent personal assistant, called S Voice, for a number of premium devices it launched in the past, the company decided to develop a more advanced voice assistant that would be a direct competitor to Apple's Siri and Google's Google Assistant. The move isn't surprising at all, for Samsung bought AI and assistant system firm Viv late last year. Viv is a company by people responsible for the creation and success of Apple's Siri. Hence, many reports are putting emphasis on the idea that Bixby will be a strong rival against Apple's famous voice assistant.

This repository contains the lecture slides and course description for the Deep Natural Language Processing course offered in Hilary Term 2017 at the University of Oxford. This is an advanced course on natural language processing. Automatically processing natural language inputs and producing language outputs is a key component of Artificial General Intelligence. The ambiguities and noise inherent in human communication render traditional symbolic AI techniques ineffective for representing and analysing language data. This is an applied course focussing on recent advances in analysing and generating speech and text using recurrent neural networks.

Tim Cook had indicated a lot of developments from Apple in his quarterly earnings call last week. He indicated that the company's flagship smartphone, the iPhone still had much more technological evolution to go for. Here is the range of products that the Apple CEO talked about and based on how they are expected to develop in 2017. "I think the smartphone is still in the early innings of the game," Cook said about the iPhone. Could this be an indication of some new technological changes coming to the device so as to keep it in "the game?" Apple generally launches just one phone per year compared to its competitors such as Samsung and LG, which have devices at various price ranges and have round the year launches.

Over July 4th weekend in 1981, several hundred game nerds gathered at a banquet hall in San Mateo, California. Personal computing was still in its infancy, and the tournament was decidedly low-tech. Each match played out on a rectangular table filled with paper game pieces, and a March Madness-style tournament bracket hung on the wall. The game was called Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron, a role-playing pastime of baroque complexity. Contestants did battle using vast fleets of imaginary warships, each player guided by an equally imaginary trillion-dollar budget and a set of rules that spanned several printed volumes. If they won, they advanced to the next round of war games--until only one fleet remained. Doug Lenat, then a 29-year-old computer science professor at nearby Stanford University, was among the players. But he didn't compete alone. He entered the tournament alongside Eurisko, the artificially intelligent system he built as part of his academic research. Eurisko ran on dozens of machines inside Xerox PARC--the computer research lab just down the road from Stanford that gave rise to the graphical user interface, the laser printer, and so many other technologies that would come to define the future of computing. That year, Lenat taught Eurisko to play Traveller. Doug Lenat says his common-sense engine is a new dawn for AI. The rest of the tech world doesn't really agree with him.