This post is part of an ongoing blog series examining "Sure Things" (predictions that are almost guaranteed to happen) and "Long Shots" (predictions that are less likely to happen) in cybersecurity in 2017. In the last few years, the digital footprint of organizations has expanded beyond the confines of the on-premise data center and private cloud to a model that now incorporates SaaS and public clouds. To date, InfoSec teams have been in a reactive mode while trying to implement a comprehensive security strategy across their hybrid architecture. In 2017, we will see a concerted effort from InfoSec teams to build and roll out a multi-cloud security strategy geared toward addressing the emerging digital needs of their organizations. Maintaining a consistent security posture, pervasive visibility, and ease of security management across all clouds will drive security teams to extend their strategy beyond security considerations for public and private clouds and also focus on securely enabling SaaS applications.

A company that successfully predicted that Donald Trump would become the next US president using artificial intelligence, claims to already know the nominations and winner of Best Picture for next months annual Academy Awards – aka The Oscars. The Massachusetts based start-up, Luminoso, unveiled its list (see below) almost two weeks before voting for the list of nominees officially closes (January 24) – and more than a month before the awards takes place at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood (February 26). The firm pulled together over 84,000 reviews written by movie goers (not critics) which have been published on the IMDB website over the past four year (2013-2016) . It then used its Natural Language Processing software, 'Luminoso Analytics', to analyze the text and identify correlations between topics discussed in the reviews and the eventual Oscar nominees and winners. It found that certain terms, including "narrative," "cinematography," "plot," "visuals," "stunning," "experience," and "masterpiece," were more prevalent in reviews of moves that later went on to be nominated and/or win the Oscars.

THE standard joke about artificial intelligence (AI) is that, like nuclear fusion, it has been the future for more than half a century now. In 1958 the New York Times reported that the Perceptron, an early AI machine developed at Cornell University with military money, was "the embryo of an electronic computer that [the American Navy] expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence". Five decades later, self-aware battleships remain conspicuous by their absence. Yet alongside the hype, there has been spectacular progress: computers are now better than any human at the games of chess and Go, for instance. Computers can process human speech and read even messy handwriting.

Like many tech companies, IBM is starting the new year by making a few predictions. One of them has to do with a software concept they call a "macroscope," a software technology that can be used to analyze the complexities of the physical world. IBM predicts that within five years, such technology will "help us understand the Earth's complexity in infinite detail." Hyperbole aside, the goal is to better manage world's resources and commercial endeavors that use those resources by applying machine learning algorithms across an array of data sources. That includes geospatial data (weather, soil, water, etc.) as well as data about economic, social and political conditions.

The Obama administration is moving in its waning days in office to set up closer coordination between companies developing autonomous-vehicle technology and regulators who will set rules for how self-driving cars and drones will operate on public roads and airways. The U.S. Department of Transportation said Wednesday it is setting up an advisory committee that will include leaders of major automotive and technology companies, including General Motors Co. Chief Executive Mary Barra as co-chairman and executives at Amazon.com Inc., Uber Technologies Inc., Alphabet Inc. and FedEx Corp. among the 25 members. Naming a large advisory group at a federal agency so late in an administration is somewhat unusual, but state and federal transportation officials believe questions around oversight and safety standards for self-driving cars will remain significant amid rapid advances in the technology. Still, several of the names on the list may draw extra attention from President-elect Donald Trump's incoming Republican administration. Mr. Trump has singled out GM for criticism of the company's decision to manufacture some cars in Mexico, putting Ms. Barra at the heart of debates over industrial and trade policies.

The U.S. Air Force's mysterious X-37B space plane has now spent 600 days in Earth orbit on the vessel's latest mission, and is nearing a program record for longest time spent in space. The robotic X-37B lifted off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on May 20, 2015, kicking off the program's fourth space mission (which is known as Orbital Test Vehicle-4, or OTV-4). If the uncrewed spacecraft spends 74 more days aloft, it will break the duration record set during OTV-3, which touched down in October 2014. But it's unclear how long OTV-4 will last, or just what the X-37B is doing as it circles Earth; most details about the space plane's missions and payloads are classified. The first OTV mission began on April 22, 2010, and concluded on Dec. 3 of that year, following 224 days of orbit.

Businesses and IT leaders concerned about cybersecurity have a lot of potential threats to deal with, from spear phishing attacks to ransomware, and may soon have another item on their worry list: artificial intelligence. Although AI has the potential to boost productivity and handle rote office tasks, freeing employees to work on more complex assignments, there is a looming downside in the security realm. Someday in the near future, hackers may be able to use AI tools to find new vulnerabilities and then create new exploits and attacks in a fraction of the time it would take a human. In August, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Defense Department's research arm, sponsored the Cyber Grand Challenge hacking competition in Las Vegas. The contest pitted seven autonomous machines against each other to find and exploit bugs in each other's systems.

Teradata India released its technology predictions for the India market in 2017. According to a recent predictions report, smart cities as planned by the government of India will use nearly 1.6 billion IoT connected devices by 2016, an increase of 39 per cent from 2015. Smart commercial buildings are predicted to be the highest user of IoT until 2017, followed by smart homes. Together these two categories will consume just over 1 billion connected devices by 2018. The Internet of Things (IoT) has vast implications for government institutions from city hall to international governing bodies.

She is currently in the NYC Data Science Academy 12 week full time Data Science Bootcamp pr... taking place between April 11th to July 1st, 2016. This post is based on her third class project - Web Scraping, due on the 6th week of the program. Oil prices have fallen sharply since the summer of 2014. Prices bottomed in February 2016, since then they have gradually increased. While the breakeven cost is a popular topic among investors, on the consumer side gasoline prices are very cheap.