Cyber attacks continue to increase in volume, velocity, and variety. Cyber criminals display great sophistication and can purchase a revolving multitude of digital weapons inexpensively via the dark web. They operate in an environment in which they know that borders are meaningless and the chances of apprehension and punishment are slim. Inventor Ray Kurzweil made his name as a pioneer in technology that helped machines understand human language, both written and spoken. These days he is probably best known as a prophet of The Singularity, one of the leading voices predicting that artificial intelligence will soon surpass its human creators - resulting in either our enslavement or immortality, depending on how things shake out.

Bengaluru: Wipro Ltd will use its artificial intelligence platform Holmes to automate several aspects of its so-called fixed-price projects, saving up to 46.5 million and freeing around 3,000 engineers from mundane software maintenance activities. The move is part of Wipro's larger plan to generate 60- 70 million in revenue by selling the platform to new and existing clients in the current financial year. About 30,000 of Wipro's workforce in the delivery side of the business are engaged in fixed-price projects. The company has over 150,000 employees, including 110,000 in delivery. New chief executive officer Abidali Neemuchwala has set an ambitious target for Wipro-- more than tripling its revenue growth to 12-14% for fiscal 2017.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo, also known as E3, will be prefaced by Bethesda Softworks and Electronic Arts press conferences Sunday, but a lot of news has already leaked ahead of the big event. Several big games have been revealed, and rumblings about new Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony video game consoles have been swelling for months. Based on the rumors, E3 2016 at the Los Angeles Convention Center June 14-16 is shaping up to be a fascinating event that could have a great effect on the video game industry. Nothing gets gamers' blood flowing like a good console unveiling. E3 is the place where consoles are launched, which is why 2016 is an odd year in the event's history.

Starring Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch and directed by Oscar Sharp, the short features a special script compiled by the neural network that even wrote a song unique to the film. After being fed scripts like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Watchmen and Aliens (as well as tons of others) it produced a nonsensical mess that actually works quite well in practice. The film was shot and edited in 48 hours, which is a feat considering how polished it looks in practice. As one character says "Well, I don't know anything about any of this, so..." You might get that feeling after viewing the film, but it's just like watching the insane ramblings of porn stars in Vernon Chatman's Final Flesh.

With appropriate policies in place, robots should become our "best friends," not our "worst nightmare," experts said at the 41st Annual AAAS Forum on Science & Technology Policy on 14 April. During a panel, entitled "Best Friend or Worst Nightmare? Autonomy and AI in the Lab and in Society," experts on artificial intelligence (AI) spoke about the role of policy in integrating new technologies into people's lives. They both praised current AI advancements, and urged more policymaking in the arena of autonomous systems, particularly related to disaster relief, sustainability, and the military, among other applications. The panel, co-organized by AAAS staff member Jonathan Drake and retired Vice President of Sandia's California Laboratory Miriam John, urged a stronger focus on the promise of AI, rather than its perils.

Last week, Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and other cutting-edge companies, took a surprising question at the Code Conference, a technology event in California. What, a man in the audience asked, did Musk make of the idea that we are living not in the real world, but in an elaborate computer simulation? Musk exhibited a surprising familiarity with this concept. "I've had so many simulation discussions it's crazy," Musk said. Citing the speed with which video games are improving, he suggested that the development of simulations "indistinguishable from reality" was inevitable.

New research explains why so many biological networks, including the human brain (a network of neurons), exhibit a hierarchical structure, and will improve attempts to create artificial intelligence. The study, published in PLOS Computational Biology, demonstrates this by showing that the evolution of hierarchy – a simple system of ranking – in biological networks may arise because of the costs associated with network connections. Like large businesses, many biological networks are hierarchically organised, such as gene, protein, neural, and metabolic networks. This means they have separate units that can each be repeatedly divided into smaller and smaller subunits. For example, the human brain has separate areas for motor control and tactile processing, and each of these areas consist of sub-regions that govern different parts of the body.

CAIRO – A vessel with an underwater robot arrived in Egypt on Thursday and is set to begin searching the Mediterranean for the wreck of the EgyptAir plane that crashed last month, authorities said. The John Lethbridge research vessel, which Egypt has hired from the Deep Ocean Search company, would begin combing the seabed on Friday in the crash zone between the Greek island of Crete and Egypt. What caused the Airbus A320 operating Flight MS804 from Paris to Cairo to go down on May 19, killing all 66 people on board, remains a mystery. The vessel, whose equipment can locate and retrieve black boxes from the seabed, arrived in Alexandria on Thursday, said Egypt's civil aviation authority. "The aircraft accident investigation committee for MS804 was at the port upon the arrival of the vessel," the authority said in a statement.

How much should you charge someone to live in your house? Or how much would you pay to live in someone else's house? Would you pay more or less for a planned vacation or for a spur-of-the-moment getaway? And the struggle to do so, my colleagues and I discovered, was preventing potential rentals from getting listed on our site--Airbnb, the company that matches available rooms, apartments, and houses with people who want to book them. In focus groups, we watched people go through the process of listing their properties on our site--and get stumped when they came to the price field. Many would take a look at what their neighbors were charging and pick a comparable price; this involved opening a lot of tabs in their browsers and figuring out which listings were similar to theirs.

Insilico Medicine and Life Extension announced today an exclusive collaboration to identify novel biomarkers of human aging through the use of big-data analytics and AI, with the ultimate goal of discovery and formulation of nutrients to support health and longevity. Insilico Medicine* is a big-data analytics company specializing in applying advances in deep learning to discovery of biomarkers and drugs. Life Extension**, a Florida-based organization established in the early 1980s, is a dietary-supplement innovator dedicated to extending healthy human longevity. Insilico Medicine will focus on applying advanced signaling pathway activation analysis techniques and deep-learning algorithms to find nutraceuticals that mimic the tissue-specific transcriptional response of many known interventions and pathways associated with health and longevity. Life Extension will use this information to develop novel nutraceutical products to support health and longevity, such as "geroprotectors" -- precision natural organic small-molecule formulations that slow down or even reverse age-associated conditions and damage.