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Siri creators launch Viv, a voice assistant that hopes to run people's entire lives

The Independent - Tech

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display


RE2 Robotics develop robot that can 'help in the kitchen'

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Most of us have struggled to prise the lid off a jar of jam or been frustrated by the tricky safety caps on bottles of pills, but now there is robotic help at hand - literally. Engineers have developed a machine with two highly dexterous arms that are capable of unscrewing even the trickiest of lids. The talents of the RE2 Robotics High Dexterous Manipulation System extend even to tying knots, opening zips, making balloon animals and cutting snowflakes out of folded paper. A pair of robotic arms developed by engineers at RE2 Robotics is so dexterous it can unscrew the lids of jars (pictured) and even use a pair of scissors to cut out shapes from folded paper. Yet despite its handiness around the home, the robot is additionally capable of lifting three times its own weight, and the company behind it said it could be used to dismantle unexploded bombs.


IBM's Watson is going to cybersecurity school

#artificialintelligence

It's no secret that much of the wisdom of the world lies in unstructured data, or the kind that's not necessarily quantifiable and tidy. So it is in cybersecurity, and now IBM is putting Watson to work to make that knowledge more accessible. Towards that end, IBM Security on Tuesday announced a new year-long research project through which it will collaborate with eight universities to help train its Watson artificial intelligence system to tackle cybercrime. Knowledge about threats is often hidden in unstructured sources such as blogs, research reports and documentation, said Kevin Skapinetz, director of strategy for IBM Security. "Let's say tomorrow there's an article about a new type of malware, then a bunch of follow-up blogs," Skapinetz explained.


We talked to the father-and-son VC team who are launching a new fund to back European tech startups

#artificialintelligence

Joi Ito/Flickr (CC)/Index VenturesSaul Klein (left) and Robin Klein (right.) Saul and Robin Klein are a father and son team who have invested in some of Europe's biggest technology startups. Saul Klein also cofounded LoveFilm and startup accelerator Seedcamp, and was one of Skype's original executives. Now the pair are joining forces for their own venture capital fund: LocalGlobe, which they say will invest in startups at the seed stage across Europe. So far the fund has announced investments in online mortgage advisor Trussle and also Estonian job search app Jobbatical. Business Insider met with the Kleins at LocalGlobe's office in London to talk about Europe's technology potential, whether we're in a tech bubble, overvalued startups, artificial intelligence and Brexit. Robin Klein: The number of new companies being formed just keeps growing and growing and growing. We think seed capital of a kind that we provide is just fundamental to this ecosystem. It's what we've done for years, it's what we think we know, what we think we're good at. But it's never going to meet the aspirations of thousands of founders who are creating great companies. Saul Klein: On the UK/Europe side, as my Dad said, we've both been involved in the industry now for [a long time.] I started doing this in October 1993, so well over 20 years since we put The Telegraph online. You add innovations, the first e-commerce transaction in the UK was 1995. I then went off to the US and spent 1995 to 2002 in the US so I saw the US bubble burst. I didn't see the UK bubble burst. But we did invest in about eight companies at the time, including lastminute.com. In the US when we saw the bubble burst there, our fortunate seed investment in the US was a company called Pyro Labs which was Blogger which got sold to Google before the IPO. The bottom line is that we've both lived and worked through at least three or four very significant cycles where things have been amazing then things have been terrible and'no tech company will ever get funded again,' 'no company will ever go public.' 'Everyone's crazy, what are they're thinking?' 'This whole internet thing is just these stupid kids.' 'It's going to go away.' We've seen here in Europe and in the US these very, very significant cycles where the sentiment, whether it's media sentiment, investor sentiment, public market sentiment, corporate sentiment, [they] have all gone through massive crashes.


IBM's Watson is going to cybersecurity school

PCWorld

It's no secret that much of the wisdom of the world lies in unstructured data, or the kind that's not necessarily quantifiable and tidy. So it is in cybersecurity, and now IBM is putting Watson to work to make that knowledge more accessible. Towards that end, IBM Security on Tuesday announced a new year-long research project through which it will collaborate with eight universities to help train its Watson artificial-intelligence system to tackle cybercrime. Knowledge about threats is often hidden in unstructured sources such as blogs, research reports and documentation, said Kevin Skapinetz, director of strategy for IBM Security. "Let's say tomorrow there's an article about a new type of malware, then a bunch of follow-up blogs," Skapinetz explained.


The Six Biggest Misconceptions About Drones

Slate

While consumer drones are becoming increasingly popular, many people still envision a General Atomics MQ-1 Predator when they hear the word drone. They assume that the camera-carrying quadrotors you can buy on Amazon or in pricy airport stores are simply smaller, less-sophisticated variants on military technology. Common sense as the military connection to consumer drones seems, it's not actually accurate: While Predators and DJI Phantom 3s are both unmanned aerial vehicles with some autonomous capabilities, they have very different origins and exceedingly different capabilities. To use an analogy, a Predator is like an aircraft carrier and a DJI Phantom 3 is like a rowboat: They're both technically boats, but you wouldn't assume they're capable of the same things--or used for the same purposes.


Zee Media Exclusive: Air India officials given kickbacks by Canadian company to bag tender

#artificialintelligence

Delhi: In one of the biggest exposes of 2016, it has been revealed that in order to bag tender for biometric facial recognition device, Cryptometrics, a company in Canada, gave kickbacks to officers of Air India. Biometric facial recognition device is used for recognition of faces of passengers. In an exclusive report, Zee Media Corp has learnt that on 24 February 2006, Air India had issued a Request for Proposal for the device and the tender for the same given by 20 companies including Canada's Cryptometrics. Later, it was revealed in order to get the tender, Cryptometrics paid kickbacks to Air India officials through a person named Nazir Karigar. His closeness with Air India officials can be ascertained from the fact that Nazir had the full copy of the tender with him on 28 December 2005 itself. Whereas Air India had issued the tender on 24 February 2006.


Google testing black links instead of blue ones, potentially changing the look of the world's best known website

The Independent - Tech

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display


This Robot Can Open Your Pill Bottles For You

Popular Science

Nimble enough to remove a canister from a cinderblock. The ways robots progress don't always mirror the stages of childhood development, but it's eerie when they do. We've seen robots stumble to walk, watched as they learned the basics of language, and now we can see one dexterous enough to move color disks from one peg to another, stacking them in the correct order. It can also do more complex tasks, like opening safety lids on pill bottles. Aptly named the "Highly Dexterous Manipulation System", the robot was developed by Resquared Robotics, with funding from the Army and Navy.


The AI system that can detect 85% of cyber attacks, with a little human help

#artificialintelligence

MIT scientists have built a hybrid human/artificial intelligence (AI) machine that they claim can learn how to detect 85% of cyber attacks – that's roughly three times better than previous benchmarks – while reducing false positive rates by a factor of 5. Nitesh Chawla, professor of computer science at Notre Dame University, said in a statement from MIT that the machine "has the potential to become a line of defense against attacks such as fraud, service abuse and account takeover." Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the machine-learning startup PatternEx demonstrated the platform, called AI2, in a paper titled "AI2: Training a big data machine to defend". As the researchers describe the current state of the art, today's security systems are typically driven by either humans – so-called "analyst-driven solutions" – or by machine. The problem with security systems based on fixed rules is that they miss attacks that don't match those rules. Machine-learning approaches, as the name suggests, rely on an adaptive process that can trigger annoying numbers of false positives.