In a blitzkrieg attack that took place over 12 hours in late 2012 and early 2013, criminals stole 45-million (U.S.) from two banks by hacking into credit card processing firms in India and the United States, then withdrawing money from ATMs in 27 countries. "In the place of guns and masks, this cybercrime organization used laptops and the Internet," New York attorney Loretta Lynch said at a news conference. "Moving as swiftly as data over the Internet … they became a virtual criminal flash mob, going from machine to machine, drawing as much money as they could, before these accounts were shut down." The mob infiltrated credit card processing firms, stole prepaid Visa and MasterCard debit card account numbers issued by the banks in the Middle-East and programmed them with extreme balances. The account numbers were emailed or texted to cohorts on the ground, who used a device to encode the account numbers onto the magnetic stripes of dummy cards.

Humanyze has rolled out Wyze, its flagship product that is designed to measure social interactions and improve teamwork and processes in companies. BOSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Humanyze, the global leader in people analytics technology, announced 4M in Series A financing today from Romulus Capital. The announcement comes as Humanyze rolls out the first of its kind Wyze people analytics platform to its strong Fortune 500 customer base in the US and industry leaders in Japan with the goal of making large corporations more agile and accurate about their most valuable resource (people), and to make these same people more in control of their performance and improvement. "Our customers – which include the largest multinationals and consulting firms – are investing heavily in technology and personnel to make full use of our data-driven people analytics platform. Employees are almost universally opting in as they see the individual benefits. These additional resources from Romulus provide us strong footing to support new customers and grow with them over the long term," Humanyze CEO Ben Waber said.

When will the technology arrive that makes you obsolete in your current job? It's no idle question, and one that none other than Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took up this week in remarks to hundreds of Seattle technology and business leaders. We'll explore his comments, a new offering from Textio, the media's failures in covering the presidential primaries; have some fun with drones, Star Wars, Disney's Frozen, and STEM education; and wash it down with a cold home brew in this edition of Xconomy Seattle's Week in Review: He shared his view of Microsoft's unique culture, and how that gives the company an advantage. One aspect is Microsoft's global mindset, which Nadella, born in Hyderabad, India, talked about in a personal way. "I wouldn't be CEO of Microsoft if it was not for Microsoft's technology being a global force," Nadella said.

IBM Japan has teamed up with Subaru to investigate how its Watson Supercomputer could help improve the automaker's EyeSight driver assist technology. As well as developing a data analytics system, the two companies are keen to integrate cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, which bodes well for the ongoing development of autonomous, networked cars. The benefits of networked autonomous vehicles were recently demonstrated by the European Truck Platooning Challenge, where teams of autonomous trucks made their way from their respective factories to Rotterdam. As well as demonstrating the fact autonomous vehicles can effectively make long trips without causing the end of the world (shocking, we know), the trucks were able to maintain a gap of just 15 m (49 ft) and react to sudden braking manoeuvres in just 0.1 seconds thanks to a WiFi connection keeping them all linked. Daimler has also invested in Car-to-X technology, which features in its latest E-Class.

As a species, we are excellent at imbuing life into the lifeless--just as we are proficient in giving meaning to the meaningless. One could argue that the ability of our brains to recognize patterns quickly is part of what gives us our humanity. Seeing faces on Mars, yelling at our cars for breaking down and giving animals more agency than they may possess are all results of our psyche. Our penchant for gestalt is important in the ever increasing world of social robots and machines. When it comes to technology and social robotics, the whole is often seen as more meaningful than the sum of the parts. The field of social robotics includes machines that use social behaviors and cues to interact with people.

There's huge progress in AI, or at least huge interest in AI--a bigger interest than there's ever been in my lifetime. I've been interested in AI since I was a little kid trying to program computers to play chess, and do natural language databases, and things like that, though not very well. I've watched the field and there have been ups and downs. There were a couple of AI winters where people stopped paying attention to AI altogether. People who were doing AI stopped saying that they were in the field of AI. They say, "Yes, I do artificial intelligence," where two years ago they would have said, "I do statistics." Even though there's a lot of hype about AI and a lot of money being invested in AI, I feel like the field is headed in the wrong direction. There's been a local maximum where there's a lot of low-hanging fruit right now in a particular direction, which is mainly deep learning and big data. People are very excited about the big data and what it's giving them right now, but I'm not sure it's taking us closer to the deeper questions in artificial intelligence, like how we understand language or how we reason about the world. The big data paradigm is great in certain scenarios. One of the most impressive advances is in speech recognition. You can now dictate into your phone and it will transcribe most of what you say right most of the time. That doesn't mean it understands what you're saying. Each new update of Siri adds a new feature. First, you could ask about movie times, then sports, and so forth. The natural language understanding is coming along slowly. You wouldn't be able to dictate this conversation into Siri and expect it to come out with anything whatsoever. But you could get most of the words right, and that's a big improvement. It turns out that it works best with a lot of brute force data available. When you're doing speech recognition on white males, who are native language speakers, in a quiet room, it works pretty well.

Humanity may be wiped out by machines this century – leading AI scientist. It took millions of years of evolution for nature to come up with something that changed the face of the planet forever – the human brain. Now, the new mind is to be born, and the best cyber scientists will be its midwife. Artificial Intelligence is said to be just decades away from creation, and it will probably change life on Earth entirely. Some predict the coming of Utopia, where machines will help humanity fight disease, poverty and even death. But that's as others see a way more darker future, with machines rising up to eradicate humankind once and for all.

Merging beliefs requires the plausibility of the sources of the information to be merged. They are typically assumed equally reliable in lack of hints indicating otherwise; yet, a recent line of research spun from the idea of deriving this information from the revision process itself. In particular, the history of previous revisions and previous merging examples provide information for performing subsequent mergings. Yet, no examples or previous revisions may be available. In spite of the apparent lack of information, something can still be inferred by a try-and-check approach: a relative reliability ordering is assumed, the merging process is performed based on it, and the result is compared with the original information. The outcome of this check may be incoherent with the initial assumption, like when a completely reliable source is rejected some of the information it provided. In such cases, the reliability ordering assumed in the first place can be excluded from consideration. The first theorem of this article proves that such a scenario is indeed possible. Other results are obtained under various definition of reliability and merging.

For someone who is in need of an organ transplant, every second counts. To save more lives, a group of scientists in India have designed a new method of transportation that is much faster than hauling them in the back of an ambulance. Called, Rs 100-crore National Programme for Micro Air, the project is set to use unmanned aerial vehicles to delivery of hearts and other vital organs, cutting time by more than 50 percent. A group of scientists from India are working on a way that will transport hearts and vital organs much faster than hauling them in the back of an ambulance. Currently the team has two options: design a drone with technology to preserve organs or variants that are able to carry the organ in a special box.

In an effort to make its apps more conversational, Google fed its AI engine a whopping 2,865 romance novels so it can improve its understanding of language. The idea is to improve the way Google products respond to users. Software engineer Andrew Dai, who led the project, told BuzzFeed News that this sort of work could help make the responses from the company's search app, as well as the'Smart Reply' feature in Inbox, more natural and varied. Our biggest ever edition of TNW Conference is fast approaching! Dai added that romance novels are great for training AI because they mostly follow the same plot – allowing the AI to focus on picking up nuances of language.