Gartner's latest Information Security and Risk Management forecast predicts the market will achieve ... [ ] an 8.3% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) growth rate from 2019 through 2024, reaching $211.4 billion. Bottom Line: In 2021, cybersecurity vendors will accelerate AI and machine learning app development to combine human and machine insights so they can out-innovate attackers intent on escalating an AI-based arms race. Attackers and cybercriminals capitalized on the chaotic year by attempting to breach a record number of enterprise systems in e-commerce, financial services, healthcare and many other industries. AI and machine learning-based cybersecurity apps and platforms combined with human expertise and insights make it more challenging for attackers to succeed in their efforts. Accustomed to endpoint security systems that rely on passwords alone, admin accounts that don't have fundamental security in place, including Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and more and attackers created a digital pandemic this year. Interested in what the leading cybersecurity experts are thinking will happen in 2021, I contacted twenty of them who are actively researching how AI can improve cybersecurity next year. Leading experts in the field include including Nicko van Someren, Ph.D. and Chief Technology Officer at Absolute Software, BJ Jenkins, President and CEO of Barracuda Networks, Ali Siddiqui, Chief Product Officer and Ram Chakravarti, Chief Technology Officer, both from BMC, Dr. Torsten George, Cybersecurity Evangelist at Centrify, Tej Redkar, Chief Product Officer at LogicMonitor, Bill Harrod, Vice President of Public Sector at Ivanti, Dr. Mike Lloyd, CTO at RedSeal and many others.

Sophos has announced cybersecurity datasets, tools and methodologies that leverage artificial intelligence to help organizations combat cyberattacks, …

Artificial intelligence has made great strides since the deep learning revolution, but AI systems still struggle to extrapolate outside of their training data and adapt to new situations. For inspiration we look to the domain of science, where scientists have been able to develop theories which show remarkable ability to extrapolate and sometimes predict the existence of phenomena which have never been observed before. According to David Deutsch, this type of extrapolation, which he calls "reach", is due to scientific theories being hard to vary. In this work we investigate Deutsch's hard-to-vary principle and how it relates to more formalized principles in deep learning such as the bias-variance trade-off and Occam's razor. We distinguish internal variability, how much a model/theory can be varied internally while still yielding the same predictions, with external variability, which is how much a model must be varied to accurately predict new, out-of-distribution data. We discuss how to measure internal variability using the size of the Rashomon set and how to measure external variability using Kolmogorov complexity. We explore what role hard-to-vary explanations play in intelligence by looking at the human brain and distinguish two learning systems in the brain. The first system operates similar to deep learning and likely underlies most of perception and motor control while the second is a more creative system capable of generating hard-to-vary explanations of the world. We argue that figuring out how replicate this second system, which is capable of generating hard-to-vary explanations, is a key challenge which needs to be solved in order to realize artificial general intelligence. We make contact with the framework of Popperian epistemology which rejects induction and asserts that knowledge generation is an evolutionary process which proceeds through conjecture and refutation.

William Gropp (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Sujata Banerjee (VMware Research) and Ian Foster (University of Chicago) High Performance Computing (HPC), Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML), and Quantum Computing (QC) and communications offer immense opportunities for innovation and impact on society. Researchers in these areas depend on access to computing infrastructure, but these resources are in short supply and are typically siloed in support of their research communities, making it more difficult to pursue convergent and interdisciplinary research. Such research increasingly depends on complex workflows that require different resources for each stage. This paper argues that a more-holistic approach to computing infrastructure, one that recognizes both the convergence of some capabilities and the complementary capabilities from new computing approaches, be it commercial cloud to Quantum Computing, is needed to support computer science research. The types of infrastructure needed to support HPC and AI/ML share many features; GPU systems originally developed for HPC have become essential for ML, and those systems have further been optimized for ML, with features now being applied to HPC simulations.

Atom segmentation and localization, noise reduction and super-resolution processing of atomic-resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) images with high precision and robustness is a challenging task. Although several conventional algorithms, such has thresholding, edge detection and clustering, can achieve reasonable performance in some predefined sceneries, they tend to fail when interferences from the background are strong and unpredictable. Particularly, for atomic-resolution STEM images, so far there is no well-established algorithm that is robust enough to segment or detect all atomic columns when there is large thickness variation in a recorded image. Herein, we report the development of a training library and a deep learning method that can perform robust and precise atom segmentation, localization, denoising, and super-resolution processing of experimental images. Despite using simulated images as training datasets, the deep-learning model can self-adapt to experimental STEM images and shows outstanding performance in atom detection and localization in challenging contrast conditions and the precision is consistently better than the state-of-the-art two-dimensional Gaussian fit method. Taking a step further, we have deployed our deep-learning models to a desktop app with a graphical user interface and the app is free and open-source. We have also built a TEM ImageNet project website for easy browsing and downloading of the training data.

Such a query can be answered currently at a high human effort cost, by inspecting e.g., a JSON list of Assemblée elected officials (available from NosDeputes.fr) and manually connecting the names with those found in a national registry of companies. This considerable effort may still miss connections that could be found if one added information about politicians' and business people's spouses, information sometimes available in public knowledge bases such as DBPedia, or journalists' notes. No single query language can be used on such heterogeneous data; instead, we study methods to query the corpus by specifying some keywords and asking for all the connections that exist, in one or across several data sources, between these keywords. This problem has been studied under the name of keyword search over structured data, in particular for relational databases [49, 27], XML documents [24, 33], RDF graphs [30, 16]. However, most of these works assumed one single source of data, in which connections among nodes are clearly identified. When authors considered several data sources [31], they still assumed that one query answer comes from a single data source. In contrast, the ConnectionLens system [10] answers keyword search queries over arbitrary combinations of datasets and heterogeneous data models, independently produced by actors unaware of each other's existence.

Password guessing approaches via deep learning have recently been investigated with significant breakthroughs in their ability to generate novel, realistic password candidates. In the present work we study a broad collection of deep learning and probabilistic based models in the light of password guessing: attention-based deep neural networks, autoencoding mechanisms and generative adversarial networks. We provide novel generative deep-learning models in terms of variational autoencoders exhibiting state-of-art sampling performance, yielding additional latent-space features such as interpolations and targeted sampling. Lastly, we perform a thorough empirical analysis in a unified controlled framework over well-known datasets (RockYou, LinkedIn, Youku, Zomato, Pwnd). Our results not only identify the most promising schemes driven by deep neural networks, but also illustrate the strengths of each approach in terms of generation variability and sample uniqueness.

Analog hardware implemented deep learning models are promising for computation and energy constrained systems such as edge computing devices. However, the analog nature of the device and the associated many noise sources will cause changes to the value of the weights in the trained deep learning models deployed on such devices. In this study, systematic evaluation of the inference performance of trained popular deep learning models for image classification deployed on analog devices has been carried out, where additive white Gaussian noise has been added to the weights of the trained models during inference. It is observed that deeper models and models with more redundancy in design such as VGG are more robust to the noise in general. However, the performance is also affected by the design philosophy of the model, the detailed structure of the model, the exact machine learning task, as well as the datasets.

New geometric and computational analyses of power-weighted shortest-path distances (PWSPDs) are presented. By illuminating the way these metrics balance density and geometry in the underlying data, we clarify their key parameters and discuss how they may be chosen in practice. Comparisons are made with related data-driven metrics, which illustrate the broader role of density in kernel-based unsupervised and semi-supervised machine learning. Computationally, we relate PWSPDs on complete weighted graphs to their analogues on weighted nearest neighbor graphs, providing high probability guarantees on their equivalence that are near-optimal. Connections with percolation theory are developed to establish estimates on the bias and variance of PWSPDs in the finite sample setting. The theoretical results are bolstered by illustrative experiments, demonstrating the versatility of PWSPDs for a wide range of data settings. Throughout the paper, our results require only that the underlying data is sampled from a low-dimensional manifold, and depend crucially on the intrinsic dimension of this manifold, rather than its ambient dimension.

This morning, Google went out of service, as it seems to be caused by a hacker's attack, making millions of people unable to access their Google accounts, including Gmail and YouTube, after the world's largest search engine crashed. This comes just days after a significant breach of US Government agencies by Russian hackers. The outage lasted for more than an hour. Well, I may say that 2020 has been a hard enough year up to here, but having the most important cloud services platform out-of-service can set the bar when it comes to the Worst year ever index. And while it looks like various services are starting to come back again, I'm taking this morning as an excellent opportunity to put ourselves one question: What would our lives be like if Google services suddenly stopped working, forever?