Tech companies should stop behaving as though everything that is not illegal is acceptable, says Microsoft's second-in-command. Instead, they should focus on defining – and living by – the standards that they would like to see in regulation, before it gets forced on them anyway. For some of the most potentially dangerous new technologies, such as facial recognition, that could mean voluntarily refusing to sell them to certain countries, for certain uses, or even agreeing to a moratorium altogether, said Brad Smith, the president and chief legal officer of the world's most valuable publicly-traded company. Speaking to the Guardian before the launch of his new book, Tools and Weapons, Smith said that if technology firms wanted to be proud of how they changed the world for the better, they must take more responsibility for the ways they have made it worse. "When you think about all of the issues that people worry about in the world today and what they spend their time arguing about, it's often issues like trade, immigration, nationalism, globalisation," Smith said.

There's a reason a new product announced by Amazon 12 months ago never got released to the general public. The product has an unbelievably affordable price at $25 and was only offered initially by "invite-only," on a first-come, first-come basis. I did get my invite recently, forked over the big bucks, and tested the unit in my 2012 Hyundai. The tiny unit, which looks like the old iPod Nano, but with an Amazon smile splashed across the front, connects to the 12-volt car socket for power, and your smartphone's Bluetooth to bring the Internet to your car, thus bringing audio through your car stereo without hanging to hassle with wires. Amazon's Echo Auto brings Alexa into the car (Photo: Jefferson Graham) Look who's listening now: Hey, Siri, Google and Alexa – enough with the snooping The good: You can bring Amazon's personal assistant to the car, to play on-demand music, news and podcasts for you, read back your latest e-mail, find the nearest gas station, tell you what's on your calendar and help you locate the nearest Starbucks.

The White House weighs its options as Iran warns that a military response could trigger an'all-out war'; chief White House correspondent John Roberts reports. Saudi Arabia defended itself as well as possible from the recent massive attack on its oil facilities -- an attack that the U.S. has blamed on Iran, a military expert said. "I don't think there is any country that could have defended any better than Saudi Arabia did, and that includes the United States," Peter Roberts, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, told The New York Times. "I don't think there is any country that could have defended any better than Saudi Arabia did, and that includes the United States." Eighteen drones and seven cruise missiles bombarded the facilities in an asault described as a "Pearl Harbor-type" attack.

You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. A new technique can predict the final size of wildfires from the moment of ignition, researchers report. Built around a machine learning algorithm, the model can help forecast whether a wildfire will be small, medium, or large by the time it has run its course--knowledge useful to those in charge of allocating scarce firefighting resources. "A useful analogy is to consider what makes something go viral in social media," says lead author Shane Coffield, a doctoral student in earth system science at the University of California, Irvine. "We can think about what properties of a specific tweet or post might make it blow up and become really popular--and how you might predict that at the moment it's posted or right before it's posted." The researchers applied that thinking to a hypothetical situation in which dozens of fires break out simultaneously.

SAS, the market leader in Analytics & Anti-fraud Technologies, and Najm for Insurance Services have announced a technology collaboration that will aim to bring SAS expertise to counter and reduce instances of fraud in Automobile and Motor insurance claims. Officials from both companies signed the agreement at a SAS event in Fairmont Riyadh on Wednesday. With the goal of streamlining claims through application assessment and taking a proactive approach to detect & deter fraud in the business, Najm is looking to improve efficiency in fraud identification, fast claims resettlement as well as the development of better-quality alerts, by utilizing the latest analytics & fraud detection technologies. Utilizing Artificial Intelligence and Machine-Learning technologies, SAS will automate aspects of Najm's claimant profiling, and will aim to complement existing manual processes to detect fraud claims through behavioral responses and automatically assess risk patterns. During the event, Najm CEO Dr. Mohammad Al-Suliman spoke about the partnership with SAS and the company's future plans.

When I left a "regular" job some time ago to become an entrepreneur and adviser to multiple companies, a senior leader in the company observed encouragingly: "Instead of one company-many employees, work is moving to one employee-many companies. You are going to be a part of this future of work." As if to prove his point, the very next day I settled down at my "hot desk" in the spanking new WeWork that had opened in my city and contributed my bit to its ever-expanding valuation. Coworking spaces are mushrooming all around us in every city of the world. JLL estimates that coworking space in India rose three-fold to 3.4 million sq.

To find out what's behind the phenomenon of super-agers, researchers conducted a study examining the brains and cognitive performances of two groups: 41 young adults between the ages of 18 and 35 and 40 older adults between the ages of 60 and 80. First, the researchers administered a series of cognitive tests, like the California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT) and the Trail Making Test (TMT). Seventeen members of the older group scored at or above the mean scores of the younger group. That is, these 17 could be considered super-agers, performing at the same level as the younger study participants. Aside from these individuals, members of the older group tended to perform less well on the cognitive tests. The default mode network is, as its name might suggest, a series of brain regions that are active by default -- when we're not engaged in a task, they tend to show higher levels of activity.

Razvan Ionasec (EMBA 2018) has been a computer buff since his childhood in Romania. His team at Siemens has now developed an artificial intelligence-based assistant to help radiologists evaluate medical scans. Razvan Ionasec had been working for several years on machine learning and computer vision technologies when he received a personal letter from a father seeking help for a son diagnosed with a complex congenital cardiovascular disease. "He had read about our research in the field of medical image analysis," says Razvan, a native of Romania. "It was too early in the development cycle at that time, but it inspired me to pursue my PhD so I could work on problems that have real impact on patients."

LONDON – A U.K. parliamentary committee has released a report that highlights industrial automation in Japan, calling on the government to promote automation in British industries. Japan "has a long history of automation and is home to major robotics manufacturers," the House of Commons Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee wrote in the report published Wednesday, adding that the country is "the origin for half of robots sold globally." Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's administration "has made a conscious choice to support automation as part of its'Abenomics' reforms, recognizing the need for continued growth and development of automation to enable the country to'drastically improve productivity,' " the report states. Referring to Japan's 2015 New Robot Strategy, the report urged the U.K. government to develop its own automation and artificial intelligence strategy by the end of 2020. The report cited an 2018 report by the International Federation of Robotics that ranked the U.K. in 22nd place in terms of robot density -- or the number of industrial robots per 10,000 workers.

David Stewart leads strategy development, drives product management and provides key marketing counsel for fraud and compliance solutions worldwide. During the past 10 years, Stewart has hosted SAS' annual Counterterrorism and Financial Crimes Forum co-sponsored by the US Department of Justice and a number of global financial institutions. He has collaborated extensively to bring data mining and machine learning capabilities to market for credit analytics, customer intelligence and financial crimes applications.