Government
Dynamic Analysis of Executables to Detect and Characterize Malware
Smith, Michael R., Ingram, Joe B., Lamb, Christopher C., Draelos, Timothy J., Doak, Justin E., Aimone, James B., James, Conrad D.
It is needed to ensure the integrity of systems that process sensitive information and control many aspects of everyday life. We examine the use of machine learning algorithms to detect malware using the system calls generated by executables-alleviating attempts at obfuscation as the behavior is monitored rather than the bytes of an executable. We examine several machine learning techniques for detecting malware including random forests, deep learning techniques, and liquid state machines. The experiments examine the effects of concept drift on each algorithm to understand how well the algorithms generalize to novel malware samples by testing them on data that was collected after the training data. The results suggest that each of the examined machine learning algorithms is a viable solution to detect malware-achieving between 90% and 95% class-averaged accuracy (CAA). In real-world scenarios, the performance evaluation on an operational network may not match the performance achieved in training. Namely, the CAA may be about the same, but the values for precision and recall over the malware can change significantly. We structure experiments to highlight these caveats and offer insights into expected performance in operational environments. In addition, we use the induced models to gain a better understanding about what differentiates the malware samples from the goodware, which can further be used as a forensics tool to understand what the malware (or goodware) was doing to provide directions for investigation and remediation.
Top Data Sources for Journalists in 2018 (350 Sources)
There are many different types of sites that provide a wealth of free, freemium and paid data that can help audience developers and journalists with their reporting and storytelling efforts, The team at State of Digital Publishing would like to acknowledge these, as derived from manual searches and recognition from our existing audience. Kaggle's a site that allows users to discover machine learning while writing and sharing cloud-based code. Relying primarily on the enthusiasm of its sizable community, the site hosts dataset competitions for cash prizes and as a result it has massive amounts of data compiled into it. Whether you're looking for historical data from the New York Stock Exchange, an overview of candy production trends in the US, or cutting edge code, this site is chockful of information. It's impossible to be on the Internet for long without running into a Wikipedia article.
Consciousness Began When the Gods Stopped Speaking - Issue 54: The Unspoken
Julian Jaynes was living out of a couple of suitcases in a Princeton dorm in the early 1970s. He must have been an odd sight there among the undergraduates, some of whom knew him as a lecturer who taught psychology, holding forth in a deep baritone voice. He was in his early 50s, a fairly heavy drinker, untenured, and apparently uninterested in tenure. "I don't think the university was paying him on a regular basis," recalls Roy Baumeister, then a student at Princeton and today a professor of psychology at Florida State University. But among the youthful inhabitants of the dorm, Jaynes was working on his masterpiece, and had been for years. From the age of 6, Jaynes had been transfixed by the singularity of conscious experience. Gazing at a yellow forsythia flower, he'd wondered how he could be sure that others saw the same yellow as he did. As a young man, serving three years in a Pennsylvania prison for declining to support the war effort, he watched a worm in the grass of the prison yard one spring, wondering what separated the unthinking earth from the worm and the worm from himself. It was the kind of question that dogged him for the rest of his life, and the book he was working on would grip a generation beginning to ask themselves similar questions.
Is There Beer in Space? - Issue 54: The Unspoken
Space is a cold and barren place. Nothing can exist there, nothing!" Ludwig Von Drake, an obscure uncle of Donald Duck and a professor of astronomy, is sitting on a high stool in his observatory. When he sees that he is being filmed, he falls off and lands on the floor with a loud thump. "Now I can see stars I've never seen before!" he groans. He walks over to a table with a large pile of books on it. The thickest of them all is a guide to space travel that he wrote himself. In a 45 -minute- long monologue, he tells us in a thick German accent how mankind discovered the planets in our solar system and has fantasized about everything that might be crawling around on them. Every now and then, he picks up a book from the large pile and reads from it, and then throws it nonchalantly into a corner of the room. He tells us about Copernicus and Galileo, and about Kepler's dreams about Martians, Fontenelle's speculations about life on other planets, and even John Herschel's Great Moon Hoax. Science fiction comes to life in the colorful cartoon: Hairy space beings and flying saucers shoot across the screen. At the end, the professor has the last word. He finds all these fantasies poppycock; nothing can live in that empty, barren space! But, as he is speaking, Von Drake is kidnapped by a black Martian robot from one of his stories. The cartoon, Inside Outer Space, is part of Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, a television series from the 1960s. The absent minded duck professor hosts a number of episodes, each with their own topic: the history of flight, the color spectrum, space--all exciting stuff for American kids in the Space Age. Lou Allamandola spent his teenage years in the science- crazy 1960s. He grew up in a Catholic family in the state of New Jersey. His grandparents were immigrants from Italy, and he didn't learn to speak English until he went to school. He still clearly remembers the Disney cartoons with Ludwig Von Drake, which were broadcast on Saturday evenings. "Von Drake called the interstellar medium--the empty space between the stars and the planets--a barren place where nothing could exist," he tells me. "That was all we knew in the '60s.
How AI Could Reshape Economies
As the field of artificial intelligence continues to expand, prominent scientists, business leaders, and politicians are expressing concerns about what this will mean for the future of work. Many conversations focus on the probability of robots taking away people's jobs, but economies could be impacted in other ways. According to experts, AI technologies may also change the nature of work and affect financial services. Even if you keep your job, your day to day duties could be drastically altered by new AI-powered tools. Instead of probing these economic nuances, the news media has largely favored more apocalyptic interpretations.
Marib Journal: As Yemen Crumbles, One Town Is an Island of Relative Calm
During a recent four-day trip to Marib with a group of Western journalists and researchers, I saw a town struggling for a sense of normalcy -- and even progress -- despite the collapsed country around it. The trip was organized by the Sana Center for Strategic Studies, a research institute focused on Yemen, and led by Farea al-Muslimi, an energetic young Yemeni scholar, who said he worried that the international community was forgetting about Yemen, to the peril of both. "We can't stop the war in Yemen right now, but at least we can cause more conversation about it," he said. "We want to bring the world to Yemen and bring Yemen to the world." Marib's unlikely success is partly a symptom of the near complete shattering of the Yemeni state, which has left regions to fend for themselves in providing life's basics for their people.
NASA Is Working On Making Drones A Part Of Every City
When you think of NASA you probably think of the missions to the moon or the International Space Station but the agency has plans to start conducting some work closer to the Earth's surface soon. The agency's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate is working on research and implementation of Urban Air Mobility or UAM for the coming years. NASA defines UAM as "a safe and efficient system for air passenger and cargo transportation within an urban area," said a release from NASA. These include small package delivery, like drone or Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) deliveries, and other services that could be controlled from onboard, on the ground or could potentially be autonomous. NASA is helping companies looking to add urban air mobility to cities. Photo: NASA Not only is NASA working on developing these technologies as it has for the past six or so years, but it's also working to create more successful management of those technologies.
Jail or bail? Machines versus judges
Decisions about whether to grant bail could be better made by a machine than by a human. Predictions based on machine learning could outperform judges when deciding which defendants to jail before trial and which to release on bail. Kleinberg et al. exploited data on more than 758,000 defendants who were arrested in New York City between 2008 and 2013. Compared with carefully devised counterfactual scenarios based on actual judges' decisions, the machine predictions based on defendants' histories could reduce crime by up to 25% with no increase in jailing, or reduce jailing up to 42% with no increase in crime. All categories of crime, including violent crimes, could be reduced, and, critically, so could racial disparities in jailing rates.
The 3 Types of AI: A Primer – Becoming Human
AI is a booming industry with a lot of noise, thought leadership, and hype. However, as we attend industry events, work with clients, and tell the story of AI for customer data, there's one common trend. Many of the people we talk to only have a loose idea of what AI does, with little or no mind to what it is. This post will serve as an easy to read primer on what AI truly is, and what kinds of AI are being developed/where things stand today in the ecosystem. AI is a form of intelligence - Specifically AI is a synthetic intelligence - intelligence of a man-made yet real quality.
The Farms of the Future Will Be Automated From Seed to Harvest
Swarms of drones buzz overhead, while robotic vehicles crawl across the landscape. Orbiting satellites snap high-resolution images of the scene far below. Not one human being can be seen in the pre-dawn glow spreading across the land. This is a snapshot of the farm of the future. Every phase of the operation--from seed to harvest--may someday be automated, without the need to ever get one's fingernails dirty.