Grammarly has your back -- and also $110 million in funding, after its first venture round. Grammarly uses artificial intelligence to help fix spelling, grammar and syntax mistakes. You can use it as a Chrome extension, in Microsoft Office or as a Windows app. Silicon Valley venture capitalist General Catalyst led the funding round, reports Bloomberg, and was joined by IVP, Spark Capital, Breyer Capital and SignalFire. Grammarly has around 6.9 million users and a $12-per-month premium option that corrects "complex writing issues."

Vint Cerf is often called the "father of the internet" and he frequently speaks about technology to large groups of people as Google's chief internet evangelist. "AI stands for artificial idiot," he said Tuesday, speaking before a largely federal audience at AFCEA's Internet of Things Tech Summit in Washington, D.C. Cerf used the tweet-fueled corruption of Microsoft's AI chatbot to make the point that AI systems today are only as smart as the people who interact with it. Twitter trolls, it turns out, aren't the type you want educating young, impressionable AI. "It's a good example of how an AI system can learn the wrong ways," Cerf said. Cerf also opined about the dangers the IoT presents to the general public and--in a stronger sense--to the U.S. military. "My theme is, 'It's the software, stupid,'" Cerf said.

Malware has proven increasingly difficult to detect via signature or heuristic-based methods, which means most Antivirus (AV) programs are woefully ineffective against mutating malware, and especially ineffective against APT attacks (Advanced Persistent Threats). Typical malware consists of about 10,000 lines of code. Five to six years ago marked the beginning of the use of machine learning to solve non-linear problems such as facial recognition or understanding malware, and what features one needs to extract to uniquely identify such programs. Other techniques, such as sandboxing and machine-based techniques, are not as fast nor as accurate as Deep Learning. Deep Instinct, founded by Guy Caspi and Eli David, Israeli Defense Force Cybersecurity veterans, applies artificial intelligence Deep Learning algorithms to detect structures and program functions that are indicative of malware.

The Food and Drug Administration is creating a digital health unit within its Center for Devices and Radiological Health in an effort to develop internal technical expertise, and streamline the agency's software review process and regulation of medical devices. "Because it's such an emerging area, having a centralized unit in the Center Director's Office is important for coordination on digital health topics and having consistency in applying policies," says Bakul Patel, associate director of digital health in the FDA's CDRH. Also See: FDA's medical device arm ramps up HIT strategies The digital health unit will be established in the CDRH's Office of the Center Director as part of the next iteration of the Medical Device User Fee Amendments, under which the FDA is authorized to collect user fees from medical device manufacturers. In exchange for those fees, FDA commits to meeting certain performance goals, such as reviewing submissions within specified timeframes. The medical device users fees, which must be reauthorized every five years, expire in September.

Three businesses in Manitoba received a big boost on Saturday after the Government of Canada handed out a $4.5 million investment. The companies received the financial support under the Western Innovation Initiative, a program providing $100 million in repayable contributions to small- and medium-sized companies in Western Canada. "That's how the good jobs for middle class Canadians and those working hard to join it will be created," said federal Minister of Small Business and Tourism Bardish Chagger at the announcement in Winnipeg on Saturday. Complex Games, which makes online games for mobile devices; Sightline Innovation, a machine-learning company; and GORP, an energy bar company, received the funding to push their products to broader markets. When they told me, I was speechless," said Colleen Dyck, CEO of The Great GORP Project Inc. "I was really honoured that they really saw the potential in my company."

More than 400 years ago, according to legend, a rabbi knelt by the banks of the Vltava river in what is now known as the Czech Republic. He pulled handfuls of clay out of the water and carefully patted them into the shape of a man. The Jews of Prague, falsely accused of using the blood of Christians in their rituals, were under attack. The rabbi, Judah Loew ben Bezalel, decided that his community needed a protector stronger than any human. He inscribed the Hebrew word for "truth", emet, onto his creation's forehead and placed a capsule inscribed with a Kabbalistic formula into its mouth. The creature sprang to life.

Welcome to the Hackett Group First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Your lines have been placed on listed only mode. Hosting tonight's call are Mr. Ted Fernandez, Chairman and CEO; and Mr. Rob Ramirez, Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Ramirez, you may begin. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us to discuss The Hackett Group's First Quarter Results. Speaking on the call today and here to answer your questions are Ted Fernandez, Chairman and CEO of The Hackett Group; and myself, Rob Ramirez, Chief Financial Officer. Our press announcement was released over the wires at 4:14 p.m. Eastern Time. For a copy of the release, please visit our website at www.thehackettgroup.com. We will also place any additional financial or statistical data discussed on this call that is not contained in the release on the Investor Relations page of our website. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that in the following comments and in the Q&A session, we will be making statements about expected future results, which may be forward-looking statements for the purposes of the federal securities laws. These statements relate to our current expectations, estimates and projections and are not a guarantee of future performance.

Just as organizations can use artificial intelligence to enhance their security posture, cybercriminals may begin to use it to build smarter malware. This is precisely why a security fabric approach is needed -- security solutions for network, endpoint, application, data center, cloud and access working together as an integrated and collaborative whole -- combined with actionable intelligence to hold a strong position on autonomous security and automated defense. In the future, we will have attacker/defender AI scenarios play out. At first, they will employ simple mechanics. Later, they will play out as intricate scenarios with millions of data points to analyze and address.

As far-fetched as it may seem today, there are a couple of compelling reasons why some humans may one day be born without either a mother or father as we now know them, and with no other humans around to bring them up. The first is the uninhabitable Earth scenario: doomsday. This is the idea that one day our planet will not be able to support human life. This may be due to catastrophic climate change brought on by a large asteroid or comet impact, a nuclear winter following a global nuclear war or a pandemic so severe that humans do not survive. Whatever the cause of our demise, if humans want to ultimately survive and one day re-emerge, it makes sense to store the building blocks of people – ovum and sperm – ready for a resurrection of the human race once our planet is habitable again. There are already gene banks around the world that have been created to store plant seeds for just this kind of eventuality.

As if airline flights haven't gotten stressful enough, here comes the latest twist. The Department of Homeland Security is considering banning computers aboard flights from Europe to the United States, because it believes terrorists could conceivably convert a laptop into a bomb, according to news reports. . Tell me it's not so. Snap's rough start as a public company, a watch from Microsoft that can calm Parkinson's tremors, and a new touch screen Amazon Echo all grabbed headlines this week. But the one that rocked this reporter was a proposed laptop ban.