When the safety and security of an entire nation is at stake, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the US needs to be "ahead of the curve", said Teresa Smetzer, Director of Digital Futures. It needs to go beyond just reporting on events to actually anticipating the next crisis. The agency's anticipatory intelligence cell uses machine learning and data science to draw insights from events that had happened in the past, and "report to our policymakers any issues of instability that they might have to deal with". "Rather than responding, they are proactively able to understand what they can do to change the situation," Smetzer said at the recent AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Data is the "lifeblood" of many organisations, whether public and private, said Smetzer.

In this paper we focus our attention on the exploitation of the information contained in financial news to enhance the performance of a classifier of bank distress. Such information should be analyzed and inserted into the predictive model in the most efficient way and this task deals with all the issues related to text analysis and specifically analysis of news media. Among the different models proposed for such purpose, we investigate one of the possible deep learning approaches, based on a doc2vec representation of the textual data, a kind of neural network able to map the sequential and symbolic text input onto a reduced latent semantic space. Afterwards, a second supervised neural network is trained combining news data with standard financial figures to classify banks whether in distressed or tranquil states, based on a small set of known distress events. Then the final aim is not only the improvement of the predictive performance of the classifier but also to assess the importance of news data in the classification process. Does news data really bring more useful information not contained in standard financial variables? Our results seem to confirm such hypothesis.

Canadian software maker BlackBerry on Monday launched a new cybersecurity software, which identifies vulnerabilities in programs used in self-driving cars. The product, called Blackberry Jarvis, is being marketed first to automakers - a group of customers the former smartphone maker is hoping will power its turnaround efforts - but could also have applications in healthcare and industrial automation. BlackBerry said it was offering Jarvis on a pay-as-you-go basis. Once initiated, automakers will have online access to Jarvis and can scan files at every stage of software development, the company said. Last year, the global'ransomware' attack, dubbed WannaCry, helped raise awareness of BlackBerry's security software business, which is largely focused on managing secure connections to mobile devices.

WannaCry attacked more than 300,000 computers in 150 countries only to be followed by Petya a month later. And the pain extended beyond the enterprise when consumers bore the brunt of one of the most devastating hacks to hit the U.S.: the Equifax breach. The Equifax hack reportedly affected 145.5 million U.S. consumers -- or approximately 44 percent of the U.S. population -- leaving people vulnerable to financial fraud for potentially the rest of their lives. These were just some of the year's lowlights, all of which point to a future where nearly every organization is reliant on successful cybersecurity. It can literally mean the difference between a company's survival and extension.

Carnegie Mellon University will lead a $27.5 million Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) initiative to build more intelligence into computer networks. Researchers from six U.S. universities will collaborate in the CONIX Research Center headquartered at Carnegie Mellon. For the next five years, CONIX will create the architecture for networked computing that lies between edge devices and the cloud. The challenge is to build this substrate so that future applications that are crucial to IoT can be hosted with performance, security, robustness, and privacy guarantees. "The extent to which IoT will disrupt our future will depend on how well we build scalable and secure networks that connect us to a very large number of systems that can orchestrate our lives and communities. CONIX will develop novel architectures for large-scale, distributed computing systems that have immense implications for social interaction, smart buildings and infrastructure, and highly connected communities, commerce and defense," said James H. Garrett Jr., dean of Carnegie Mellon College of Engineering.

As mankind expands outwards into the universe, unmanned spacecraft will face a growing problem: as Earth becomes more distant, the transmission time for information and instructions to reach these craft becomes longer and longer. This time lag could make it difficult or even impossible for satellites to respond to fast-moving threats, like space debris, or quickly take opportunities to collect data from unexpected sources, like a passing meteorite. A new grant from NASA to the University of Akron in Ohio will fund research to overcome this issue by helping such spacecraft "think" for themselves using deep-learning artificial intelligence (AI) that works over an Ethereum blockchain network. "I hope to develop technology that can recognize environmental threats and avoid them, as well as complete a number of tasks automatically," Akron Assistant Professor Jin Wei Kocsis, who will lead the research, said in a press release. "I am honored that NASA recognized my work, and I am excited to continue challenging technology's ability to think and do on its own."

The product, called Blackberry Jarvis, is being marketed first to automakers - a group of customers the former smartphone maker is hoping will power its turnaround efforts - but could also have applications in healthcare and industrial automation.

Artificial Intelligence software has beaten humans in one of the world's most-challenging reading comprehension tests. In a feat being hailed as a world first, a deep neural network scored higher than the average person on a Stanford University designed quiz. The breakthrough could lead to more advanced robots and automated systems, capable of solving complex problems and answering difficult questions. Future applications could range from customer service to helping tackle social and political issues, like climate change and conflicts over resources. Artificial Intelligence software has beaten humans in one of the world's most-challenging reading comprehension tests.

We are living in interesting times. Multiple technologies, improving exponentially, are converging. I have been chronicling this convergence for several years in my newsletter, Exponential View. As Bill Gates said, "Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years." Likewise, most annual predictions overestimate what can occur in a year, and underestimate the power of the trend over time.

People are increasingly reliant on artificial intelligence (AI) -- that is, the machines, systems or applications that are capable of performing tasks that, until recently, could only be performed by a human. Think of your morning routine: maybe a Google Assistant checks your calendar and reminds you of your meetings. Then you survey Twitter, which uses algorithms to curate what you see -- the latest about Trump, trade and technology rise to the top. And at the end of it all, when you settle in for some Netflix, your profile suggests a few thrillers you're likely to binge-watch. Marketing statistics reveal that some 57 percent of consumers expect voice-activated smart assistants to have a major or moderate impact on their daily lives by 2020.