Identity fraud, in which a slice of your identity ranging from new credit cards to entire bank accounts is taken over by criminals, rose by 49 per cent in 2015 on the previous year. That totalled almost 170,000 cases, according to data collected by Cifas, the financial industry's non-profit fraud advisory service. The reason for the rise is that more and more we use the internet for financial transactions, but have very few ways to verify our identity without cumbersome systems involving human interaction, which are also vulnerable to fraud. Cifas' 2015 Fraudscape report shows that 86 per cent of identity fraud happened online, with bank accounts and credit or debit cards most targeted, closely followed by loans and communications, typically mobile phone accounts. Traditionally, companies dealing with such problems have acted after the fact, trying to unravel complex or opportunistic frauds by working back through audit trails.

Previously I explored the value of eminence and thought leadership to consulting firms, and how unfortunately the power of inbound content marketing has a dark side that forms part of a three-pronged attack on the consulting industry. Meanwhile, the tireless invention and innovation efforts of research teams in companies around the world have helped to keep the pace of technological advancement in computer processing power at or above Moore's Law for several decades. This has given technology companies the ability to put more computing power than the entire Apollo space program into the pockets of more than a billion people around the world. It seems like everything has become digital, including music, books, and even movies. Increasingly intelligent digital technologies and mercurial customer expectations threaten both people and enterprise at every turn.

As a salesperson, you learn to rely on intuition, charisma, and bonds forged over the course of a long customer relationship. Metrics, software, analytical tools: they're for marketers – the theory-formulators, the lead generators, the A/B-testers, the people who are there to tee you up so you can smash it across the green. Force of will and force of personality have taken you pretty far in the past, so why wouldn't they carry you forward into the future? It's a seductive myth, and more so because it was true until quite recently. Today, however, you can't rely on your gut or your way with people.

Let's say you couldn't remember the capital of Belgium. You could ask the computer what it is by saying'I want Paris, but subtract France and add Belgium.' The computer would return Brussels. Now imagine you could do that with employees. What if you could say'I want someone like my best engineer, but with more experience in management?'

Editor's Note: Last month, Dark Reading editors named Deep Instinct the most innovative startup in its first annual Best of Black Hat Innovation Awards program at Black Hat 2016 in Las Vegas. As you reach for a water bottle, you don't pause to analyze its material, size or shape in order to determine whether it's a water bottle. Instead, you immediately reach for it, with complete confidence in its identification. If I show the same water bottle to any traditional computer vision module, it will easily recognize it. If I partially obstruct the image with my fingers, then traditional computer vision modules will have difficulty recognizing it.

Earlier in the series, we discussed Salesforce's (CRM) operating segments' performance in its recently announced fiscal 2Q17 results. In its earnings release, Salesforce announced the introduction of "Salesforce Einstein," an AI (Artificial Intelligence) platform, at its upcoming annual 2016 Dreamforce conference. According to Salesforce, Einstein is "the world's first comprehensive artificial intelligence platform for CRM." The Salesforce Einstein platform has its foundation in different acquisitions the company has made in the past like RelateIQ, MetaMind, Implisit Insights, PredictionIO, and Tempo, as the above chart shows. Salesforce stated, "We've been able to stitch all this together and focus on AI. AI is the next wave of our industry and has resulted in a machine learning team of more than 175 data scientists who have built this amazing Einstein platform."

If you train a machine learning algorithm on real data from the world we live in, it will pick up on these biases,

At TellusLabs, we use satellite imagery and other earth data to deliver actionable insights to customers in agriculture, water, forestry, energy, and many other sectors. While some of this imagery has been collected since the 1970s (the Landsat program), only in the last decade has it been opened for free use in public and commercial domains. This democratization of satellite data empowers industry, academia, and government sectors, worldwide, with access to earth observation research and insights. This spaceborne perspective is also beautiful -- in this post, we combine some amazing scenes of agriculturally active areas (like this scene below from Storm Lake, Utah) with a little more detail on how this whole process works. As compelling as these images are, there is a wide gap between pixel values and a useful signal.

Businesses of today are constantly on the lookout for ways to radically transform their operational efficiencies. Digitization of business processes, technologies and products has enabled them to integrate methods to not only lower their costs, but to meet customer expectations in novel and customized ways. The one driver that many enterprises are wholeheartedly adopting now is Robotic Process Automation (RPA). With the help of robotics, enterprises can improve the physically measurable outcomes of manufacturing facilities, and also enhance their virtual operations to deliver the best results. In the simplest terms, RPA is the application of software robots that can interpret the functioning of existing applications and then imitate them with higher precision and fewer errors.

Stepsize is a UK startup focused on developer tools. The firm is aiming to put a degree of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into DevOps. Stepsize Layer is a desktop application for developers that automatically adds context to code bases. It does this by hooking up tools used to develop software, structuring historical data and attaching this to the piece of code. This email address is already registered.