Almost every day, there's news about a massive data leak -- a breach at Yahoo that reveals millions of user accounts, a compromise involving Gmail phishing scams. Security professionals are constantly moving the chess pieces around, but it can be a losing battle. Yet, there is one ally that has emerged in recent years. Artificial intelligence can stay vigilant at all times, looking for patterns in behavior and alerting you to a new threat. While AI is not anywhere close to being perfect, experts tell CSO that machine learning, adaptive intelligence, and massive data models that can spot hacking much faster than any human are here to help.

Public Sector Agencies Must Adopt Emerging Technologies Like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to Effectively Compete for Talent, Accenture Report Finds ARLINGTON, Va.; Feb. 2, 2017 – Public sector agencies must adopt emerging technologies – including machine learning, artificial intelligence and biometrics – to attract and retain more technically adept employees. This approach is critical to addressing a widening skills gap and strong competition from a better financed private sector, a new report from Accenture (NYSE: ACN) shows. The report, Emerging Technologies in Public Service, examines the adoption of emerging technologies across agencies with the most direct interaction with citizens or the greatest responsibility for citizen-facing services: health and social services, policing/justice, revenue, border services, administration and pensions / social security. As part of the report, Accenture surveyed nearly 800 public service technology professionals across nine countries to identify emerging technologies being implemented or piloted. These technologies include advanced analytics/ predictive modeling, the Internet of Things, intelligent process automation, video analytics, biometrics/ identity analytics, machine learning, and natural language processing/ generation.

The Falcons are facing third and goal on the Patriots' five-yard line. Matt Ryan takes the snap and hands off to Devonta Freeman, already running hard at the goal line. Then, with a crunch audible to the topmost rows of NRG Stadium, Freeman is brought down by Dont'a Hightower right at the goal line. Touchdown?! Silence falls as all eyes turn… not to the referees on the sidelines (there aren't any) but to giant LCD panels behind the end zones. The screens remain black for several long moments until "TOUCHDOWN" lights up.

The Falcons are facing 3rd and goal on the Patriots' 5 yard line. Matt Ryan takes the snap and hands off to Devonta Freeman, already running hard at the goal line. Then, with a crunch audible to the topmost rows of NRG Stadium, Freeman is brought down by Dont'a Hightower right at the goal line. Silence falls as all eyes turn… not to the referees on the sidelines (there aren't any) but to giant LCD panels behind the end zones. The screens remain black for several long moments until "TOUCHDOWN" lights up.

Ian H. Witten is a professor of computer science at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. He directs the New Zealand Digital Library research project. His research interests include information retrieval, machine learning, text compression, and programming by demonstration. He received an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge University, England; an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada; and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Essex University, England. He is a fellow of the ACM and of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Boeing will transition "many" of its commercial aviation analytics software products to run in Microsoft's Azure cloud. The two companies today said they had struck an agreement to help airlines "accelerate innovation in areas such as predictive maintenance and flight optimisation". Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. "[We're] teaming up to accelerate the digital transformation of aviation through the use of analytics-based applications, cloud technologies and large-scale integration," Boeing digital aviation vice president Kevin Crowley said. Microsoft said the collaboration would see artificial intelligence and IoT play greater roles in the aviation space.

You don't have to be a gambler to appreciate the complexities of the card game Texas Hold'Em. It involves a strategy that needs to evolve based on the players around the table, it takes a certain amount of intuition, and it doesn't require the player to win every hand. Just a few days ago, an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm named Libratus beat four professional poker players at a no-limit Texas Hold'Em tournament played out over 20 days. If you have even the slightest understanding of how to write code, you would realize that it is impossible to actually code a software program to do that with such "imperfect information". The AI algorithm did exceptionally well and was utilizing strategies that humans had never used before.

A chatbot is an artificial person, animal or other creature which holds conversations with humans. This could be a text based (typed) conversation, a spoken conversation or even a non-verbal conversation. Chatbot can run on local computers and phones, though most of the time it is accessed through the internet. Chatbot is typically perceived as engaging software entity which humans can talk to. It can be interesting, inspiring and intriguing.

The Falcons are facing 3rd and goal on the Patriots' 5 yard line. Matt Ryan takes the snap and hands off to Devonta Freeman, already running hard at the goal line. Then, with a crunch audible to the topmost rows of NRG Stadium, Freeman is brought down by Dont'a Hightower right at the goal line. Touchdown?! Silence falls as all eyes turn… not to the referees on the sidelines (there aren't any) but to giant LCD panels behind the end zones. The screens remain black for several long moments until "TOUCHDOWN" lights up.

It is often critical in real-world applications to: (i) perform inverse learning of the cost parameters of a multi-objective reward based on observed agent behavior; (ii) perform sensitivity analyses of policies to various parameter settings; and (iii) analyze and optimize policy performance as a function of policy parameters. When such problems have mixed discrete and continuous state and/or action spaces, this leads to parameterized hybrid MDPs (PHMDPs) that are often approximately solved via discretization, sampling, and/or local gradient methods (when optimization is involved). In this paper we combine two recent advances that allow for the first exact solution and optimization of PHMDPs. We first show how each of the aforementioned use cases can be formalized as PHMDPs, which can then be solved via an extension of symbolic dynamic programming (SDP) even when the solution is piecewise nonlinear. Secondly, we leverage recent advances in non-convex solvers such as dReal and dOp (that offer δ-optimality guarantees for nonlinear problems given a symbolic function) for non-convex global optimization in (i), (ii), and (iii) using SDP to derive symbolic solutions to each PHMDP formalization. We demonstrate the efficacy and scalability of our framework by calculating the first known exact solutions to complex nonlinear examples of each of the aforementioned use cases.