Increasing Market Demands In The Entertainment Industry

Advanced Analytics Revamping the Healthcare Industry

Over the past few years, emerging technology trends like cloud, predictive analytics, big data analytics, and machine learning have been significantly transforming the healthcare landscape. 

The industry is leveraging advanced analytics to reshape the way care is delivered, identify gaps in quality documentation and assessment to produce insights that lead to better outcomes, address performance challenges, lower costs and build new Read More

Trends that are going to change the HR industry

Suitable candidates are considered as the assets for organizations. The hardships lead to be more strategic for the HR (human resource) team of organizations because HRs’ role is to recruit not only an employee but also understand if the employee can serve as an asset for the very organization and recruit accordingly.

Nowadays technologies have made HR industry evolving to become more efficient, profitable, and enjoyable for employees. This industry is converting into more productive one with the help of advanced technologies.

Following are some of the trends, which are transforming the industry:

Artificial intelligence (AI): Talent acquisition is one of the important responsibilities of HR departments, but even they cannot be entirely sure about the hiring. Artificial Intelligence technology streamlines this hiring process by relying more on the analytical process instead of by human observations. Also, AI helps in listing relevant interview questions according to the post, employee’s background.

Robotics Quotient: The HR department has many transactional activities that are ideally suited for robotic process automation (RPA). RPA enables HRs to automate tasks that are rule-based, repetitive, and standardized and results in free-minded HRs who can focus on more strategic and innovative functions as talent development, retention, and policy implementation.

Predictive analysis: HRs deal with large quantities of people data. With the help of predictive analytics, HRs need not rely on gut feeling or soft science; they can rely on proven and data-driven predictive models. Predictive analysis enables HRs to forecast the impact of people policies on the well-being and bottom-line performance of the employees.  

Cloud: Cloud applications play a significant role in the HR industry. Functions of organizations need fast and flexible IT frameworks. Cloud is redefining the frameworks and process of working of the organizations. The competitions in organizations on recruiting processes increase data of a number of candidates and push the organizations to move the information to the cloud. Moving data to the cloud makes HRs’ functions more efficient as it lowers the manual works of HRs.

By the advancement of technology, HRs are playing a leadership role in the growth of organizations. As HRs are adopting the change with the help of technologies, the organizations will become smarter and more productive.

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Suggested: Cyber Security Predictions to Safeguard your Businesses

Source: Cybersecurity APAC 

Brain Waves Can be Used to Detect Potentially Harmful Personal Information

Cyber security and authentication have been under attack in recent months as, seemingly every other day, a new report of hackers gaining access to private or sensitive information comes to light. Just recently, more than 500 million passwords were stolen when Yahoo revealed its security was compromised.

Securing systems has gone beyond simply coming up with a clever password that could prevent nefarious computer experts from hacking into your Facebook account. The more sophisticated the system, or the more critical, private information that system holds, the more advanced the identification system protecting it becomes.

Fingerprint scans and iris identification are just two types of authentication methods, once thought of as science fiction, that are in wide use by the most secure systems. But fingerprints can be stolen and iris scans can be replicated. Nothing has proven foolproof from being subject to computer hackers.

“The principal argument for behavioral, biometric authentication is that standard modes of authentication, like a password, authenticates you once before you access the service,” said Abdul Serwadda a cybersecurity expert and assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Texas Tech University.

“Now, once you’ve accessed the service, there is no other way for the system to still know it is you. The system is blind as to who is using the service. So the area of behavioral authentication looks at other user-identifying patterns that can keep the system aware of the person who is using it. Through such patterns, the system can keep track of some confidence metric about who might be using it and immediately prompt for reentry of the password whenever the confidence metric falls below a certain threshold.”

One of those patterns that is growing in popularity within the research community is the use of brain waves obtained from an electroencephalogram, or EEG. Several research groups around the country have recently showcased systems which use EEG to authenticate users with very high accuracy.

However, those brain waves can tell more about a person than just his or her identity. It could reveal medical, behavioral or emotional aspects of a person that, if brought to light, could be embarrassing or damaging to that person. And with EEG devices becoming much more affordable, accurate and portable and applications being designed that allows people to more readily read an EEG scan, the likelihood of that happening is dangerously high.

“The EEG has become a commodity application. For $100 you can buy an EEG device that fits on your head just like a pair of headphones,” Serwadda said. “Now there are apps on the market, brain-sensing apps where you can buy the gadget, download the app on your phone and begin to interact with the app using your brain signals. That led us to think; now we have these brain signals that were traditionally accessed only by doctors being handled by regular people. Now anyone who can write an app can get access to users’ brain signals and try to manipulate them to discover what is going on.”

That’s where Serwadda and graduate student Richard Matovu focused their attention: attempting to see if certain traits could be gleaned from a person’s brain waves. They presented their findings recently to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Biometrics.

Brain waves and cybersecurity

Serwadda said the technology is still evolving in terms of being able to use a person’s brain waves for authentication purposes. But it is a heavily researched field that has drawn the attention of several federal organizations. The National Science Foundation (NSF), funds a three-year project on which Serwadda and others from Syracuse University and the University of Alabama-Birmingham are exploring how several behavioral modalities, including EEG brain patterns, could be leveraged to augment traditional user authentication mechanisms.

“There are no installations yet, but a lot of research is going on to see if EEG patterns could be incorporated into standard behavioral authentication procedures,” Serwadda said.

Assuming a system uses EEG as the modality for user authentication, typically for such a system, all variables have been optimized to maximize authentication accuracy. A selection of such variables would include:

The features used to build user templates.      

The signal frequency ranges from which features are extracted

The regions of the brain on which the electrodes are placed, among other variables.

Under this assumption of a finely tuned authentication system, Serwadda and his colleagues tackled the following questions:

If a malicious entity were to somehow access templates from this authentication-optimized system, would he or she be able to exploit these templates to infer non-authentication-centric information about the users with high accuracy?

In the event that such inferences are possible, which attributes of template design could reduce or increase the threat?

Turns out, they indeed found EEG authentication systems to give away non-authentication-centric information. Using an authentication system from UC-Berkeley and a variant of another from a team at Binghamton University and the University of Buffalo, Serwadda and Matovu tested their hypothesis, using alcoholism as the sensitive private information which an adversary might want to infer from EEG authentication templates.

In a study involving 25 formally diagnosed alcoholics and 25 non-alcoholic subjects, the lowest error rate obtained when identifying alcoholics was 25 percent, meaning a classification accuracy of approximately 75 percent.

When they tweaked the system and changed several variables, they found that the ability to detect alcoholic behavior could be tremendously reduced at the cost of slightly reducing the performance of the EEG authentication system.

Motivation for discovery

Serwadda’s motivation for proving brain waves could be used to reveal potentially harmful personal information wasn’t to improve the methods for obtaining that information. It’s to prevent it.

To illustrate, he gives an analogy using fingerprint identification at an airport. Fingerprint scans read ridges and valleys on the finger to determine a person’s unique identity, and that’s it.

In a hypothetical scenario where such systems could only function accurately if the user’s finger was pricked and some blood drawn from it, this would be problematic because the blood drawn by the prick could be used to infer things other than the user’s identity, such as whether a person suffers from certain diseases, such as diabetes.

Given the amount of extra information that EEG authentication systems are able glean about the user, current EEG systems could be likened to the hypothetical fingerprint reader that pricks the user’s finger. Serwadda wants to drive research that develops EEG authentication systems that perform the intended purpose while revealing minimal information about traits other than the user’s identity in authentication terms.

Currently, in the vast majority of studies on the EEG authentication problem, researchers primarily seek to outdo each other in terms of the system error rates. They work with the central objective of designing a system having error rates which are much lower than the state-of-the-art. Whenever a research group develops or publishes an EEG authentication system that attains the lowest error rates, such a system is immediately installed as the reference point.

A critical question that has not seen much attention up to this point is how certain design attributes of these systems, in other words the kinds of features used to formulate the user template, might relate to their potential to leak sensitive personal information. If, for example, a system with the lowest authentication error rates comes with the added baggage of leaking a significantly higher amount of private information, then such a system might, in practice, not be as useful as its low error rates suggest. Users would only accept, and get the full utility of the system, if the potential privacy breaches associated with the system are well understood and appropriate mitigations undertaken.

But, Serwadda said, while the EEG is still being studied, the next wave of invention is already beginning.

“In light of the privacy challenges seen with the EEG, it is noteworthy that the next wave of technology after the EEG is already being developed,” Serwadda said. “One of those technologies is functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which has a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than an EEG. It gives a more accurate picture of brain activity given its ability to focus on a particular region of the brain.”

The good news, for now, is fNIRS technology is still quite expensive; however there is every likelihood that the prices will drop over time, potentially leading to a civilian application to this technology. Thanks to the efforts of researchers like Serwadda, minimizing the leakage of sensitive personal information through these technologies is beginning to gain attention in the research community.

“The basic idea behind this research is to motivate a direction of research which selects design parameters in such a way that we not only care about recognizing users very accurately but also care about minimizing the amount of sensitive personal information it can read,” Serwadda said.

These 9 Companies Could Help Us Send the Next Robotic Landers to the Moon

We sent the first humans to land on the Moon in 1969. Since then, only of 12 men have stepped foot on the lunar surface – but we left robotic explorers behind to continue gathering science data. And now, we’re preparing to return. Establishing a sustained presence on and near the Moon will help us learn to live off of our home planet and prepare for travel to Mars.

To help establish ourselves on and near the Moon, we are working with a few select American companies. We will buy space on commercial robotic landers, along with other customers, to deliver our payloads to the lunar surface. We’re even developing lunar instruments and tools that will fly on missions as early as 2019!

Through partnerships with American companies, we are leading a flexible and sustainable approach to deep space missions. These early commercial delivery missions will also help inform new space systems we build to send humans to the Moon in the next decade. Involving American companies and stimulating the space market with these new opportunities to send science instruments and new technologies to deep space will be similar to how we use companies like Northrop Grumman and SpaceX to send cargo to the International Space Station now. These selected companies will provide a rocket and cargo space on their robotic landers for us (and others!) to send science and technology to our nearest neighbor.

So who are these companies that will get to ferry science instruments and new technologies to the Moon?

Here’s a digital “catalogue” of the organizations and their spacecraft that will be available for lunar services over the next decade:

Astrobotic Technology, Inc.

Pittsburg, PA

Deep Space Systems

Littleton, CO

Firefly Aerospace, Inc.

Cedar Park, TX

Intuitive Machines, LLC

Houston, TX

Lockheed Martin Space

Littleton, CO

Masten Space Systems, Inc.

Mojave, CA

Moon Express, Inc.

Cape Canaveral, FL

Orbit Beyond, Inc.

Edison, NJ

Draper, Inc.

Cambridge, MA

We are thrilled to be working with these companies to enable us to investigate the Moon in new ways. In order to expand humanity’s presence beyond Earth, we need to return to the Moon before we go to Mars.

The Moon helps us to learn how to live and work on another planetary body while being only three days away from home – instead of several months. The Moon also holds enormous potential for testing new technologies, like prospecting for water ice and turning it into drinking water, oxygen and rocket fuel. Plus, there’s so much science to be done!

The Moon can help us understand the early history of the solar system, how planets migrated to their current formation and much more. Understanding how the Earth-Moon system formed is difficult because those ancient rocks no longer exist here on Earth. They have been recycled by plate tectonics, but the Moon still has rocks that date back to the time of its formation! It’s like traveling to a cosmic time machine!

Join us on this exciting journey as we expand humanity’s presence beyond Earth.

Learn more about the Moon and all the surprises it may hold: https://moon.nasa.gov

Find out more about today’s announcement HERE.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Connected cars are not too far away from being introduced. There will come a day where the people can simply sit in a car and drive off, instead of setting the temperature, seats, batteries, as everything would be automatic. 

The cars would be autonomous and make a steady approach to the destination the driver prefers. After reaching the destination, the car would park itself in the prearranged parking location, which includes a wireless inductive charger.

https://medium.com/@me_isbella/trends-in-entertainment-industry-c4131a39fd6a 

The amount of data generated by the devices that people transport has increased exponentially and has had a knock-on effect in several professions. For criminal lawyers, the potential evidence available has increased, and this increase in data has reflected in all branches of law. The data generated by the legal process are already digitized and combined with other technologies. It has the potential to make lawyers’ jobs easier.

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#solarenergy #renewable energy

Solar Energy Could Grow 6,500% by 2050 - Solar and wind power together are projected to provide two-thirds of all electricity in 2050. https://ift.tt/2Px7tFp

Gamification: Effective Means of Event Management

Mummification, along with live video features and chatbots are one of the most talked about event trends today. Even though the term gamification is spread like wildfire throughout the event industry, there is still confusion about what gamification is and how it can enhance an in-person event.

Read full insights: gamification and event management