Here's What You Should Know About Launching an AI Startup AI startups say the promise of turning dazzling models into useful products is harder than anyone expected. Three founders discuss what it takes. Julie Bornstein thought it would be a cinch to implement her idea for an AI startup . Her résumé in digital commerce is impeccable: VP of ecommerce at Nordstrom, COO of the startup Stitch Fix, and founder of a personalized shopping platform acquired by Pinterest . Fashion has been her obsession since she was a Syracuse high schooler inhaling spreads in Seventeen and hanging out in local malls.

A classifier using byte n-grams as features is the only approach we have found fast enough to meet requirements in size (sub 2 MB), speed (multiple GB/s), and latency (sub 10 ms) for deployment in numerous malware detection scenarios. However, we've consistently found that 6-8 grams achieve the best accuracy on our production deployments but have been unable to deploy regularly updated models due to the high cost of finding the top-k most frequent n-grams over terabytes of executable programs. Because the Zipfian distribution well models the distribution of n-grams, we exploit its properties to develop a new top-k n-gram extractor that is up to $35\times$ faster than the previous best alternative. Using our new Zipf-Gramming algorithm, we are able to scale up our production training set and obtain up to 30\% improvement in AUC at detecting new malware. We show theoretically and empirically that our approach will select the top-k items with little error and the interplay between theory and engineering required to achieve these results.

Warnings of disruption and protests have come from police as more than 700 officers prepare to mount an operation in Birmingham for Aston Villa's Uefa Europa League match against Maccabi Tel Aviv. Officers will be keeping the public safe and to tackle any crime and disorder on Thursday, West Midlands Police said, with police horses, dogs, the force's drone unit, and road policing officers out in the city. Planned protests include one by supporters of Palestine, who want the match to be called off. Last month, a decision to ban Tel Aviv fans from the event became the focus of parliamentary-level debate . The Israeli club later said supporters would not travel to Birmingham for safety reasons.

It's a crushing diagnosis for everyone involved. Jules's wife, Maria, told me that once it was official, she and Jules left the doctor's office gripping each other in floods of tears. Their lives were turned upside down. Four and a half years later, Jules cannot move his limbs, and a tracheostomy has left him unable to speak. "To say this diagnosis has been devastating is an understatement," says Joyce, who has bulbar MND--she can still move her limbs but struggles to speak and swallow.

The complexity characteristics of texts written in natural languages are significantly related to the rules of punctuation. In particular, the distances between punctuation marks measured by the number of words quite universally follow the family of Weibull distributions known from survival analyses. However, the values of two parameters marking specific forms of these distributions distinguish specific languages. This is such a strong constraint that the punctuation distributions of texts translated from the original language into another adopt quantitative characteristics of the target language. All these changes take place within Weibull distributions such that the corresponding hazard functions are always increasing. Recent previous research shows that James Joyce's famous "Finnegans Wake" is subject to such extreme distribution from the Weibull family that the corresponding hazard function is clearly decreasing. At the same time, the distances of sentence ending punctuation marks, determining the variability of sentence length, have an almost perfect multifractal organization, so far to such an extent found nowhere else in the literature. In the present contribution based on several available translations (Dutch, French, German, Polish, Russian) of "Finnegans Wake", it is shown that the punctuation characteristics of this work remain largely translation invariant, contrary to the common cases. These observations may constitute further evidence that "Finnegans Wake" is a translinguistic work in this respect as well, in line with Joyce's original intention.

As the recent studies indicate, the structure imposed onto written texts by the presence of punctuation develops patterns which reveal certain characteristics of universality. In particular, based on a large collection of classic literary works, it has been evidenced that the distances between consecutive punctuation marks, measured in terms of the number of words, obey the discrete Weibull distribution - a discrete variant of a distribution often used in survival analysis. The present work extends the analysis of punctuation usage patterns to more experimental pieces of world literature. It turns out that the compliance of the the distances between punctuation marks with the discrete Weibull distribution typically applies here as well. However, some of the works by James Joyce are distinct in this regard - in the sense that the tails of the relevant distributions are significantly thicker and, consequently, the corresponding hazard functions are decreasing functions not observed in typical literary texts in prose. "Finnegans Wake" - the same one to which science owes the word "quarks" for the most fundamental constituents of matter - is particularly striking in this context. At the same time, in all the studied texts, the sentence lengths - representing the distances between sentence-ending punctuation marks - reveal more freedom and are not constrained by the discrete Weibull distribution. This freedom in some cases translates into long-range nonlinear correlations, which manifest themselves in multifractality. Again, a text particularly spectacular in terms of multifractality is "Finnegans Wake".

At the RSA security conference in San Francisco this week, there's been a feeling of inevitability in the air. At talks and panels across the sprawling Moscone convention center, at every vendor booth on the show floor, and in casual conversations in the halls, you just know that someone is going to bring up generative AI and its potential impacts on digital security and malicious hacking. NSA cybersecurity director Rob Joyce has been feeling it, too. "You can't walk around RSA without talking about AI and malware," he said on Wednesday afternoon during his now annual "State of the Hack" presentation. "I think we've all seen the explosion. I won't say it's delivered yet, but this truly is some game-changing technology."

Bots like ChatGPT may not be able to pull off the next big Microsoft server worm or Colonial Pipeline ransomware super-infection but they may help criminal gangs and nation-state hackers develop some attacks against IT, according to Rob Joyce, director of the NSA's Cybersecurity Directorate. Joyce, speaking at CrowdStrike's Government Summit Tuesday, said he doesn't expect to see -- at least not "in the near term" -- AI used "for automated attacks that will rip through systems at speeds that are unfathomable today." Machine learning and its chatbot offspring are "the tools that are going to flow and increase the pace of the threat," Joyce claimed. "It's not going to generate the threat itself." Miscreants can use ML software to develop more authentic-seeming phishing lures and craft better ransom notes, while also scanning larger volumes of data for sensitive info they can monetize, he offered.

Speaking at The Wall Street Journal's virtual CIO Network Summit event on Tuesday, Rep. Jim Langevin (D., R.I.), a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, said he is taking an "all hands on deck approach" to prepare for possible cyber retaliation against the U.S. "We have to be realistic and understand that as we impose sanctions--we take actions--there could be blowback here," said Rep. Langevin. In preparing for possible cyberattacks, Rep. Langevin said, "private companies also have a role to play." He said they should be implementing testing procedures to back up and restore data, instituting multifactor authentication on devices connected to their networks, ensuring software is up-to-date and patching known vulnerabilities. Theresa Payton, founder and CEO of Fortalice Solutions and former CIO of the White House under President George W. Bush, said companies should consider locking accounts after two or three failed login attempts. "During challenging times such as these, the Russian operatives could be using password spraying attacks, recycling passwords from past password data dumps [and] using artificial intelligence" to access corporate networks, Ms. Payton said at the CIO Network Summit event.

It is clear that the pandemic has had a dramatic impact on education, which for many has meant an unplanned and rapid move to online and blended learning approaches. In the Summer of 2021 a'Machine Learning & AI' module was developed by PhD student Joyce Mahon at UCD in a collaboration between the SFI CRT in Machine Learning and industry partner Huawei. Joyce is supervised by Dr. Brett Becker and Dr. Brian Mac Namee of the UCD School of Computer Science; and for the duration of this project worked alongside Dr. Keith Quille of TU Dublin, and with student volunteers. 'Machine Learning & AI' module was added to the CS_LINC platform developed in 2020 by the CS_INC team in TU Dublin. CS_LINC provides formal computer science curricula through free and easily accessible online modules.