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This is very true; everyone knows in order for AI to truly be embraced by both consumers and industry; that Cyber Security on multiple fronts will need to be invested in to ensure better adoption of all the great technology on the horizon.


Though the cyber security industry has lost its momentum in the past several months, partially due to the weakness in the broad technology sector, it is poised for exponential growth in the coming years in the face of increasing cybercrime and the need to protect against these threats. According to Gartner, global security spending will increase 4.7% year over year to $75.4 billion in 2015 with some analysts projecting the global market to grow from $77 billion in 2015 to $170 billion by 2020.

The Q4 earnings reports of several industry players reflect this trend as most of them have beaten our earnings and revenue estimates with an encouraging outlook. Yet, they failed to drive the space and its ETFs higher that might suggest attractive entry point at the current level (read: 16 Bold ETF Predictions for 2016 ).

Let’s dig into the earnings results of some of the cyber security firms that have the largest allocation to the ETFs in this industry:

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Are you feeling confident about those robots and other AI machines and apps connected to the cloud environments self managing themselves?


The latest round of embarrassing federal data breaches struck the very agencies charged with protecting Americans, evidence one leading member of Congress believes is proof that throwing money at a problem doesn’t solve much unless there’s accountability to go with it.

Last week, the personal data of some 20,000 FBI employees and more than 9,000 Department of Homeland Security workers was released.

Days later, the story took on additional embarrassment when authorities arrested the perpetrator, a 16-year-old boy in Great Britain. The teen said he gained access to the information through weak security in the Department of Justice email system.

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I was waiting for this HIPAA’s new guidelines for mobile apps (focuses a lot on IAM); this is only the first wave. We will see more when more AI is launched.


Federal regulators have issued new guidance, including material to clarify for healthcare entities and software developers various scenarios where HIPAA regulations might apply to mobile health applications, including situations when patients use smartphones to collect or transmit personal health data.

See Also: 2015 Breach Preparedness and Response Study: The Results

Some privacy and security experts say the new mobile application guidance material from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights addresses a topic that is not only a current source of confusion for many covered entities and business associates, but also is likely to become increasingly complex as more consumers use smartphones and other devices to help manage chronic illnesses and other health issues.

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I believe that AI holds a lot of promise and many great things; however, we have to correct some very critical issues 1st before compound a huge issue that we have today. And, that is Cyber Security and re-establish trust with our consumers and customers. Without these 2 being fully addressed; you will compound these two challenges with AI plus run the risk of having an IoT that most people will not wish to use due to hackers, bad data, etc. Not to mention lawsuits for Wi-Fi connected robotics that were hacked and injured or worse some innocent person.

I believe need to ensure priorities are in order before we make things worse.


Unexpected convergent consequences…this is what happens when eight different exponential technologies all explode onto the scene at once.

This post (the second of seven) is a look at artificial intelligence. Future posts will look at other tech areas.

An expert might be reasonably good at predicting the growth of a single exponential technology (e.g., the Internet of Things), but try to predict the future when A.I., robotics, VR, synthetic biology and computation are all doubling, morphing and recombining. You have a very exciting (read: unpredictable) future. This year at my Abundance 360 Summit I decided to explore this concept in sessions I called “Convergence Catalyzers.”

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This is one that truly depends on the targeted audience. I still believe that the 1st solely owned & operated female robotics company will make billions.


Beyond correct pronunciation, there is the even larger challenge of correctly placing human qualities like inflection and emotion into speech. Linguists call this “prosody,” the ability to add correct stress, intonation or sentiment to spoken language.

Today, even with all the progress, it is not possible to completely represent rich emotions in human speech via artificial intelligence. The first experimental-research results — gained from employing machinelearning algorithms and huge databases of human emotions embedded in speech — are just becoming available to speech scientists.

Synthesised speech is created in a variety of ways. The highest-quality techniques for natural-sounding speech begin with a human voice that is used to generate a database of parts and even subparts of speech spoken in many different ways. A human voice actor may spend from 10 hours to hundreds of hours, if not more, recording for each database.

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“We need to start thinking very seriously—what will humans do when machines can do almost everything?” Vardi said. “We have to redefine the meaning of good life without work.”


And increase inequality.

Robots and artificial intelligence have long posed a threat to humans’ jobs, but a group of scientists on Sunday issued an especially dire warning about the impact of such machines.

Several academics told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that further advances in automation could result in mass unemployment across a whole spectrum of industries, from transportation to sex work.

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The article entitled “Yes Robots Will Steal Our Jobs, But Don’t Worry We’ll Get New Ones” published by Rawstory is a very Interesting Article; however, again, I see too many gaps that will need to be address before AI can eliminate 70% of today’s jobs. Below, are the top 5 gaps that I have seen so far with AI in taking over many government, business, and corporate positions.

1) Emotion/ Empathy Gap — AI has not been designed with the sophistication to provide personable care such as you see with caregivers, medical specialists, etc.

2) Demographic Gap — until we have a more broader mix of the population engaged in AI’s design & development; AI will not meet the needs for critical mass adoption; only a subset of the population will find will connection in serving most of their needs.

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Lack of good Cyber Security across the net, will continue to be a key reason why AI in general will not deliver the return on new AI tech products and robots / devices. $3+ million in ranson may not be that large to mid size and large tech companies; however, it is everything to small businesses and small businesses and consumers is what keeps tech in business.


Hospital staff severely impeded in their day-to-day work.

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In professional cycling, it’s well known that a pack of 40 or 50 riders can ride faster and more efficiently than a single rider or small group. As such, you’ll often see cycling teams with different goals in a race work together to chase down a breakaway before the finish line.

This analogy is one way to think about collaborative multi-agent intelligent systems, which are poised to change the technology landscape for individuals, businesses, and governments, says Dr. Mehdi Dastani, a computer scientist at Utrecht University. The proliferation of these multi-agent systems could lead to significant systemic changes across society in the next decade.

Image credit: ResearchGate
Image credit: ResearchGate

“Multi-agent systems are basically a kind of distributed system with sets of software. A set can be very large. They are autonomous, they make their own decisions, they can perceive their environment, “Dastani said. “They can perceive other agents and they can communicate, collaborate or compete to get certain resources. A multi-agent system can be conceived as a set of individual softwares that interact.”

As a simple example of multi-agent systems, Dastani cited Internet mail servers, which connect with each other and exchange messages and packets of information. On a larger scale, he noted eBay’s online auctions, which use multi-agent systems to allow one to find an item they want to buy, enter their maximum price and then, if needed, up the bid on the buyer’s behalf as the auction closes. Driverless cars are another great example of a multi-agent system, where many softwares must communicate to make complicated decisions.

Dastani noted that multi-agent systems dovetail nicely with today’s artificial intelligence. In the early days of AI, intelligence was a property of one single entity of software that could, for example, understand human language or perceive visual inputs to make its decisions, interact, or perform an action. As multi-agent systems have been developed, those single agents interact and receive information from other agents that they may lack, which allows them to collectively create greater functionality and more intelligent behavior.

“When we consider (global) trade, we basically define a kind of interaction in terms of action. This way of interacting among individuals might make their market more efficient. Their products might get to market for a better price, as the amount of time (to produce them) might be reduced,” Dastani said. “When we get into multi-agent systems, we consider intelligence as sort of an emergent phenomena that can be very functional and have properties like optimal global decision or situations of state.”

Other potential applications of multi-agent systems include designs for energy-efficient appliances, such as a washing machine that can contact an energy provider so that it operates during off-peak hours or a factory that wants to flatten out its peak energy use, he said. Municipal entities can also use multi-agent systems for planning, such as simulating traffic patterns to improve traffic efficiency.

Looking to the future, Dastani notes the parallels between multi-agent systems and Software as a Service (SaaS) computing, which could shed light on how multi-agent systems might evolve. Just as SaaS combines various applications for on-demand use, multi-agent systems can combine functionalities of various software to provide more complex solutions. The key to those more complex interactions, he added, is to develop a system that will govern the interactions of multi-agent systems and overcome the inefficiencies that can be created on the path toward functionality.

“The idea is the optimal interaction that we can design or we can have. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that multi-agent systems are by definition, efficient,” Dastani said. “We can have many processes that communicate, make an enormous number of messages and use a huge amount of resources and they still can not have a sort of interesting functionality. The whole idea is, how can we understand and analyze the interactions? How can we decide which interaction is better than the other interactions or more efficient or more productive?”

Qubits in solid state devices for transmission across an Quantum Internet is a given in order to have great performance on a Quantum Network as well as help ensuring secured transmission of information across the net — this is a given and why Quantum is a must for supporting and securing things like AI, IoT, and other emerging technologies such as Brain Interface devices.

Without this technology; it will be very hard for industries, governments, and especially consumers to embrace and adopt full automated AI, brain interface devices, etc.


A research team from the Joint Quantum Institute have developed a way for qubits to interact with photons, which could ultimately lead to futuristic quantum networks. Theorists explained that such a solid state device could give birth to compact chip-integrated quantum circuits enabling gigahertz range bandwidths.

Qubits or quantum bits which are the quantum analogue of the classical bit allows superposition of states in between horizontally polarized and vertically polarized states. Contemporary optical networks use electronic circuits to store information and an optical fibre to carry it. However, scientists sketched a quantum network system in which highly secured qubits will be transmitted using an optical fibre. However, in order to realise this in practice will require a feasible interaction between an electron and a photon.

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