It seems like every other day there is news of some massive security breach resulting in people's login credentials being scattered all over the digital universe usually accompanied by embarrassing mea culpa statements issued by company executives promising they will "try to do better". Is it really that difficult to keep things secure? As it turns out, it's really difficult. We talked before about 9 hot cybersecurity startups looking to provide solutions that range from making sure you have installed the latest security patch to using machine learning to identify virus signatures on the fly. With the coming age of quantum computing, we will need to take things to a whole new level to ensure the security of critical industries like utilities and defense.

The UK's National Data Guardian (NDG) has criticised the National Health Service (NHS) for its partnership with Google's artificial intelligence company DeepMind. According to a letter published by Sky News yesterday, Google DeepMind has received personal health data from 1.6 million NHS patients on a legally inappropriate basis. An investigation is currently being carried out by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), with the ICO telling Sky News that it is "close to conclusion." The letter from Dame Fiona Caldicott of the NDG was sent to NHS Royal Free Trust medical director Stephen Powis on February 20th. DeepMind was given access to NHS records in 2015 to test a smartphone app called Streams on the legal basis that it was offering "direct care."

Finland is developing a suggestion for the country's very own artificial intelligence (AI) programme to become the best in the world in the field. Finland's Minister of Economic Affairs Mika Lintilä today announced the establishment of an AI-focussed steering group. According to Lintilä, AI has risen to the core of the next wave of digitalisation, and Finland, in line with the current government programme, is harnessing its expertise to take advantage of this development. The goal is to make AI and robotics the key to success for Finnish companies. Lintilä states that Finland wants to be the best in the world in applying AI and renewing ways of working.

In recent years, a host of Hollywood blockbusters -- including "The Fast and the Furious 7," "Jurassic World," and "The Wolf of Wall Street" -- have included aerial tracking shots provided by drone helicopters outfitted with cameras. Those shots required separate operators for the drones and the cameras, and careful planning to avoid collisions. But a team of researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and ETH Zurich hope to make drone cinematography more accessible, simple, and reliable. At the International Conference on Robotics and Automation later this month, the researchers will present a system that allows a director to specify a shot's framing -- which figures or faces appear where, at what distance. Then, on the fly, it generates control signals for a camera-equipped autonomous drone, which preserve that framing as the actors move.

Prisons have a drone problem, in that they're being used to fly drugs and other contraband over walls and into the hands of inmates. Dealing with these airborne mules is tricky because you either need to hope they crash or catch their operators in the act, but one prison is taking a more proactive approach to stopping undesirable deliveries. Alongside other security upgrades, the small, 139-capacity Les Nicolles Prison in Guernsey, Channel Islands, is said to be the first in the world to receive an anti-drone fence. It's not a physical barrier, but an invisible wall that jams pilot signals and stops drones from passing beyond its threshold. Two British companies, Drone Defence and Eclipse Digital Solutions, adapted existing jamming technology to create the "Sky Fence."

In a standard cluster analysis, such as k-means, in addition to clusters locations and distances between them, it's important to know if they are connected or well separated from each other. The main focus of this paper is discovering the relations between the resulting clusters. We propose a new method which is based on pairwise overlapping k-means clustering, that in addition to means of clusters provides the graph structure of their relations. The proposed method has a set of parameters that can be tuned in order to control the sensitivity of the model and the desired relative size of the pairwise overlapping interval between means of two adjacent clusters, i.e., level of overlapping. We present the exact formula for calculating that parameter. The empirical study presented in the paper demonstrates that our approach works well not only on toy data but also compliments standard clustering results with a reasonable graph structure on real datasets, such as financial indices and restaurants.

In the Spring of 2008, Stephen Green, the then-Chairman of HSBC, penned his early reflections on the unfolding cataclysm later called the Financial Crisis. "There has been a massive breakdown of trust: trust in the financial system, trust in bankers, trust in business, trust in business leaders, trust in politicians, trust in the media, trust in the whole process of globalization – all have been severely damaged, in rich countries and in poor countries alike." Nearly a decade later, these words have a regrettable continued resonance. Indeed, such views featured prominently in Senate Banking Committee hearings late last year regarding the opening of false accounts at Wells Fargo. John Stumpf, the bank's then-CEO, argued that such behavior was an aberration: "That's not our culture," Stumpf said.

Most aircraft are designed to be very good at going upwards, and also not bad at going forwards, with some relatively small amount of thought given to turning left and right. Thanks to gravity, downwards is usually taken care of. Even aircraft designed to hover, like helicopters and quadrotors, have preferential directions of orientation and travel where their particular arrangement of motors and control surfaces makes them most effective. ETH Zurich's Omnicopter goes about flying in a totally different way. With eight motors oriented in all directions, the Omnicopter doesn't have an up or down or front or back: It can translate and rotate in any direction, letting it play a very skilled game of fetch. We have developed a computationally efficient trajectory generator for six degrees-of-freedom multirotor vehicles, i.e. vehicles that can independently control their position and attitude.

Now they can also haul garbage. Not to be outdone by the likes of Uber and Waymo, Volvo has now outlined one of its own autonomous vehicle projects in Sweden: a self-driving garbage truck. Like Uber Freight, the project is another effort to extend self-driving technology beyond just shuttling people around in self-driving taxis. After all, someone has to line up the garbage cans for the vehicle -- because you sure don't when you're rushing your trash out the door on your way to work. What makes this project interesting is that the truck route can be programmed, since garbage pick-up is often on the same route.

Google Home, the tech giant's digital assistant and answer to the popular Amazon Echo, is adding a long list of new features, Google vice president Rishi Chandra announced at the company's I/O conference Wednesday. The laundry list of upgrades includes more helpful notifications, Bluetooth connectivity, and an expansion to non-U.S. SEE ALSO: Google's data center raises the stakes in this state's'water wars' Proactive assistance was the first new feature announced onstage. That means the device will automatically notify if there's traffic on the way to a calendar event, for example. Chandra called his mom from the stage to demonstrate Google Home's new hands-free calling.