The UK's National Crime Agency recently warned that businesses and law enforcement agencies are losing the'cyber arms race." One of the key threats was found to be fraud, with 700,000 cases contributing to the 2.46 million'cyber incidents' of 2015. Of real concern was the NCA finding that cyber criminals remain one step ahead in terms of technical capabilities – but that is beginning to change. The UK government has pledged to spend 1.9 billion on cyber defences over the next five years, with businesses and law enforcement setting up networks and shared threat intelligence in order to fight evolving and increasing cyber threats. There is also a renewed focus on the technologies used to fight cyber crime, with one company deploying machine learning and behavioural analytics in the fight against fraud. British company Featurespace uses adaptive behavioural analytics and real-time machine learning in order to detect fraud in the financial services sector.

When Stanford University student Joshua Browder began accumulating numerous parking tickets in London for minor violations last year, he realized he needed to do something. "After the fourth ticket, my parents said to me, 'You're on your own. We're not going to help you anymore,'" the Britain native told NBC News. Not wanting to pay, and upset with "local governments trying to get away with murder," the computer science and economics student wrote an appeal letter. To his, and his parents', surprise, it worked.

"All of this is woven into a multi-layered story based on the human struggle for power, which can only be experienced through the interactive medium of video games," developer Bulkhead Interactive's Howard Philpott writes. If you can't wait until the end of next month to play but will be in Cologne, Germany for Gamescom, good news, because the game will be on the show floor.

Japanese video game developer Square Enix announced Thursday that it's working on a role-playing game exclusively for the Apple Watch. The report comes after the video game publisher, famous for its iconic franchises "Final Fantasy" and "Dragon Quest," pulled installments of its "Chaos Rings" series from the App Store. Square Enix also reportedly filed a trademark for a game called "Cosmos Rings" in Europe. The company has now announced that the new game will be called "Cosmos Rings." The game is scheduled for a summer release and will be among one of the first role-playing games specifically designed for the Apple Watch.

An AI research lab owned by Google is going to start meeting NHS patients as it looks to be more open and transparent about how it helps doctors and clinicians to do their jobs. DeepMind, as the startup is known, intends to hold four patient meet ups a year at Google's new London office in King's Cross, with the first "patient engagement forum" taking place in September in an event that will be streamed on YouTube, alongside a live Twitter Q&A. The patient meet ups are taking place because DeepMind wants to get the public on side as it looks to expand its relationship with the NHS. The events will give members of the public the opportunity to ask DeepMind staff about its NHS partnerships and to learn how the Google-owned company intends to improve their healthcare. Founded in 2011 by Demis Hassabis, Mustafa Suleyman and Shane Legg, DeepMind faced criticism from privacy campaigners and some patients after it emerged in May that it had access to millions of NHS patient records for a kidney monitoring project.

The amount of energy consumed by big data centers has always been a headache for tech companies. Keeping the servers cool as they crunch numbers is such a challenge that Facebook even built one of its facilities on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Well, Google has a different solution to this problem: putting its DeepMind artificial intelligence unit in charge and using AI to manage power usage in parts of its data centers. A 40 percent reduction in the amount of electricity needed for cooling, which Google describes as a "phenomenal step forward." After accounting for "electrical losses and other non-cooling inefficiencies," this 40 percent reduction translated into a 15 percent reduction in overall power saving, says Google.

Siamak Ravanbakhsh, Barnab as P oczos, Jeff Schneider 1 and Dale Schuurmans, Russell Greiner 2 1 Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 2 University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2E8, Canada Abstract We propose a Laplace approximation that creates a stochastic unit from any smooth monotonic activation function, using only Gaussian noise. This paper investigates the application of this stochastic approximation in training a family of Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM) that are closely linked to Bregman divergences. This family, that we call exponential family RBM (Exp-RBM), is a subset of the exponential family Harmoniums that expresses family members through a choice of smooth monotonic non-linearity for each neuron. Using contrastive divergence along with our Gaussian approximation, we show that Exp-RBM can learn useful representations using novel stochastic units. 1 Introduction Deep neural networks (LeCun et al., 2015; Bengio, 2009) have produced some of the best results in complex pattern recognition tasks where the training data is abundant. Here, we are interested in deep learning for generative modeling. Recent years has witnessed a surge of interest in directed generative models that are trained using (stochastic) back-propagation ( e.g., Kingma and Welling, 2013; Rezende et al., 2014; Goodfellow et al., 2014). These models are distinct from deep energy-based models - including deep Boltzmann machine (Hinton et al., 2006) and (convolutional) deep belief networkAppearing in Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) 2016, Cadiz, Spain. Although, due to their use of Gaussian noise, the stochastic units that we introduce in this paper can be potentially used with stochastic back-propagation, this paper is limited to applications in RBM.

From CIOs and CTOs to CFOs and COOs, everyone has "get more out of our data" scrawled in big letters above their offices. But Data Science has historically been an intimidating field and without core business involvement, data strategies fail to deliver on their promise. In part one of this two part series, we'll start the demystifying process by focusing on language, the cornerstone of collaboration. "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The first application I ever wrote shared with others was a little DOS based calendar that would let you know what day of the week it was any time in history, from 30,000BC to 30,000AD. It was pretty lame but it set the course for my entire career because I published it on a shareware site (yes, dating myself a lot here) and it got picked up by a magazine.

The following interview is one of many included in the report. Oriol Vinyals is a research scientist at Google working on the DeepMind team by way of previous work with the Google Brain team. He holds a Ph.D. in EECS from University of California, Berkeley, and a master's degree from University of California, San Diego. Oriol Vinyals: I'm originally from Barcelona, Spain, where I completed my undergraduate studies in both mathematics and telecommunication engineering. Early on, I knew I wanted to study AI in the U.S. I spent nine months at Carnegie Mellon, where I finished my undergraduate thesis.

Wearable devices that track fitness are a rich source of real-time health data. Over the past year, technology titans including Google, Apple, Microsoft and IBM have been hiring leaders in biomedical research to bolster their efforts to change medicine. In September 2015, Tom Insel announced that he would quit his position as head of the US National Institute of Mental Health to join Google Life Sciences (now Verily). Three months later, Michael McConnell took a leave of absence from directing major cardiovascular research programmes at California's Stanford University to join him. And last month, Stephen Friend took a senior position with Apple.