Microsoft's chief legal officer, Brad Smith (left) said governments should treat the WannaCry ransomware attack as a "wake-up call." Microsoft has criticized governments and intelligence agencies for "stockpiling" vulnerabilities in government computer systems, in the wake of of the WannaCry ransomware that has so far affected 150 countries and an estimated 200,000 computers since Friday. The virus exploits a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows XP which was originally discovered by, and then stolen from, the National Security Agency. "The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake-up call," Microsoft's chief legal officer Brad Smith wrote in a blog post on Sunday. "They need to take a different approach and adhere in cyberspace to the same rules applied to weapons in the physical world. We need governments to consider the damage to civilians that comes from hoarding these vulnerabilities and the use of these exploits."

UP to S$150 million will be committed to AI.SG, a new national programme that seeks to boost Singapore's capabilities in artificial intelligence (AI). The National Research Foundation (NRF) will invest the amount over the next five years. Minister for Communications and Information Yaacob Ibrahim said on Wednesday that AI and data science are among key frontier technologies the Singapore government will harness as part of its "enhanced growth strategy for the digital economy". He was speaking at Innovfest Unbound 2017, a two-day innovation festival celebrating digital disruption and which has attracted more than 8,000 global entrepreneurs and representatives from government agencies and corporates. Dr Yaacob said: "The potential gains from an enabler technology like AI are massive."

Desperate to overcome the nation's growing shortage of labor, midsized companies are planning to buy robots and other equipment to automate a wide range of tasks, including manufacturing, earthmoving and hotel room service. According to a Bank of Japan survey, companies with share capital of ¥100 million to ¥1 billion plan to boost investment in the fiscal year that started in April by 17.5 percent, the highest level on record. It is unclear how much of that is being spent on automation but companies selling such equipment say their order books are growing and the government says it sees a larger proportion of investment being dedicated to increasing efficiency. Revenue at many robot-makers also rose in the January-March period for the first time in several quarters. "The share of capital expenditure devoted to becoming more efficient is increasing because of the shortage of workers," said Seiichiro Inoue, a director at the industrial policy bureau of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

The true scale of the hack that hit the NHS could only become clear on Monday morning. Despite cyber security experts working hard to save hospitals from the attack, it may turn out to be far worse than previously thought after the weekend. In the NHS, experts are concerned that many pieces of equipment – not only computers but things like heart monitors – will be switched on for the first time after the weekend and may start being infected and spreading the malware all over again. More than 200,000 victims in around 150 countries have been infected by the ransomware which originated in the UK and Spain on Friday before spreading globally. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

TOKYO Desperate to overcome Japan's growing shortage of labor, mid-sized companies are planning to buy robots and other equipment to automate a wide range of tasks, including manufacturing, earthmoving and hotel room service. According to a Bank of Japan survey, companies with share capital of 100 million yen to 1 billion yen plan to boost investment in the fiscal year that started in April by 17.5 percent, the highest level on record. It is unclear how much of that is being spent on automation but companies selling such equipment say their order books are growing and the Japanese government says it sees a larger proportion of investment being dedicated to increasing efficiency. Revenue at many of Japan's robot makers also rose in the January-March period for the first time in several quarters. "The share of capital expenditure devoted to becoming more efficient is increasing because of the shortage of workers," said Seiichiro Inoue, a director in the industrial policy bureau of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, or METI.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a set of computer science techniques that, as Stanford professor Andrew Ng is fond of saying, gives your software super powers. Building on our Primer on Artificial Intelligence, this microsite is intended to help newcomers (both non-technical and technical) begin exploring what's possible with AI. We've met with hundreds of Fortune 500 / Global 2000 companies, startups, and government policy makers asking: "How do I get started with artificial intelligence?" This site is designed as an resource for anyone asking those questions, complete with examples and sample code to help you get started. While there are dozens of excellent tutorials available on the web (once you've figured out what library or API you want to use - we've listed a few of our favorites in the Reference section), we felt a pre-tutorial -- a "Chapter 0" if you will, was missing: something that would help you survey the landscape broadly; to give you a sense of what's possible; and help you think about how you might use artificial intelligence techniques to make your software smarter, your users happier, and your business better.

By year's end, the Pentagon wants computers to be leading the hunt for Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, through turning countless hours of aerial surveillance video into actionable intelligence. It's part of Project Maven, a fast-moving effort launched last month by Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work to accelerate, improve, and put to wider use the military's use of machine learning. "We have to tackle the problem a different way," said Air Force Lt. Gen. John N.T."Jack" Shanahan, director for defense intelligence for warfighter support, and the man tasked with finding the new technology. "We're not going to solve it by throwing more people at the problem…That's the last thing that we actually want to do. We want to be smarter about what we're doing."

In healthcare applications, temporal variables that encode movement, health status and longitudinal patient evolution are often accompanied by rich structured information such as demographics, diagnostics and medical exam data. However, current methods do not jointly optimize over structured covariates and time series in the feature extraction process. We present ShortFuse, a method that boosts the accuracy of deep learning models for time series by explicitly modeling temporal interactions and dependencies with structured covariates. ShortFuse introduces hybrid convolutional and LSTM cells that incorporate the covariates via weights that are shared across the temporal domain. ShortFuse outperforms competing models by 3% on two biomedical applications, forecasting osteoarthritis-related cartilage degeneration and predicting surgical outcomes for cerebral palsy patients, matching or exceeding the accuracy of models that use features engineered by domain experts.

Massive public resume data emerging on the WWW indicates individual-related characteristics in terms of profile and career experiences. Resume Analysis (RA) provides opportunities for many applications, such as talent seeking and evaluation. Existing RA studies based on statistical analyzing have primarily focused on talent recruitment by identifying explicit attributes. However, they failed to discover the implicit semantic information, i.e., individual career progress patterns and social-relations, which are vital to comprehensive understanding of career development. Besides, how to visualize them for better human cognition is also challenging. To tackle these issues, we propose a visual analytics system ResumeVis to mine and visualize resume data. Firstly, a text-mining based approach is presented to extract semantic information. Then, a set of visualizations are devised to represent the semantic information in multiple perspectives. By interactive exploration on ResumeVis performed by domain experts, the following tasks can be accomplished: to trace individual career evolving trajectory; to mine latent social-relations among individuals; and to hold the full picture of massive resumes' collective mobility. Case studies with over 2500 online officer resumes demonstrate the effectiveness of our system. We provide a demonstration video.

This e-newsletter marks the sun setting on the career of GeoIntelligence Insider columnist and contributing editor Art Kalinski, long active in geospatial circles. Art is handing the journalistic reins to William Tewelow, a former intelligence specialist with the U.S. Navy. He also served a special assignment at the U.S. Department of Transportation and is currently a manager with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Every issue of this newsletter also brings you the latest news on both expanding fronts, hardware and software, in the defense and security realm. Counter-drone technology research and operation efforts are helping to prepare for the potential threat of drone swarms.