Nearly three years after it was first launched, Amazon Web Services' SageMaker platform has gotten a significant upgrade in the form of new features making it easier for developers to automate and scale each step of the process to build new automation and machine learning capabilities, the company said. As machine learning moves into the mainstream, business units across organizations will find applications for automation, and AWS is trying to make the development of those bespoke applications easier for its customers. "One of the best parts of having such a widely-adopted service like SageMaker is that we get lots of customer suggestions which fuel our next set of deliverables," said AWS vice president of machine learning, Swami Sivasubramanian. "Today, we are announcing a set of tools for Amazon SageMaker that makes it much easier for developers to build end-to-end machine learning pipelines to prepare, build, train, explain, inspect, monitor, debug and run custom machine learning models with greater visibility, explainability, and automation at scale." Already companies like 3M, ADP, AstraZeneca, Avis, Bayer, Capital One, Cerner, Domino's Pizza, Fidelity Investments, Lenovo, Lyft, T-Mobile, and Thomson Reuters are using SageMaker tools in their own operations, according to AWS.

An increasing number of modern antivirus solutions rely on machine learning (ML) techniques to protect users from malware. While ML-based approaches, like FireEye Endpoint Security's MalwareGuard capability, have done a great job at detecting new threats, they also come with substantial development costs. Creating and curating a large set of useful features takes significant amounts of time and expertise from malware analysts and data scientists (note that in this context a feature refers to a property or characteristic of the executable that can be used to distinguish between goodware and malware). In recent years, however, deep learning approaches have shown impressive results in automatically learning feature representations for complex problem domains, like images, speech, and text. Can we take advantage of these advances in deep learning to automatically learn how to detect malware without costly feature engineering? As it turns out, deep learning architectures, and in particular convolutional neural networks (CNNs), can do a good job of detecting malware simply by looking at the raw bytes of Windows Portable Executable (PE) files.