The Wall Street JournalIBM's Watson artificial intelligence (AI) system is falling short of some expectations for its outcomes in the fight against cancer, with many users citing inaccuracy, the AI's susceptibility to error due to a lack of data, and the evolution of cancer therapies outpacing the ability of human trainers to upgrade Watson. IBM says Watson offers valuable cancer-care benefits, such as helping physicians keep up with medical knowledge. For an AI to recommend fine-tuned […]

SiliconANGLEIntel on Tuesday announced three vulnerabilities that target speculative execution on its chips. The Foreshadow vulnerabilities allow the chip to predict possible outcomes of the code it is in the process of executing, and has three variants that target different types of processing. Foreshadow operates through the Software Guard Extensions (SGX) in Intel chips, impacting certain microprocessor products supporting Intel SGX. Hackers could target the speculative data because SGX […]

Carnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon University and DeepMotion researchers have developed a physics-based, real-time method for controlling animated characters that can learn basketball dribbling skills from experience. The system learns from motion capture of movements performed by people dribbling basketballs. The researchers used deep-reinforcement learning to enable the model to identify important details associated with dribbling. The system learned the skills in two stages: it […]

EmpaResearchers at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology in Switzerland (Empa) and the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Germany have succeeded in adjusting the electronic properties of graphene nanoribbons by varying their shape, a process that could generate specific local quantum states in the ribbon. Changing the width of a graphene nanoribbon from seven to nine atoms produces a transitional zone, giving rise to a "protected," highly robust new […]

Help Net SecurityScientists at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Israel say urban water services are vulnerable to a botnet attack on smart irrigation systems that water concurrently. The team analyzed three popular commercial smart irrigation systems and found they contained weaknesses susceptible to botnet hijacking. The attack strategy does not require infecting a water service's physical cyber systems, as a bot running on a compromised device can identify a smart irrigation […]