Ransomware attacks escalated dramatically in 2016. In fact, there was a 300 percent increase in ransomware attacks last year, according to the FBI, to an average of 4,000 attacks a day, up from 1,000 ransomware attacks a day in 2015. What's more, organizations are targeted more frequently than individuals because they generate a much bigger potential payoff. Ransomware has become a profitable criminal enterprise that continues to change and grow. Managed Service Providers often assist clients with data restoration to avoid the downtime that can be caused by a ransomware attack. They also work with clients to improve their security posture overall so they can avoid ransomware damage.

Dublin-based software firm Artomatix has closed a €2.1 million seed round with investors that include Enterprise Ireland. Artomatix, which employs 17 people, was founded in March 2014 by Dr Eric Risser, Neal O'Gorman and Bart Kiss. It has developed artificial intelligence (AI) technology to help automate 3D art creation for game design. The company's technology, known as Example Based Content Creation, relies on Dr Risser's expertise in machine learning, computer vision and graphics developed over 10 years of research. The technology gives 3D artists the ability to speed up their workflow thanks to algorithms that can generate thousands of images based on the initial design and parameters that an artist provides.

What does the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) conjure up in the mind of the consumer? Will our children be replaced by fun-loving androids as the eponymous 2001 Steven Spielberg film A.I. suggests? Or perhaps grown adults will suddenly be replaced by robots in the workplace? While all of that may seem a little far-fetched, in reality, AI is already integral to many consumers' daily lives – in the form of image and voice recognition on mobile devices; personalised viewing suggestions on streaming platforms such as Amazon Video or Netflix; or voice interaction/recognition analysis incorporated into search engines such as Google. AI has also gained recognition in the healthcare sector – machine learning applications that have the potential to assist hospital staff in routine tasks such as keeping a patient's treatment records up to date are being tested and the voice-controlled Amazon Echo device, Alexa, can assist patients at home with tasks such as reminding them to take medication or arranging a GP appointment.

Researchers have developed a new system which allows human operators to correct robotic mistakes with only the power of their minds. The world of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) has expanded as of late. We now see AI in everything from Facebook's facial recognition system to voice assistants and machine learning in cybersecurity and big data analysis. But as these systems are designed to emulate human decision-making and thought processes, mistakes can happen. When an AI decision-maker chooses the wrong course of action, correcting these decision pathways can be an arduous process.

Making the decision on whether or not a patient has cancer usually involves trained professionals meticulously scanning tissue samples over weeks and months. But Google's artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer DeepMind may be able to do it much, much faster. The search company has been working with the NHS since September last year to help speed up cancer detection. The software can now tell the difference between healthy and cancerous tissue, as well as discover if metastasis has occured. "Metastasis detection is currently performed by pathologists reviewing large expanses of biological tissues. This process is labour intensive and error-prone," explained Google in a white paper outlining the study.

After conspicuously being absent when the group came together in September 2016, Apple has joined the Partnership on AI. Tim Cook's firm has become a founding member of the organisation, which includes Google/DeepMind, Microsoft, IBM, Facebook and Amazon. Apple's Tom Gruber, the chief technology officer of AI personal assistant Siri, has joined the group of trustees running the non-profit partnership. "We believe it's beneficial to Apple, our customers, and the industry to play an active role in its development and look forward to collaborating with the group to help drive discussion on how to advance AI while protecting the privacy and security of consumers," Gruber said in a statement . Although Apple didn't join the partnership from the beginning it is said discussions involving its membership have been ongoing.

Reinforcement learning is an area of machine learning inspired by behaviorist psychology, concerned with how software agents ought to take actions in an environment so as to maximize some notion of cumulative reward. The problem, due to its generality, is studied in many other disciplines, such as game theory, control theory, operations research, information theory, simulation-based optimization, multi-agent systems, swarm intelligence, statistics, and genetic algorithms. In the operations research and control literature, the field where reinforcement learning methods are studied is called approximate dynamic programming. The problem has been studied in the theory of optimal control, though most studies are concerned with the existence of optimal solutions and their characterization, and not with the learning or approximation aspects. In economics and game theory, reinforcement learning may be used to explain how equilibrium may arise under bounded rationality.

New technologies are emerging and showing up in our everyday lives at a rapid rate. Voice-recognition, like Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa, and image recognition in our Facebook and Google accounts are just two mainstream applications that leverage artificial intelligence (AI)--one of the newest technologies gaining widespread momentum today. Artificial intelligence (AI) is defined by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence as "the scientific understanding of the mechanism underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines." It is one of the Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2016 chosen by the World Economic Forum, based on the power to improve lives, transform industries, and safeguard the planet. Combining artificial intelligence with the advancements in natural language processing (NLP), social awareness algorithms, and big data enables its many applications.

Ian Bogost (previously) describes the "deflationary" use of "artificial intelligence" to describe the most trivial computer science innovations and software-enabled products, from Facebook's suicide detection "AI" (a trivial word-search program that alerts humans) to the chatbots that are billed as steps away from passing a Turing test, but which are little more than glorified phone trees, and on whom 40% of humans give up after a single conversational volley. Georgia Tech artificial intelligence researcher Charles Isbell says it's "Making computers act like they do in the movies." Isbell suggests two features necessary before a system deserves the name AI. First, it must learn over time in response to changes in its environment. Fictional robots and cyborgs do this invisibly, by the magic of narrative abstraction. But even a simple machine-learning system like Netflix's dynamic optimizer, which attempts to improve the quality of compressed video, takes data gathered initially from human viewers and uses it to train an algorithm to make future choices about video transmission.

Refugees struggling with asylum applications can now use a chatbot to get free legal aid in the US, Canada and the UK. DoNotPay, created by London-born Stanford student Joshua Browder, started out as an artificial-intelligence lawyer helping with parking tickets and delayed flights. After success in those areas -- it overturned more than 160,000 parking fines across London and New York for free -- lawyers and nonprofits reached out saying that the idea of automated legal services cold be extended to help refugees stranded in these countries. "I hope it will allow anyone to have a right to safety, regardless of the ability to afford a lawyer," Browder, 20, told Mashable. The chatbot works by asking users a series of questions to determine if they're eligible for asylum protection under international law, such as: "Are you afraid of being subjected to torture in your home country?"