Austin-based SparkCognition, a startup applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to the cybersecurity market, has raised 6M in a Series B funding round. The funding came from CME Ventures, Verizon Ventures, The Entrepreneurs' Fund (TEF), and Alameda Ventures. The startup--led by Amir Husain--said the Series B was oversusbcribed. SparkCognition says it has developed machine learning technology which it is applying to both Internet-of-Things (IoT) and cyber security, to automatically detect and identify attacks in IoT infrastructure.

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

Three weeks ago we reported an amusing anecdote out of China in which robot waiters in a Guangzhou restaurant had been "fired" because whencustomers flocked to the Heweilai Restaurant chain in the southern Chinese city, they found they were not all they are cracked up to be. "A staff member said the robots couldn't effectively handle soup dishes, often malfunctioned, and had to follow a fixed route that sometimes resulted in clashes. A customer also said the robots were unable to do tasks such as topping up water or placing a dish on the table." "The robots weren't able to carry soup or other food steady and they would frequently break down. The boss has decided never to use them again," said one employee. We joked in the summary saying that "for now, it appears, China's minimum wage workers, and it has a few hundred million of those, will not be phased out just yet." According to a report released by the MIT Technology Review, where some saw failure in China's "novelty" worker robots, the Chinese government saw nothing less than the opportunity to perfect what will soon put million of Chinese workers out of a job: an army of worker robots. Because while there is certanly humor to be found in the anecdote about a robot "termination", the Chinese government is keen to change this.

Volvo XC90 Drive Me is the brand's latest experimental self-driving car (Photo: Volvo) Volvo and Ford are teaming with Google and ride-sharing giants Uber and Lyft to advance the interests of self-driving cars. On Tuesday the companies announced the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, a group that aims to push the development of self-driving vehicles among lawmakers, regulators, civic groups, businesses and local governments. The group's spokesman is David Strickland, chief of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from 2010 to 2014. The coalition plans to work with policymakers to facilitate the deployment of self-driving cars, Strickland said in a statement, including creating "one clear set of federal standards" for autonomous vehicles. The U.S. Department of Transportation reports that last year there were 33,000 fatalities on U.S. roads.

If your self-driving car crashes, who gets sued? Google, Uber, and Ford would rather it be you, according to some experts. Tech companies making self-driving cars could become better protected under the law than those car's owners, experts warn, as the announcement came of a powerful new coalition of automakers and big tech companies forming to take on US government regulations around self-driving vehicles. Google, Uber, Lyft, Ford and Volvo, all of which are working on self-driving car technology, will lobby as the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets to bring autonomous vehicles to the road across the US. Related: We don't need self-driving cars – we need to ditch our vehicles entirely Heading it up will be David Strickland, the former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Administration, the same group he will now be working to influence.

The ACM constitution provides that our Association hold a general election in the even-numbered years for the positions of President, Vice President, Secretary/Treasurer, and Members-at-Large. Biographical information and statements of the candidates appear on the following pages (candidates' names appear in random order). In addition to the election of ACM's officers--President, Vice President, Secretary/Treasurer--five Members-at-Large will be elected to serve on ACM Council. Please refer to the instructions posted at https://www.esc-vote.com/acm2016. To access the secure voting site, you will need to enter your email address (the email address associated with your ACM member record) and your unique PIN provided by Election Services Co. Please return your ballot in the enclosed envelope, which must be signed by you on the outside in the space provided. The signed ballot envelope may be inserted into a separate envelope for mailing if you prefer this method. All ballots must be received by no later than 16:00 UTC on 24 May 2016. Validation by the Tellers Committee will take place at 14:00 UTC on 26 May 2016. Vicki Hanson is a Distinguished Professor of Computing at Rochester Institute of Technology, U.S. (since 2013), Professor and Chair of Inclusive Technologies, Computing, University of Dundee, U.K. (since 2009), and an IBM Research Staff Member Emeritus (since 2009). Previously, she was Research Staff Member and Manager, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center (1986–2008), Research Associate, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT (1980–86), and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (1978–80). Vicki is the ACM Vice President. She also currently serves as a member of the ACM Executive Committee and Council, on the ACM-W Europe Executive Committee, and on the ACM Fellows Awards Committee (Chair, 2015). She is Vice President at Large of ACM SIGCHI and an ACM Distinguished Speaker. She has served on the SIG Governing Board Executive Committee (2005–14; SGB Chair 2010–12), and as Chair of SIGACCESS, where she revitalized the SIG and established a successful annual conference (ASSETS). She co-founded the field's premier archival journal (ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing) and served as Associate Editor of ACM TWEB. She was on the organizing committee for several SIGPLAN OOPSLA conferences, chaired the recent ACM CEO Search Committee, and currently serves on the Royal Society of Edinburgh Fellows committee (since 2013; Convener 2015). She is an ACM Fellow, a Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Senior Member of IEEE.

Samuel Greengard is an author and journalist based in West Linn, OR.

Photography company Getty Images is accusing Google of scraping images from third party websites and encouraging piracy, adding a new wrinkle to the Mountain View, Calif.'s ongoing legal battles in Europe. Google first introduced the feature in Jan. 2013. Previously, the search engine only displayed tiny thumbnails of images. In a statement released to TIME ahead of the filing, Getty argues that since image consumption is immediate, "there is little impetus to view the image on the original source site" once it's seen in high resolution on Google. The complaint comes less than a week after the European Union's antitrust commission charged Google with using unfair practices to promote its own services on Android devices.

The research on human cognition has recently benefited from the use of the mathematical formalism of quantum theory in Hilbert space. However, cognitive situations exist which indicate that the Hilbert space structure, and the associated Born rule, would be insufficient to provide a satisfactory modeling of the collected data, so that one needs to go beyond Hilbert space. In Part I of this paper we follow this direction and present a general tension-reduction (GTR) model, in the ambit of an operational and realistic framework for human cognition. In this Part II we apply this non-Hilbertian quantum-like model to faithfully reproduce the probabilities of the 'Clinton/Gore' and 'Rose/Jackson' experiments on question order effects. We also explain why the GTR-model is needed if one wants to deal, in a fully consistent way, with response replicability and unpacking effects.

When you think of artificial intelligence, the first image that likely comes to mind is one of sentient robots that walk, talk and emote like humans. It's known as machine learning, and it revolves around enlisting computers in the task of sorting through the massive amounts of data that modern technology has allowed us to generate (a.k.a. One of the places machine learning is turning out to be the most beneficial is in the environmental sciences, which have generated huge amounts of information from monitoring Earth's various systems -- underground aquifers, the warming climate or animal migration, for example. A slew of projects have been popping up in this relatively new field, called computational sustainability, that combine data gathered about the environment with a computer's ability to discover trends and make predictions about the future of our planet. This is useful to scientists and policy-makers because it can help them develop plans for how to live and survive in our changing world.