The health sector is the most vulnerable, most targeted, and resoundingly least equipped to defend against hackers who are pummeling healthcare organizations with ransomware attacks. This ransomware epidemic will only become more severe and costly as the infection volume in 2017 will trump infections in 2016. In this post, entitled "How to Crush the Health Sector's Ransomware Pandemic: The Machine Learning Based Artificial Intelligence Revolution Starts Now!", the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology discusses the power of machine based artificial intelligence as a potent cybersecurity defense layer to defend against hyper-evolving APTs and malware. This paper was authored by James Scott, Sr. Fellow, ICIT

Pentaho helps data scientists and engineers easily prepare and blend traditional sources like ERP, EAM and big data sources like sensors and social media. Pentaho also accelerates the notoriously difficult and costly task of feature engineering by automating data onboarding, data transformation and data validation in an easy-to-use drag and drop environment. Model training, tuning and testing -- Data scientists often apply trial and error to strike the right balance of complexity, performance and accuracy in their models. With integrations for languages like R and Python, and for machine learning packages like Spark MLlib and Weka, Pentaho allows data scientists to seamlessly train, tune, build and test models faster. Model deployment and operationalization -- a completely trained, tuned and tested machine learning model still needs to be deployed.

Powered by NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs and NVIDIA's NVLink high speed multi-GPU interconnect technology, the HGX-1 comes as AI workloads – from autonomous driving and personalized healthcare to superhuman voice recognition -- are taking off in the cloud. The HGX-1 architecture provides unprecedented configurability and performance. Powered by eight NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs in each chassis, it features an innovative switching design – based on NVIDIA NVLink interconnect technology and the PCIe standard – enabling a CPU to dynamically connect to any number of GPUs. This allows cloud service providers that standardize on a single HGX-1 infrastructure to offer customers a range of CPU and GPU machine instance configurations to meet virtually any workload. The HGX-1 Hyperscale GPU Accelerator reference design is highly modular, allowing it to be configured in a variety of ways to optimize performance for different workloads.

Healthcare literature has exploded in the past 30 years. Can artificial intelligence help doctors keep up with what works in healthcare? Microsoft Azure and the Cochrane Transform Project, along with more than 5,000 citizen scientists around the world, are using the cloud, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to analyze hundreds of thousands of reports and clinical trials, speeding up a process from years to mere weeks. This results in faster decisions about which medical interventions work best, all thanks to the intelligent cloud.

Search engine giant Google, in a bid to improve user-experience on the internet, has reportedly killed the web security tool Captcha and introduced a much-enhanced anti-bot feature reCAPTCHA. Google has been testing it under the program -- No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA -- for more than a year. Now, the company has officially introduced the reCAPTCHA with Artificial Intelligence (AI) with machine learning capability and which also performs advanced risk analysis in real-time. Previously, users had to go through the Captcha security process, and asked to spell out tricky characters or identify places/road signs in a box, which many found very irksome and time-consuming. Google then introduced beta-version of reCAPTCHA, where users were just asked to tick the checkbox with a question -- "I'm not a robot". Even this was found be a nuisance.

Artificial intelligence is the fodder of much science fiction. It's in the medical world where Artificial Intelligence (AI) went from an imaginary idea to real-world use. Developments are moving faster than expected. Its first iterations weren't powerful enough to be clinically useful; AI started out with simple pattern recognition by computers. Programmers would "teach" algorithms to generate certain output variables as functions of input variables that were fed to them.

To me, SXSW is the most exciting place in the world, featuring all the coolest breakthrough thinkers in media, publishing, technology, and marketing. I did my best to pluck out a few meaningful sessions and here are some interesting highlights I picked up from my trip. This is PART TWO of my report from Austin. You can see my earlier notes here. Many predicted that consumers would be spending more time with chatbots than real people.

For a previous generation in the US, the only places where one might worry about the possibility of a mass casualty were "high-value targets," like airports and government offices, places that have body scanners and bag inspections, security guards and long lines to get in today. But attackers increasingly strike at public places like nightclubs, stadiums, clinics, malls, places of worship and schools. A startup called Evolv Technology Inc., has raised $18 million to help venues with even a limited budget use advanced technology rather than pat downs to detect and prevent mass casualties. Investors in Evolv's new round of funding included General Catalyst, Lux Capital, Gates Ventures, and Data Collective. The Waltham, Mass.-based startup has created both hardware and software for physical security.

In cities like San Francisco, New York and Boston, 60% of the residents are renters. And across the U.S., there has been unprecedented growth in rental demand. Nine million more households have become renters over the last 10 years -- the largest gain in housing history. Today, roughly 45 million families and households are tenants. Investors have noticed these rental trends, and billions of dollars have been invested in the rental property market.

The focus of Mark Cuban's Q&A at South by Southwest was supposed to be about government disruption, and he was supposed to hype up the Austin-based insurance company The Zebra, one of his newest investments. But Cuban, everyone's favorite love-to-hate billionaire entrepreneur and Shark Tank star, had a few other topics in mind. You might say that the charismatic Cuban disrupted his own session. Here are the five standout anecdotes, stories, and lessons he decided to share. Cuban hates when people compare him to President Trump, but it's easy to see why they do--they are both wealthy businessmen with reality TV shows.