"Admiral Insurance will analyse the Facebook accounts of first-time car owners to look for personality traits that are linked to safe driving. For example, individuals who are identified as conscientious and well-organised will score well. Facebook forces Admiral to pull plan to price car insurance based on posts Read more The insurer will examine posts and likes by the Facebook user, although not photos, looking for habits that research shows are linked to these traits. These include writing in short concrete sentences, using lists, and arranging to meet friends at a set time and place, rather than just "tonight"."

"Some people assume that once quantum computing comes along modern encryption technologies will be outpowered. But experts are starting to posit that hash functions and asymmetric encryption could defend not only against modern computers, but also against quantum attackers from the future."

"DDoS attacks are also becoming more common. Brian Krebs, an independent security researcher, observed earlier this month that the "source code" to the Mirai botnet had been released by a hacker group, "virtually guaranteeing that the internet will soon be flooded with attacks from many new botnets powered by insecure routers, IP cameras, digital video recorders and other easily hackable devices""

"Fidelis malware mangler Jason Reaves says the TrickBot malware has strong code similarities to the Dyre trojan, a menace that ripped through Western banks and businesses in the US, the UK, and Australia, inflicting tens of millions of dollars in damages through dozens of separate spam and phishing campaigns since June 2014. Dyre stole some US$5.5 million from budget carrier Ryanair and fleeced individual businesses of up to $1.5 million each in substantial wire transfers using stolen online banking credentials."

"It is one of the first programs to combine an external memory with an approach called deep-learning, in which the program learns how to do tasks independently rather than being pre-programmed with a set of rules by a human."

"Unlike other companies, Zebra's algorithms provide an actual diagnosis, completely automatically using only imaging data. This is a very new field - older technology was always driven by the radiologist, and never automatic. The algorithms are part of the Zebra Analytics Platform - a cloud based analytics engine that receives medical imaging studies, analyzes them and returns results to participating hospitals and physicians."

"A woman helped create and program the world's first general purpose computer. How much progress has there been since Ada Lovelace Day began in 2009?"

"All of Mercedes-Benz's future Level 4 and Level 5 autonomous cars will prioritize saving the people they carry, according to Christoph von Hugo, the automaker's manager of driver assistance systems and active safety. "If you know you can save at least one person, at least save that one. Save the one in the car," Hugo said in an interview at the Paris auto show. "If all you know for sure is that one death can be prevented, then that's your first priority.""

"Moore's Law (or the exponential growth of integrated circuits) is actually referring to the fifth paradigm of computation. Here's the list of the underlying technologies: (1) Electromechanical; (2) Vacuum Tube; (3) Relay; (4) Transistors; and (5) Integrated Circuits. Quantum computers may well be the sixth paradigm, given that they work in a fashion that is entirely different from "classical" computers"

"Generally, it questions the advance of computing in the absence of a deeper knowledge of how the human brain perceives the world to be computed. We want computers to have perception, yet we know little about the workings of our own human perception."

"The Bank of England has previously highlighted the impact of trading algorithms. "Some markets appear to have become more fragile, as evidenced by episodes of short-term volatility and illiquidity over the past couple of years," Threadneedle Street said last December, warning of a move towards "fast, electronic trading." "

"At Imperial College London, Murray Shanahan and colleagues are working on a way around this problem using an old, unfashionable technique called symbolic AI. "Basically this meant an engineer labelled everything for the AI," says Shanahan. His idea is to combine this with modern machine learning. Symbolic AI never took off, because manually describing everything quickly proved overwhelming. Modern AI has overcome that problem by using neural networks, which learn their own representations of the world around them. "They decide what is salient," says Marta Garnelo, also at Imperial College."

"If mediocre malware can power some of the largest DDoS attacks ever, and considering the sad state of security of the Internet of Things in general, we should probably brace for more cyberattacks powered by our easy-to-hack "smart" Internet of Things, as many, including ourselves, had predicted months ago."

"The baby automaton joins a growing list of companion robots, such as the upcoming Jibo - designed by robotics experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and resembling a swivelling lamp - and Paro, a robot baby seal marketed by Japanese company Intelligent System as a therapeutic machine to soothe elderly dementia sufferers. Around a quarter of Japan's population is over 65 with a dearth of care workers putting a strain on social services."

"The significance of the attack on Krebs is that it looks as though many of the attacks on him came from large numbers of enslaved devices - routers, cameras, networked TVs and the like. "Someone has a botnet with capabilities we haven't seen before," says Martin McKeay, Akamai's senior security expert. The DDoS arms race has just moved up a gear."

"Facebook is mired in a series of controversies about the curation of its news feed, from its broadcasting live killings, to editing out an iconic photo of the Vietnam war, to accusations of political bias. It recently tried to smooth the process out by firing its human editors … only to find the news feed degenerated into a mass of fake and controversial news stories."

""Robots are a great educational tool for children. It inspires them to learn about science and engineering," Sharkey told the Guardian in March. "But there are significant dangers in having robots mind our children. They do not have the sensitivity or understanding needed for childcare." "

"A new strain of ransomware has been targeting government agencies and educational institutions in the United States, through scam emails that pretend to be something important. The malware, dubbed as 'MarsJoke' by Proofpoint security researchers, reportedly began a large-scale email campaign which distributed the cryptomalware last week. The developers are sending out emails which seems to be masked as a message from an airline company."

"In Neural Photo Editing With Introspective Adversarial Networks, a group of University of Edinburgh engineers and a private research colleague describe a method for using "introspective adversarial networks" to edit images in realtime, which they demonstrate in an open project called "Neural Photo Editor" that "enhances" photos by predicting what should be under your brush."

"Researchers have shown that given access to only an API, a way to remotely use software without having it on your computer, it's possible to reverse-engineer machine learning algorithms with up to 99% accuracy. In the real world, this would mean being able to steal AI products from companies like Microsoft and IBM, and use them for free. Small companies built around a single machine learning API could lose any competitive advantage."