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Splunk today announced it plans to acquire security software company TruStar for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition will add TruStar’s cloud-native, cyber intelligence-sharing capabilities and automated processes to Splunk’s growing cybersecurity portfolio.

“TruStar will help us get even better at predictive threat assessments by strengthening our threat intelligence framework. This acquisition will allow customers to autonomously and seamlessly enrich their (security operation center) workflows with threat intelligence data feeds from heterogeneous sources,” Splunk president and CEO Doug Merritt told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview.

The pending deal is in line with Splunk’s philosophy that “security is a data problem,” he said. The announcement marks a return to M&A activity for Splunk and the massive $1.05 billion deal for SignalFX in 2019. The company also made four cloud-related acquisitions in 2020.

Machine learning algorithms have gained fame for being able to ferret out relevant information from datasets with many features, such as tables with dozens of rows and images with millions of pixels. Thanks to advances in cloud computing, you can often run very large machine learning models without noticing how much computational power works behind the scenes.

But every new feature that you add to your problem adds to its complexity, making it harder to solve it with machine learning algorithms. Data scientists use dimensionality reduction, a set of techniques that remove excessive and irrelevant features from their machine learning models.

Dimensionality reduction slashes the costs of machine learning and sometimes makes it possible to solve complicated problems with simpler models.

Interesting as I recall Aubrey lamenting that he had met Bezos several times over the years but never got a dime from him. Also I wonder where he would put the cash. Just donor all h by is SENS? Pick a company like Age-x?


Jeff Bezos is said to get into the Longevity Industry next month according to Aubrey De Grey. Having a billionaire invest into finding a cure for aging is both amazing and worrisome.
The field of longevity research was long underfunded but recently, with more and more results coming in, investors like Jeff Bezos are getting more and more interested in the field.

Last week, the most prominent figure in the longevity-research community, Aubrey The gray, has announced that one of the biggest event of this community will transpire in around a month. Previous investors were other tech entrepreneur like Peter Thiel or Googles Larry Page.

Got milk?


Hoping to capitalise on a surge in demand for home deliveries, a Singapore technology company has deployed a pair of robots to bring residents their groceries in one part of the city state.

Developed by OTSAW Digital and both named “Camello”, the robots’ services have been offered to 700 households in a one-year trial.

Users can book delivery slots for their milk and eggs, and an app notifies them when the robot is about to reach a pick-up point — usually the lobby of an apartment building.

ETH Computer scientists have developed a new AI solution that enables touchscreens to sense with eight times higher resolution than current devices. Thanks to AI, their solution can infer much more precisely where fingers touch the screen.

Quickly typing a message on a smartphone sometimes results in hitting the wrong letters on the small keyboard or on other input buttons in an app. The touch that detect finger input on the have not changed much since they were first released in mobile phones in the mid-2000s.

In contrast, the screens of smartphones and tablets are now providing unprecedented visual quality, which is even more evident with each new generation of devices: higher color fidelity, higher resolution, crisper contrast. A latest-generation iPhone, for example, has a display resolution of 2532×1170 pixels. But the it integrates can only detect input with a resolution of around 32×15 pixels—that’s almost 80 times lower than the display resolution: “And here we are, wondering why we make so many typing errors on the small keyboard? We think that we should be able to select objects with pixel accuracy through touch, but that’s certainly not the case,” says Christian Holz, ETH computer science professor from the Sensing, Interaction & Perception Lab (SIPLAB) in an interview in the ETH Computer Science Department’s “Spotlights” series.

Launching this summer, NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) will showcase the dynamic powers of laser communications technologies. With NASA’s ever-increasing human and robotic presence in space, missions can benefit from a new way of “talking” with Earth.

Since the beginning of spaceflight in the 1950s, NASA missions have leveraged to send data to and from space. Laser communications, also known as optical communications, will further empower missions with unprecedented data capabilities.