Artificial intelligence (AI) developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) can already detect 85pc of cyberattacks and is getting smarter every day, according to the institute. Scientists at MIT's prestigious Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) have developed AI that they believe can create a line of defence against the numerous cyberattacks that have crippled government agencies, health insurers and many others. And they have also claimed that their AI can detect attacks on networks as they happen 85pc of the time. 'That human-machine interaction creates a beautiful, cascading effect' – KALYAN VEERAMACHANENI, CSAIL This is particularly important because the industry standard for threat detection is typically 100 days. AI2, short for Artificial Intelligence Squared, looks at data to detect suspicious activity. It does so by clustering the data into meaningful patterns and then presents its findings to human analysts who identify which events are actual attacks.

Which industries will come to the fore in the next decade, and beyond, and become hubs of innovation? According to former State Department official Alec Ross, they won't be the industries that have dominated technology thus far. Instead, artificial intelligence (AI), genomics and robotics will lead the way. On Tuesday, the Italian Embassy in Washington, D.C., held an event to discuss Ross' recently published book, The Industries of the Future. He expounded on the book's themes and highlighted what it will take for individuals, companies and countries to harness the changes that he sees coming to the global economy.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 11, 2016) - Grishin Robotics announces new 100 million fund, four times the size of its initial 25 million fund, announced in mid-2012. Originally one of the first exclusively robotics funds in the world, the firm now expands its investment focus to companies involved in the "Hardware Revolution" and becomes one of the ecosystem's largest players. While Dmitry self-financed Grishin Robotics' investments until now, a number of institutional and individual investors from Europe and the U.S. became partners in this new fund. Until recently, people mainly thought about robots as multi-functional products in humanoid form-factor. Today single-purpose devices, combining sensors with software and data analytics components, have the potential to radically automate the physical world around us -- eliminating "dirty, dull & dangerous" tasks from our lives and, thus, realizing the ultimate purpose of robotics.

The recent emergence of a powerful machine-learning technique known as deep learning has made computing giants such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft even hungrier for data. It's what lets software learn to do things like recognize images or understand language. Yet many problems where deep learning could be most valuable involve data that is hard to come by or is held by organizations that are unwilling to share it. And as Apple CEO Tim Cook puts it, some consumers are already concerned about companies "gobbling up" their personal information. "A lot of people who hold sensitive data sets like medical images are just not going to share them for legal and regulatory concerns," says Vitaly Shmatikov, a professor at Cornell Tech who studies privacy.

ReplyYes has seen success with its automated messaging system. Chatbots already have a little bit of a bad name. Early reviews for the ones on Facebook Messenger have been rough due to apparent malfunctions, and Microsoft's Tay has been an utter disaster, at least on a couple of occasions. But a startup called ReplyYes, which offers a text-to-buy system for retailers, provides a glimpse into the potential of automated messaging. Interestingly, the company has a pair of e-commerce ventures: One sells vinyl records, the other graphic novels.

Last week, Facebook launched the messenger chatbot platform, which like Slack, Telegram and others, presents a big market opportunity for startups to innovate. In addition, the companies and products that determine how to most efficiently distribute their product on these new platforms will benefit from user curiosity and less competition, both of which result in lower cost-of-customer acquisition. These are the five questions I'm wondering about in this new world: New user experience and distribution platforms come around perhaps once every ten years. Bots have the opportunity to create a discontinuity in the market. It's going to be enthralling to see all the innovation that founders and startups will bring to this market.

Mobileye, the Israeli car automation company that came onto the self-driving car scene as sort of an anti-Google, is now looking at the future in terms that seem a bit closer to Google's than used to be the case. Speaking Friday at a conference organized by Goldman Sachs (which owned a chunk of Mobileye's shares when the company first became publicly traded in 2014), Amnon Shashua, Mobileye's founder and chief technical officer, placed a lot of emphasis on mapping, something Google has done all along. And now Shashua is predicting utterly hands-free driving--if only on the highway--by 2021. Mobileye had always emphasized incremental steps, such as active cruise control and emergency braking, collectively called advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). It was Google that proposed to skip all half measures and get right to full-bore self-driving cars.

Humankind shuddered once again as machines seemed to score yet another triumph in what had been an exclusively human arena. In case you missed it, last month an artificial intelligence (AI)-generated novel almost won a Japanese literary competition, inspiring awe, intrigue, and eventually skepticism. The new novel's plot "is essentially told from the subjective of an AI that becomes aware of its budding talents as a writer, and abandons its primary task of serving humanity," according to the "Motherboard" channel at Vice.com, and the Los Angeles Times, citing a report in The Japan News, even provided a translation of the novel's final thrilling sentence. "I writhed with joy, which I experienced for the first time, and kept writing with excitement. The day a computer wrote a novel. The computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working for humans."

Facebook's AI hardware is now, like its software, open source, joining a broad movement towards outsourcing the world's artificial intelligence intelligence. Facebook also stated it hoped independent AI technicians would develop deep learning tech superior to what the company currently uses, and that it would buy this technology. The tech giant has developed deep learning technology, which it uses for Facebook-related functions like identifying faces in pictures and curating news feeds, but can also apply to a wide range of computing tasks. Through the Open Compute Project, Facebook's custom hardware designs -- a GPU-based server called "Big Sur" -- will join Google's and others' open source deep learning designs. The hope is that more workers will devote themselves to these projects and become familiar with using the technology.

That's the first day of Apple's 2016 Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, when the company is expected to reveal the latest version of iOS, a bump to the Apple TV, and maybe even a renamed release of OS X – or "MacOS", as it hinted at last week. The event was announced, bizarrely, through Siri, which started giving out a more precise answer to the question "when is WWDC?" than previously. Until Monday evening, the digital assistant had answered with "WWDC is not yet announced", but now it correctly says that "the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) will be held June 13 through June 17 in San Francisco. Although WWDC is more developer-focused than most other Apple events, it usually involves the first look at major software updates coming later in the year. If past events are any indication, this June will see the launch of iOS 10, as well as updates to WatchOS and tvOS (the software that runs the Apple TV). It will also be the first chance for developers (and Mac users) to find out information about the next version of OS X.