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Solar Impulse 2: Sun-powered plane journey is proof of human endurance as well as renewable energy, pilots say

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


Obama in Germany plugs international trade deals, tries to counter critics

The Japan Times

HANOVER, GERMANY โ€“ President Barack Obama delivered a strong defense of international trade deals Sunday in the face of domestic and foreign opposition, saying it's "indisputable" that such agreements strengthen the economy and make U.S. businesses more competitive worldwide. Obama, on a farewell visit to Germany as president, is trying to counter public skepticism about a trans-Atlantic trade deal with Europe, while also facing down criticism from the 2016 presidential candidates of a pending Asia-Pacific trade pact. Despite all that, Obama said: "the majority of people still favor trade. They still recognize, on balance, that it's a good idea. "It is indisputable that it has made our economy stronger," Obama said about international trade. He said he was confident the trans-Atlantic trade deal could be completed by the end of year, to be presented for ratification.


MIT Creates Remarkably Accurate Tool to Detect Cyber-Attacks

#artificialintelligence

They continue to target computer networks and damage their infrastructure. Now, a combined team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and machine-learning startup PatternEx have developed a powerful artificial intelligence system called AI2 which works significantly better than any existing cyber-attack detection system. The system has been tested on 3.6 billion log lines or pieces of data that reveal major system activities triggered by millions of users over a period of three months. Researchers have found that new tool can detect cyber-attacks with 85% accuracy which is roughly three times better than the previous benchmark. Moreover, it reduces the number of'false positives' โ€“ an event wrongly identified as threat โ€“ by a factor of 5. Conventional security systems are either virtual machine-based or humanly operated but none of them has proven overwhelmingly successful at encountering cyber-attacks.


Everybody Freeze! Corey Pein

#artificialintelligence

Narratives are made by the artful omission of facts. Never was this maxim more evident than in a gullible feature story that landed on the front page of the New York Times last fall, about a young woman's last-ditch bid for life extension as she succumbed to the ravages of brain cancer. A sober look at the case would have revealed it to be but the latest botched mortuary procedure conducted by a gang of creepy scam artists. Instead, through the good graces of the Times, this grim tale was spun into an inspirational saga of one person's courageous quest for a second chance at life, aided by medical visionaries on the verge of miraculous technological breakthroughs. Kim Suozzi died at age twenty-three in January 2013. After her first diagnosis, twenty-one months earlier, Suozzi chose to become one of the youngest people ever[*] to undergo an expensive form of ritualistic corpse mutilation called cryonic preservation. In pop culture, cryonics is perhaps best known as the plot device that transports the schlubby pizza delivery guy in Matt Groening's animated series Futurama into the thirty-first century. The decades-old quack procedure, which involves freezing corpse parts for later resuscitation, was for a long time apocryphally associated with such wealthy eccentrics as Walt Disney. It then caused a scandal in 2002 when it was widely reported that the body of baseball great Ted Williams had gone into deep freeze against the wishes of some in his family. In recent years, cryonics has regained an entirely undue aura of respectability as the thought leaders of Silicon Valley have trained their enterprising, disruptive vision on the conquest of disease and death.[**] Suozzi, an agnostic libertarian and aspiring neuroscientist, began taking cryonics seriously after discovering the work of the futurologist Ray Kurzweil through a cognitive science class at Truman State University in Missouri. After surgery and other treatments failed to stop the growth of her brain tumor, Suozzi determined that upon death she--or rather, her head--would be frozen and stored for decades, centuries, or millennia in the hope that one day, diligent, wonder-working doctors would transplant her consciousness into a new, healthy body, or perhaps onto a high-capacity hard drive. As a tech-savvy millennial, Suozzi turned to the chat website Reddit for help in raising the 80,000 she needed to fulfill her last wish. That got her well on her way, with about 7,000 reportedly raised.


4 ways healthcare is putting artificial intelligence, machine learning to use - MedCity News

#artificialintelligence

Artificial intelligence and concerns over the long term consequences has come up again in the news week in the form of a Scientific American blog musing over how artificial intelligence will evolve -- "Is AI Dangerous? It Dependsโ€ฆ" There is a certain amount of hand wringing over AI and, to a lesser extent, its branches such as machine learning and natural language processing. It also drew attention to notables who have voiced concern over AI including Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk. The concerns tend to emerge from worst case scenarios and assume that even though AI can be used for beneficial purposes, what if the technology is turned against us? But many people applying AI to make healthcare delivery more efficient and automated don't see it that way.


Outwitting poachers with artificial intelligence

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The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. In fiscal year (FY) 2016, its budget is 7.5 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 colleges, universities and other institutions. Each year, NSF receives more than 48,000 competitive proposals for funding and makes about 12,000 new funding awards. NSF also awards about 626 million in professional and service contracts yearly.


Deep Learning Outwits Cyber Attackers and Poachers, Google Releases Q1 Numbers, and More โ€“ This Week in Artificial Intelligence 04-22-16

#artificialintelligence

Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Laboratory (CSAIL) alongside machine learning-startup PatternEx have created a new cybersecurity defense system that makes use of both unsupervised and supervised learning methods. Human analysts are then presented with the data and given an opportunity to identify actual attacks, which are then fed back into the machine. The system learns and refines its accuracy over time. CSAIL research scientist Kalyan Veeramachaneni, one of AI,2's co-creators, described it this way: "The more attacks the system detects, the more analyst feedback it receives, which, in turn, improves the accuracy of future predictions. That human-machine interaction creates a beautiful, cascading effect."


MIT Develops AI That Detects 85 Percent of Cyber-Attacks

#artificialintelligence

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created an AI system that can predict a cyberattack before it happens in 85% of incidents. Analyst-driven systems rely on rules created by people and consequently can't detect attacks that don't adhere to those rules, whereas machine-learning systems rely on anomaly detection, which tends to generate false positives that have to be investigated by people.MIT researchers have announced that they've concocted a new artificial intelligence system capable of successfully detecting 85% of cyber-attacks. Part of the challenge of merging human- and computer-based threat detection has been the manual labeling of data for algorithms.The system has been tested on 3.6 billion log lines or pieces of data that reveal major system activities triggered by millions of users over a period of three months. It then reports this activity to a human analyst who can then judge if there's an actual attack.With that feedback, it takes on board whether or not it should be classifying the events as attacks or not, then refines its internal models.According to Engadget, Kaylan Veermachaneni, co-creator of the system, said that one should think of the new system as a virtual analyst. In the near future the industry and federal regulators will need to figure out a balance between the need of cyber security and protecting consumers' privacy. This method often leads to false positives, meaning that humans doubt the reliability of the system and are forced to go back and check all the results anyway.And the more data it analyses, the more accurate it becomes.


MIT shows how AI cybersecurity excels by keeping humans in the loop - TechRepublic

#artificialintelligence

Cybersecurity threats are among the most pressing concerns for businesses and institutions that need to protect information, but today's security systems are limited. Most security systems fall into two categories: human analyst or machine learning. Now, a new research paper from MIT shows that a combination of human experts with a machine learning system--in other words, supervised machine learning--provides better results than either human or machine alone. "AI squared," which uses a system developed by PatternEx, is 10 times better at catching threats than machine learning alone, and reduces false positives by a factor of five. This, said MIT's researchers, is three times better than current benchmarks.


Outwitting poachers with artificial intelligence: Computer science and game theory applied to protect Earth's endangered animals and forests

#artificialintelligence

Human patrols serve as the most direct form of protection of endangered animals, especially in large national parks. However, protection agencies have limited resources for patrols. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Army Research Office, researchers are using artificial intelligence (AI) and game theory to solve poaching, illegal logging and other problems worldwide, in collaboration with researchers and conservationists in the U.S., Singapore, Netherlands and Malaysia. "In most parks, ranger patrols are poorly planned, reactive rather than pro-active, and habitual," according to Fei Fang, a Ph.D. candidate in the computer science department at the University of Southern California (USC). Fang is part of an NSF-funded team at USC led by Milind Tambe, professor of computer science and industrial and systems engineering and director of the Teamcore Research Group on Agents and Multiagent Systems.