In 2017, your new fridge might be able to tell you corny jokes and serenade you, but still lack a witty answer to "Are you Skynet?" Microsoft announced during the WinHEC coference in Shenzhen, China that Cortana would arrive on Windows IoT Core as part of the Windows 10 Creators Update. The IoT version of Windows is designed for smart devices such as robots, maker projects, thermostats, toasters, doorbells, and picture frames. Windows IoT Core can sometimes lag a little behind Windows 10 PC releases so it's not clear when the IoT version will roll out. During the Windows 10 November Update in 2015, the IoT build lagged by about a month, though the earlier Anniversary Update arrived around the same time on both PCs and IoT devices. The impact on you at home: If I was in a betting mood I'd expect to see the new Windows IoT Core inspire multiple Cortana-powered smart speakers from third parties. Microsoft doesn't appear to have any interest in making its own smart speaker.

You have great SaaS business app ideas. You want to turn your idea quickly into a functional and engaging proof of concept. You need to be able to modify it to meet customers' needs, and you need to deliver a complete and secure SaaS application. How could you achieve all the above and yet avoid unforeseen IT requirements that add unnecessary cost and complexity? You also want your app to be responsive in any device at any time.

Is there a next phase for cloud computing? During the past few years, cloud computing has become a mainstream element of modern software solutions just as common as websites or databases. The cloud computing market is a race vastly dominated by four companies: Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM with a few other platforms with traction in specific regional markets such as AliCloud in China. In such a consolidated market, it's hard to imagine a technology being disruptive enough to alter the existing dynamics. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the type of technology with the potential to not only improve the existing cloud platform incumbents but also power a new generation of cloud computing technologies. The thesis of a new generation of cloud computing platforms might seem ludicrous at first but it also presents a very intriguing argument.

MedyMatch Technology, a company based in Tel Aviv, Israel, leverages artificial intelligence, deep learning, and computer vision technologies to offer patient-specific clinical decision support. Their application helps radiologists and emergency room physicians to detect signs of intracranial hemorrhages, which are difficult to diagnose by standard analysis of imaging data alone. The Medgadget team recently had an opportunity to speak with Gene Saragnese, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of MedyMatch, to discuss their technology and its significance in depth. Prior to joining MedyMatch in January of 2016, Gene was the Chief Executive Officer of Philips Imaging and a member of Philips Healthcare's Executive Team. A graduate of Rutgers College of Engineering in New Jersey, he has also previously served as GE Healthcare's Chief Technology Officer and has held management roles with GE, RCA, Martin Marietta, and Lockheed Martin.

Amazon's Echo has made tangible the promise of an artificially intelligent personal assistant in every home. Those who own the voice-activated gadget (known colloquially as Alexa, after its female interlocutor) are prone to proselytizing "her" charms, applauding Alexa's ability to call an Uber, order pizza or check a 10th-grader's math homework. The company says more than 5,000 people a day profess their love for Alexa. On the other hand, Alexa devotees also know that unless you speak to her very clearly . . . I hate her, I love her," one customer wrote on Amazon's website, while still awarding Alexa five stars. "You will very quickly learn how to talk to her in a way that she will understand and it's not unlike speaking to a small frustrating toddler." Voice recognition has come a long way in the past few years. But it's still not good enough to popularize the technology for everyday use and usher in a new era of human-machine interaction, allowing us to talk with all our ...

Spotted by Conflict News contributor Derek Bisaccio, this anti-drone rifle comes to us from Tasnim News, an Iranian media service. The anti-drone rifle was unveiled during a military exercise by Iran's army. Tasnim describes it as "a drone jammer, a portable electronic device used for deflecting the hostile flying objects." According to the brief description provided by Tasnim, the drone jammer can lock onto an enemy drone, and then "disrupt its operation or even hack the aircraft and force it to land safely." More pictures of the weapon are available at a Tasnim gallery.

In the summer of 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara commissioned a group of thirty-six scholars to write a secret history of the Vietnam War. The project took a year and a half, ran to seven thousand pages, and filled forty-seven volumes. Only a handful of copies were made, and most were kept under lock and key in and around the Beltway. One set, however, ended up at the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, where it was read, from start to finish, by a young analyst there named Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was dismayed by what he learned. For a generation, the U.S. government had been lying to the American people about the Vietnam War. He put the first of the volumes in his briefcase, praying that the security guards at RAND would not stop him, and made his way to a small advertising agency in West Hollywood, where a friend told him there was a Xerox machine he could use. "It was a big one, advanced for its time, but very slow by today's standards," Ellsberg writes in his 2002 autobiography, "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers": It could do only one page at a time, and it took several seconds to do each page. I tried pressing the book down on the glass to do two pages at a time, but the middle section was faint and uneven. Fortunately the books were bound with metal tapes through holes so they could be taken apart. . . . The machine didn't collate, and the bar had to come back and travel just as slowly for each copy.

Polymorphic malware detection is challenging due to the continual mutations miscreants introduce to successive instances of a particular virus. Such changes are akin to mutations in biological sequences. Recently, high-throughput methods for gene sequence classification have been developed by the bioinformatics and computational biology communities. In this paper, we argue that these methods can be usefully applied to malware detection. Unfortunately, gene classification tools are usually optimized for and restricted to an alphabet of four letters (nucleic acids). Consequently, we have selected the Strand gene sequence classifier, which offers a robust classification strategy that can easily accommodate unstructured data with any alphabet including source code or compiled machine code. To demonstrate Stand's suitability for classifying malware, we execute it on approximately 500GB of malware data provided by the Kaggle Microsoft Malware Classification Challenge (BIG 2015) used for predicting 9 classes of polymorphic malware. Experiments show that, with minimal adaptation, the method achieves accuracy levels well above 95% requiring only a fraction of the training times used by the winning team's method.

Many Netgear routers are at risk of an easy hack that could easily lead to people's internet browsing being compromised. Anyone with an affected router – which seems to include many of the company's most popular models – should turn it off if they can, to make sure they are safe, according to experts. The problem is very simple and exploiting it is "trivial", according to US-CERT, the country's official computer security organisation. "Users who have the option of doing so should strongly consider discontinuing use of affected devices until a fix is made available," the experts, which are part of the Department for Homeland Security, said. In its facilities, JAXA develop satellites and analyse their observation data, train astronauts for utilization in the Japanese Experiment Module'Kibo' of the International Space Station (ISS) and develop launch vehicles 32/39 The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to the music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight.

In the beginning, there were mainframe computers and punch cards. Since then, we've seen three transformations. The latest, augmented reality plus artificial intelligence, will change more than the previous three combined. At least, that's what tech evangelist Robert Scoble and author Shel Israel say in their new book: The Fourth Transformation: How Augmented Reality & Artificial Intelligence Will Change Everything. First was text and MS-DOS.