A group of hackers managed to breach Washington D.C.'s surveillance camera network and infect the system with ransomware days before President Trump's inauguration, law enforcement officials close to the investigation told Fox News. The network of cameras affected eight days before President Trump was sworn in included ones located along the inaugural parade route, officials said Thursday. Investigators were able to rid the system of ransomware without paying any money, and the network was fully operational on Inauguration Day. An investigation into the ransomware attack is ongoing and being run by the Secret Service, officials said. A separate law enforcement source described the cyber-attack to Fox News as emanating from overseas, and that investigators have not ruled out the possibility that this attack was carried out by a state sponsored actor.

Nvidia continued to see demand for its graphics processors in the emerging world of artificial intelligence in its fourth quarter earnings reported Thursday. In its fourth quarter earnings release, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company reported revenue of $2.17 billion, up 55% year over year, on earnings per share of $1.13, up 117% a year ago. Wall Street analysts estimated $2.11 billion in revenue on EPS of 83 cents. Traditionally, the company's processors have been mostly used to power the latest gaming graphics, but the chips have become popular to run AI software in the data center and autonomous vehicles. A specific branch of AI, called deep learning, is where Nvidia's processors particularly shine.

The artificial intelligence market is expected to grow to USD $16.06 Billion by 2022. The McKinsey Global Institute says, "Recent advances in machine learning can be used to solve a tremendous variety of problems--and deep learning is pushing the boundaries even further." One such company set to take advantage of this emerging market is ASX-listed BrainChip Holdings (ASX:BRN) which is headquartered in Aliso Viejo, California. They have developed a Spiking Neuron Adaptive Processor (SNAP) that essentially mimics the human brain: autonomous and unsupervised learning, evolves and associates information. According to CEO Louis DiNardo, SNAP has many applications, which includes surveillance, casino operations, and even investing.

Activity on the tech labs front is happening faster than we can get to it these days, so here are a few "in case you missed it" items... The state of Ohio, JobsOhio and the Ohio State University are putting $45 million into an expansion of the Transportation Research Center's (TRC) 540-acre Smart Mobility Advanced Research and Test (SMART) Center in the Columbus area. Research will focus both on connected and driverless vehicles within this section of the 4,500-acre TRC expanse. This first phase of SMART expansion will include the industry's largest high-speed intersection, an urban network of intersections (i.e., roundabouts, or what we in the Northeast call rotaries), a rural network that includes wooded roads and a neighborhood network for slower speeds. TRC provides the largest independent vehicle testing facility in North America, according to TRC CEO Mark-Tami Hotta.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang introducing the Nvidia Spot, a USD 49.95 microphone and speaker that will let owners use Google Assistant anywhere in a home, at the company's CES 2017 keynote (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images) Nvidia continued to see demand for its graphics processors in the emerging world of artificial intelligence in its fourth quarter earnings reported Thursday. In its fourth quarter earnings release, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company reported revenue of $2.17 billion, up 55% year over year, on earnings per share of $1.13, up 117% a year ago. Wall Street analysts estimated $2.11 billion in revenue on EPS of 83 cents. Traditionally, the company's processors have been mostly used to power the latest gaming graphics, but the chips have become popular to run AI software in the data center and autonomous vehicles. A specific branch of AI, called deep learning, is where Nvidia's processors particularly shine.

We introduce a near-linear complexity (geometric and meshless/algebraic) multigrid/multiresolution method for PDEs with rough ($L^\infty$) coefficients with rigorous a-priori accuracy and performance estimates. The method is discovered through a decision/game theory formulation of the problems of (1) identifying restriction and interpolation operators (2) recovering a signal from incomplete measurements based on norm constraints on its image under a linear operator (3) gambling on the value of the solution of the PDE based on a hierarchy of nested measurements of its solution or source term. The resulting elementary gambles form a hierarchy of (deterministic) basis functions of $H^1_0(\Omega)$ (gamblets) that (1) are orthogonal across subscales/subbands with respect to the scalar product induced by the energy norm of the PDE (2) enable sparse compression of the solution space in $H^1_0(\Omega)$ (3) induce an orthogonal multiresolution operator decomposition. The operating diagram of the multigrid method is that of an inverted pyramid in which gamblets are computed locally (by virtue of their exponential decay), hierarchically (from fine to coarse scales) and the PDE is decomposed into a hierarchy of independent linear systems with uniformly bounded condition numbers. The resulting algorithm is parallelizable both in space (via localization) and in bandwith/subscale (subscales can be computed independently from each other). Although the method is deterministic it has a natural Bayesian interpretation under the measure of probability emerging (as a mixed strategy) from the information game formulation and multiresolution approximations form a martingale with respect to the filtration induced by the hierarchy of nested measurements.

This week Intel's CEO used a meeting with Donald Trump to announce it would invest $7bn in building a factory in Arizona, creating about 3,000 jobs. It seemed like a coup for Trump, who has pledged to bring manufacturing back to the US. In a media-attended Oval Office meeting, Intel's Brian Krzanich stood next to Trump and declared, with all the conviction of a hostage making a false confession, that the investment was a response to Trump's business-friendly policies. Thank you Brian Krzanich, CEO of @Intel. "It's in support of the tax and regulatory policies that we see the administration pushing forward that really make it advantageous to do manufacturing in the US," he said.

It might be time to stop thinking about Kansas City, Mo. as "flyover country." After a series of projects and millions of dollars spent, ""We will be the smartest city on Earth within five years," Bob Bennett, Kansas City's Chief Innovation Officer, said in an interview with The Kansas City Star . The mission began four years ago when Kansas City officials added free Wi-Fi on 50 city blocks and 125 smart LED street lights all over downtown. In July 2015, Kansas City announced a partnership with Cisco, an artificial intelligence company. Both parties invested a total of $15 million in hopes of simplifying travel in their city.

A study by a British think tank, Reform, says that 90% of British civil service workers have jobs so pointless, they could easily be replaced by robots, saving the government around $8 billion per year. The study, published this week, says that robots are "more efficient" at collecting data, processing paperwork, and doing the routine tasks that now fall to low-level government employees. Even nurses and doctors, who are government employees in the UK, could be relieved of some duties by mechanical assistants. There are "few complex roles" in civil service, it seems, that require a human being to handle. "Twenty percent of public-sector workers hold strategic, 'cognitive' roles," Reform's press release on the study says.

This year, the world saw a long-theorized weapon in action: a commercial drone, like a person might find at Best Buy, dropping a bomb on a target in Iraq. These drone bombers, used by the ultra-violent quasi-state ISIS in Iraq and Syria, are the flashiest combination of modern technologies with the modern battlefield. Cheap, camera-carrying robots, put to nefarious ends by a group that could never otherwise dream of fielding an air force. Dropping grenades isn't the deadliest thing an insurgent group can do with a small flying robot, but it leads to a very important question: What, exactly, is the answer to such a drone? There is--and this is rare for the defense world--no clear answer yet. The answer to a tank is a guided missile, fired by shoulder-launcher, helicopter, or low-flying attack plane.