Bletchley Park, the site of secret code-deciphering projects during World War Two, could become the centre for a new generation of codemakers and codebreakers. There are plans for a training college to teach cybersecurity skills to 16-19 year olds at the Buckinghamshire site. Former Home Secretary Lord Reid said it had become vital to build up the "talent pool" for cyber-defence. The college in a wartime building at Bletchley is intended to open in 2018. The project, developed by a not-for-profit group from the cybersecurity industry, is planning a National College of Cyber Security, which would open in autumn 2018.

Its first operatives famously cracked coded messages encrypted by the Nazis, hastening the end of the second world war. Now Bletchley Park is planning a new school for the next generation of codebreakers in order to plug a huge skills gap in what is fast emerging as the biggest security threat to 21st-century Britain. The College of National Security, a first for the UK, is scheduled to open in 2018 in a specially adapted premises on the Bletchley Park site. The sixth-form boarding school will be free to the 500-odd applicants, with a mix of venture capital, corporate sponsorship and very possibly state funding underwriting the multimillion-pound costs. The school will teach cyber skills to some of the UK's most gifted 16- to 19-year-olds.

The ongoing evolution in advanced analytics and other emerging technologies is transforming the operational processes in government and public service agencies throughout the world. With the help of these technologies, such organisations are trying to address citizen demands, helping to overcome persistent challenges such as regulatory compliance, outdated legacy IT infrastructures and organisational cultures, according to a new study report from Accenture. In its latest report titled, Emerging Technologies in Public Service, Accenture surveyed nearly 800 public service technology professionals across nine countries to identify emerging technologies being implemented or piloted. The technologies include advanced analytics/predictive modelling, the IoT, intelligent process automation, video analytics, biometrics/identity analytics, machine learning, and natural language processing/generation. The survey found that while more than two-thirds, (70%) of public sector agencies are evaluating the potential of emerging technologies, only a small percentage (25%) is moving beyond the pilot phase to full implementation.

Automaton models are often seen as interpretable models. Interpretability itself is not well defined: it remains unclear what interpretability means without first explicitly specifying objectives or desired attributes. In this paper, we identify the key properties used to interpret automata and propose a modification of a state-merging approach to learn variants of finite state automata. We apply the approach to problems beyond typical grammar inference tasks. Additionally, we cover several use-cases for prediction, classification, and clustering on sequential data in both supervised and unsupervised scenarios to show how the identified key properties are applicable in a wide range of contexts.

Europe's Schiaparelli Mars lander crashed last month after a sensor failure caused it to cast away its parachute and turn off braking thrusters more than two miles (3.7 km) above the surface of the planet, as if it had already landed, a new report has revealed. The error stemmed from a momentary glitch in a device that measured how fast the spacecraft was spinning, the report by the European Space Agency said. The spacecraft activated its ground systems, even though it was still about 2.3 miles off the surface, the ESA said. The new image of Schiaparelli and its hardware components was taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO, on 1 November. A number of the bright white spots around the dark region interpreted as the impact site are now confirmed as real objects – they are not likely to be imaging'noise' – and therefore are most likely fragments of Schiaparelli.

During its wheeled treks on the Red Planet, NASA's Spirit rover may have encountered a potential signature of past life on Mars, report scientists at Arizona State University (ASU). To help make their case, the researchers have contrasted Spirit's study of "Home Plate" -- a plateau of layered rocks that the robot explored during the early part of its third year on Mars -- with features found within active hot spring/geyser discharge channels at a site in northern Chile called El Tatio. The work has resulted in a provocative paper: "Silica deposits on Mars with features resembling hot spring biosignatures at El Tatio in Chile." As reported online last week in the journal Nature Communications, field work in Chile by the ASU team -- Steven Ruff and Jack Farmer of the university's School of Earth and Space Exploration -- shows that the nodular and digitate silica structures at El Tatio that most closely resemble those on Mars include complex sedimentary structures produced by a combination of biotic and abiotic processes. "Although fully abiotic processes are not ruled out for the Martian silica structures, they satisfy an a priori definition of potential biosignatures," the researchers wrote in the study.

He studied English Literature and History at Sussex University before gaining a Masters in Newspaper Journalism from City University. Businesses are often data-rich but information-poor. Machine learning (ML) is changing that. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to let computers learn independently through algorithms without being explicitly programmed can help companies process vast quantities of complex data to improve analytics, predictive accuracy and decision-making. Machine learning is already being used in everything from fraud detection to self-driving cars, and in sectors from marketing to government.

Robots have become commonplace in many aspects of life including health care, military and security work. Yet until recently little thought has been given outside of academic circles to the ethics of robots. Silicon Valley Robotics recently launched a Good Robot Design Council -- which has launched "5 Laws of Robotics" guidelines for roboticists and academics -- on the ethical creation, marketing and use of robots in everyday life. The laws have been adapted from the EPSRC 2010 "Principles of Robotics". In Britain a few months ago we saw a similar document, "BS8611 Robots and robotic devices" by the British Standards Institute (BSI) presented at the Social Robotics and AI conference in Oxford as an approach to embedding ethical risk assessment in robots.

The world of big data analytics is incredibly diverse, and people are coming up with new analytic tools and techniques every day. But one particularly productive combination that should not be overlooked involves the use of text analytics and machine learning. Tom Sabo, principal solutions architect at analytics giant SAS, says the one-two punch of predictive modeling on structured data, and text mining with unstructured data, can deliver insights that are more than the sum of their analytic parts. "They really run side by side," Sabo tells Datanami. "Let's say somebody has predictive models in place against whether customer will churn or to maximize profit, for instance. If they have text, like notes, in the rest of that structured data…we can incorporate that additional free form information for actionable insight."

The UK government just announced a slew of investment in startups and R&D in a move that's guaranteed to benefit the country's increasingly important technology sector. News of the funding was unveiled during Chancellor of the Exchequer Phillip Hammond's Autumn Statement. Your questions answered by founders, experts and thought leaders in business, design and tech. Over £400 million of government finance will make its way to startups as venture capital via the British Business Bank. The explicit purpose of this is to stop the flow of UK startups being purchased by foreign buyers.