The Viacom saga continues: National Amusements, the holding company through which Sumner Redstone controls Viacom, is looking for new Viacom board members. This isn't a shocker--speculation of a board shake-up began after George Abrams and Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman were removed from National Amusements' board a few weeks ago. On the list of potential board replacements, reports the Wall Street Journal, are former Time Warner exec Kenneth Lerer, ex-Sony Entertainment President Nicole Seligman, and former Discovery Communications CEO Judith McHale. Don't mess with Texas (drivers): Former Lyft and Uber drivers in Austin, TX say Uber and Lyft broke federal law when they abruptly stopped operations in the city. Drivers filed a suit in San Francisco (where the companies are based) saying the two ride-sharing services violated a law stating they needed to give sixty days' notice to employees before a'mass layoff'.

Microsoft has released the newest version of its Security Intelligence Report which analyzes the threat landscape of exploits and vulnerabilities the industry faced in the second half of 2015. For the very first time the report, now in its tenth year, includes security data from the Microsoft cloud. "We're pretty excited about this volume because it's the first one we've ever released with data from our cloud services and there are a lot of customers including CISOs and CIOs that are interested in the data we have from our cloud," Tim Rains, chief security advisor at Microsoft, told Infosecurity. By implementing their machine learning system capable of processing ten terabytes of data every day, the firm has been able to leverage its widespread cloud data to create an extensive, intelligent security graph to help protect its customers. "The intelligent security graph is our attempt to collect trillions of signals from billions of data sources so that we can triangulate what the bad guys are doing and where they're at. The graph allows us to put a great deal of data together, analyze it and make changes to our security posture," Rains said.

"Software eating the world" is the basic philosophy behind all of Andreessen Horowitz's investments. But the Silicon Valley VC firm has a few specific areas of tech that are lighting up its radar right now. With 1.5 billion in a new fund to invest in startups, managing partner Scott Kupor told Business Insider about a few areas that the firm is super excited about: While Kupor called out these four areas specifically, it doesn't mean that the firm is not interested in any company that falls outside the categories. The firm is still looking for entrepreneurs with big ideas that have the software to back it. "For us, we're always looking for companies where software is the differentiating factor of the business," Kupor said.

Artificial intelligence is still not as fast or reliable as human intelligence--which is perhaps a relief for those of you with nightmares of the robot takeover. But now, a new study in PLoS Computational Biology explains why the human brain's enigmatic but effective design works so well--and how we can harness that power to make smarter machines. Hierarchy--the ability to divide units into smaller, functional parts--is the driving force behind every biological system. Our very bodies are organized into organ systems which are made of of organs, organs made up of tissues and tissues made up of cells. But the human brain is the ultimate hierarchical system, with separate areas and sub-regions designed to perform specific tasks for specific body parts.

The personal data you share with Facebook and other social platforms is a treasure trove of information that can, according to one UK startup, prove whether or not you would be a good tenant. Score Assured wants to take the data you share privately and publicly with social media and sell it to individuals, employers, and landlords. Tenant Assured, the first tool in the company's potential suite of data mining-and-selling resources, will connect with your social accounts and give landlords a report based on your data. The company says it uses machine learning software to predict what your data means--from your personality to "financial stress." It also rates the "risk" you would be as a tenant.

Artificial intelligence has been around since 1956 and has made some giant leaps in that time: beating the best human at chess, the best human at US gameshow Jeopardy and recently beating the best human at complex strategy game Go. Brands have only recently started adopting artificial intelligence for core consumer services. Google's voice recognition technology now claims 98% accuracy and Facebook's DeepFace is said to recognise faces with a 97% success rate. IBM's Watson, which uses artificial intelligence to perform its question-answering function, is 2,400% "smarter" today than when it achieved the Jeopardy victory five years ago. There is no doubt that the relationship between men and machines is changing, and brands are on the cusp of making artificial intelligence an everyday element of their customer offerings.

Although no one is sure whether the AI devices of the future are going to kill us, take our jobs or just help us with mundane tasks, one thing we can agree on is that they will need power and lots of it. That's why a number of companies have developed processors designed with processing tasks in mind, like ex-NASA engineer Daniel Goldin, who's created a 256-core chip that's helped him raise over 100 million in funding. Goldin knows his way around running a company too, since he holds the record as the longest running NASA administrator, with his tenure extending through much of the Shuttle era, between 1992 and 2001. He has brought that expertise and engineering background to bear on KnuPath, his monstrous chip design. This chip is being combined with another product known as KnuVerse, which we're told is a neural computing system capable of "military grade" voice recognition: no matter how loud the environment you're in, it will be able to understand you.

"The emerging threat is: It is not the guy sitting in Bangalore but the robot next door which is going to take your job, and this creates enormous anxiety among the middle class. You can see this in the political dialogue that is taking place in the US as well as in the run-up to Brexit in Britain." What will happen to countries like Vietnam, the Philippines and India if that ladder for steady growth is removed, when its export-driven aspect is just taken away because industrialized countries can produce things just as cheaply? The worry is that if a large segment of the middle-class becomes disempowered and is looking for easy solutions in country after country, could it create conditions for more political turmoil? " asked Rajan. Rajan's statement is being taken seriously in India as well, because despite growing at a pace of almost 7.6% in 2015-16, the Labour Bureau reported that job growth had slumped to a six year low: only 100,100 million in 2015. Siri also tells 17.9 million jobless people in India.. How to address them!! https://t.co/PhzLxP3GWZ However, Secretary of Economic Affairs Shaktikanta Das told Sputnik, "I will not go into the numbers, but when the manufacturing, industry and services sectors are growing then I think it's a positive development.

In this March 23, 2010, file photo, the Google logo is seen at the Google headquarters in Brussels. SAN FRANCISCO – Google defended itself against charges of political bias in its search algorithm after a video alleged it distorted display results for Hillary Clinton. Creators of the video on the YouTube channel SourceFed, which had accumulated over 15 million views on Facebook and nearly 300,000 on YouTube by Friday evening, alleged Google's search engine Autocomplete feature suppresses searches pairing the presumptive Democratic nominee with criminal activity. If someone types "Hillary Clinton cri," Google's search suggests phrases like "Hillary Clinton crime reform" and "Hillary Clinton crisis", said Matt Lieberman, host and writer for SourceFed, in the video. Yet after typing the same phrase on Yahoo or Bing search, suggestions on crimes and criminal activity are among the first suggestions, he notes.

Situ8ed, founded in December 2015, based in Grenoble in the heart of the French Alps, and hosted by INRIA in their Rhone Alpes research centre. We're using situation modelling techniques pioneered by one of our founders to recognize real-world situations for smartphone users. Key to our products is the use the latest signal processing and machine learning techniques. Key to our value proposition is the protection of confidential data. We're developing an SDK for application developers (for Android and IOS) with cloud-based services for managing the installed base.