I was 13 years old when the movie Alien was released. It scared me into a month-long spell of anxiety. The hair on the back of my neck was perpetually up and I had the jittery demeanor of a combat veteran. While the full-grown xenomorph alien was chilling, the larval stage face-hugger was terrifying. Not only did it penetrate the human host's throat, planting the chest-burster in the gut, but it was intrinsically grotesque, an odious, zoological mash-up of scurrying spider and slithering snake. It's easy to interpret our fears of alien predators as nothing more than superficial horror ginned up by the Hollywood fright machine.

Dr. Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com, made his first regional keynote speech at GITEX Technology Week today. Speaking on how an experimental mindset helps drive continuous innovation on a worldwide scale, he highlighted how digital acceleration can create new opportunities and extolled entrepreneurs to work on things that truly differentiate their businesses. At this afternoon's keynote, Dr. Vogels said that the most disruptive businesses in the Middle East are powered in the cloud. Dr. Vogels expressed his excitement to announce that the company is building a presence in the Middle East, which will allow it to harness the power of technology to create a rich featured infrastructure platform for startups and big businesses in the region. Meanwhile, Mike Sutcliff, Group Chief Executive of Accenture Digital at his keynote address highlighted the role technology will play across the private and government sectors.

The ambush in Niger earlier this month that left four U.S. troops dead has been the subject of immense speculation, not only concerning President Trump's public response to the tragedy but also about what actually happened on the ground that day. Asked by Fox News on Capitol Hill if the administration has been forthcoming about the attack, Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., replied, "of course not" and added, "it may require a subpoena." Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Thursday that the attack is under investigation. A dozen U.S. Army soldiers, mostly Green Berets, along with 30 Nigerians, traveled 125 miles north of Niger's capital, Niamey, in unarmored trucks on a routine mission and to meet with local village elders in Tonga Tonga, near the border with Mali, on Oct. 4. U.S. Army Sergeant La David Johnson was killed when his patrol was ambushed in Niger.

Since the 2013 Target breach, it's been clear that companies need to respond better to security alerts even as volumes have gone up. With this year's fast-spreading ransomware attacks and ever-tightening compliance requirements, response must be much faster. Adding staff is tough with the cybersecurity hiring crunch, so companies are turning to machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to automate tasks and better detect bad behavior. In a cybersecurity context, AI is software that perceives its environment well enough to identify events and take action against a predefined purpose. AI is particularly good at recognizing patterns and anomalies within them, which makes it an excellent tool to detect threats.

Can artificial intelligence replace the human brain?Will it? "Humans were are not built to spend more than two hours looking at a screen or scrolling through excel sheets. Humans are best at being human. Artificial Intelligence will do the rest." Telling words from Jim Stolze, Co-founder of aigency -- an Amsterdam-based company that recruits AI and humans for work.

WASHINGTON – The imminent fall of the Islamic State's de facto capital leaves America a multitude of tasks to restore stability in the Middle East, starting with pockets of remaining IS resistance in Syria and Iraq. Then there are the more deeply rooted problems, not fixable by guns or bombs, that allowed extremism to rise and flourish: Syria's civil war and Iraq's intractable political, religious and ethnic disputes, which turned violent again this week. The challenge is more than the U.S. can handle alone. It likely will keep some troops in Iraq for years to come to train and advise the army, police and other members of security forces that imploded when IS fighters swept across the Syrian border and captured Mosul in June 2014. The militants also have footholds in Afghanistan and beyond.

This article proposes a Bayesian nonparametric method for forecasting, imputation, and clustering in sparsely observed, multivariate time series. The method is appropriate for jointly modeling hundreds of time series with widely varying, non-stationary dynamics. Given a collection of $N$ time series, the Bayesian model first partitions them into independent clusters using a Chinese restaurant process prior. Within a cluster, all time series are modeled jointly using a novel "temporally-coupled" extension of the Chinese restaurant process mixture. Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques are used to obtain samples from the posterior distribution, which are then used to form predictive inferences. We apply the technique to challenging prediction and imputation tasks using seasonal flu data from the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, demonstrating competitive imputation performance and improved forecasting accuracy as compared to several state-of-the art baselines. We also show that the model discovers interpretable clusters in datasets with hundreds of time series using macroeconomic data from the Gapminder Foundation.

Twenty years ago, WIRED made a bold prediction: Cable modems are on the way out. "Things are looking bad for the cable industry: Careful study has shown that nearly the entire cable network would need to be replaced to make it suitable for two-way data traffic, and satellite services have been stealing away cable's television customers at an intolerable rate." Fast-forward to 2017 and ... cable modems are everywhere. Hey, points for journalistic confidence. Listen, predicting the future is thankless and hard and often ill-advised.

Assassin's Creed, Ubisoft flagship action-adventure video game series, is celebrating 10 years since it first hit stores. Altair, Ezio and their assassin friends -- the game characters -- have taken us through important focal points in history like the Italian Renaissance and American Revolution. The latest installment, Assassin's Creed Origins, marks the nineteenth game of this franchise including all spin-off series. A new live-action trailer for this much-awaited game was released Monday, along with a live-action trailer launch for another action behemoth, Call of Duty: WW2. The game hits the shelves after a one-year break between titles and this gap has heightened expectations among hard-core Assassin's Creed fans.

KAMPALA – As the toll rises above 300 from one of the world's deadliest attacks in years, the al-Shabab extremist group has sent a powerful signal that the international focus on extremism can't afford to overlook the African continent. Saturday's truck bombing on a crowded Mogadishu street showed that al-Shabab, targeted for years by U.S. airstrikes and tens of thousands of African Union forces, has once again made a deadly comeback. Pushed from Somalia's capital in recent years, al-Shabab has retreated mostly to rural areas of the country's south, where the fragile central government can't assert its authority and local fiefdoms are in charge. From there, Africa's deadliest Islamic extremist group has continued to plan guerrilla-style attacks like Saturday's truck bombing in the capital, Mogadishu. While demonstrating al-Shabab's resilience in the face of new military offensives by the U.S. and Somalia in recent months, the attack also highlights the shortcomings of U.S. drone strikes in a politically fraught country with a weak military and even weaker police, analysts told The Associated Press.