November 14, 2014

With $100 Million, Entrepreneur Sees Path to Disrupt Medical Imaging
The imaging system is being developed by Butterfly Network, a three-year old company that is the furthest advanced of several ventures that Rothberg says will be coming out of 4Combinator, an incubator he has created to start and finance companies that combine medical sensors with a branch of artificial-intelligence science called deep learning. Rothberg won’t say exactly how Butterfly’s device will work, or what it will look like. “The details will come out when we are on stage selling it. That’s in the next 18 months,” he says. But Rothberg guarantees it will be small, cost a few hundred dollars, connect to a phone, and be able to do things like diagnose breast cancer or visualize a fetus.


Solving the information and big data challenge with Artificial Intelligence
Semantic Understanding uses a linguistic approach to make sense of the text and locate key content in the email text body. For example, if it finds the phrase “I don’t want to cancel the contract”, it applies linguistic intelligence and recognises the whole sense of the communication and understands it is about a contract non-cancellation. In contrast, a rule based system would only pick up the word ‘cancel’ and understand Cancel Contract and then act on it contrary to the customer’s wishes. This is great stuff, also used by SIRI, Google NOW and the likes.


New iOS social engineering exploit reminds us to keep alert
The vulnerability has been confirmed to exist in iOS 7.1.1, 7.1.2, 8.0, the current iOS 8.1, and the 8.1.1 beta -- both on jailbroken and non-jailbroken devices. Each app on the App Store has a so-called bundle identifier, a numeric name that makes the normal-language name of the app superfluous. If a malware app is given the same bundle identifier as a standard App Store app, it can be installed over it if the user can be enticed to click on a link on a website or email message. This means that a carefully designed and targeted link to an app download could be sent to an executive or politician, with a socially engineered message "from" an associate meant to entice a user download of a "new game" or some other innocuous app.


Three information infrastructure myths debunked
The Information Management keynote session at IBM Insight 2014 brought new product offerings, memorable stories and answers to some common information infrastructure myths. Beth Smith, general manager of IBM Information Management, accompanied by special guest Grant Imahara of former Mythbusters fame, and a slew of IBMers led the audience on a systematic journey to debunk three specific misconceptions about information infrastructure one by one.


How to create a realistic enterprise strategy for cloud computing
"If you understand that this is just a platform change, it's not so scary," he said. "We have all moved to new technology … with cloud; we are just using things we don't own that sit on the open Internet." In some cases, that is certainly a nerve-wracking proposition. But it makes sense in others. For example, retailers that need to scale up or down quickly or expand storage at low cost find the cloud to be a good option and should develop a strategy for cloud computing.


Android 5.0 deep-dive review: Exploring Lollipop's many layers
Everything has been recreated to match the Lollipop look, right down to the Contacts (formerly known as "People") and Downloads apps -- although curiously, in the case of the latter, I'm seeing a version of the app on my Nexus 6 review unit that doesn't quite match the one on my Nexus 9. Given that the Nexus 9 received a software update prior to its consumer launch, I'm guessing that the Nexus 6 will soon be brought up to parity. The visual overhaul isn't just within Android itself, either; it's across Google as a whole. Though the desktop evolution is still underway, Material Design has slowly but surely been creeping into Google's various apps and services for a while.


Virtual Reality Aims for the Mobile Phone
Mobile seems a logical platform for the technology. When you find yourself fully immersed in a virtual realm, the illusion is compromised by the dim awareness that you remain attached to a PC via a cat’s cradle of wires. Mobile devices, theoretically, offer a more liberating experience. They’re not only self-contained but also cheaper to buy and run. And yet there are significant technological hurdles to overcome before the Gear VR, or its successors, can become mass-market products. “Heat is our primary issue,” says Cohen. “When you run a mobile phone’s CPUs and GPUs at maximum, the device heats up really quickly, and it needs to either cut the speed by throttling or shut down entirely.”



Automakers Agree on Guarding Car Computers From Hacking
The accord, to be announced today, calls for heightened security for information such as driver location and behavior, according to the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and the Association of Global Automakers, Washington-based groups whose members include General Motors Co. (GM:US) and Toyota Motor Corp. (7203) “As modern cars not only share the road but will in the not-too-distant future communicate with one another, vigilance over the privacy of our customers and the security of vehicle systems is an imperative,” John Bozella, president and chief executive officer of Global Automakers, said in a statement.


Chip Industry's IoT Facelift Comes With Security Wrinkle
Europe is already ahead of the US and most of the world in building out the infrastructure for the cloud and connectivity, according to Ploss, thanks to the infrastructure it has in place from its leadership in smartphones. Rick Clemmer, executive director, president, and CEO of NXP, was more emphatic regarding Europe's advantage, particularly with respect to security for IoT. "US is a leader in the Internet, but is a third-world country in security," he said. Still, said Clemmer, usability is a key issue for IoT devices, especially, as Bozotti pointed out, when the users themselves are becoming older as part of a general aging of the population, which creates even more pull for smarter cities -- based on easy-to-use devices.


What CIOs Can Learn From the Biggest Data Breaches
The worst data breaches are sometimes left unsolved, but security professionals can sometimes piece together the root cause. Idan Tendler, the CEO of security analytics company Fortscale, says it's possible, based on unconfirmed reports, that the JP Morgan Chase breach of 83 million customers' persona data happened after hackers obtained a list of the applications that run on the bank's internal servers. Once hackers had the list, they searched for known vulnerabilities for each application until they found a way to break in. They then obtained administrative privileges to gain access to the servers.



Quote for the day:

"The key element in good business management is emotional attitude. The rest is mechanics." -- Harvey Geenan

No comments:

Post a Comment