Vatican and Microsoft partner to showcase St. Peter’s Basilica through AI technology  National Catholic Reporter

Derek Collins of Huawei Ireland thinks that the global research landscape will have to evolve as humans begin to demand better technologies and 'dare to dream'.

Read more: What role does AI research play in the future of telecoms?

In the latest episode of For Tech’s Sake, we dive deep under the sea to explore the world of internet cables, from the Victorian internet to modern-day fibre.

Read more: Breaking the internet: The fragility of subsea cables

The company must invest $15.75m to strengthen its cybersecurity and pay a penalty of $15.75m to the US Treasury.

Read more: T-mobile reaches $31.5m settlement with FCC over cybersecurity breaches

Growing digital dependencies, geopolitical tensions and the climate crisis have placed subsea cable infrastructure in increasing danger.

Read more: The growing need to address subsea cable security

Details of the compromised data revealed that it may have been stolen on 28 September.

Read more: Internet Archive suffers from cyberattack affecting 31m users

Wondering how to get your head around the world of cybersecurity? Get to know the experts in the field to stay on top of the latest trends.

Read more: 10 cybersecurity experts you need to know

Elio Networks’ Philip Russell discusses what companies need to consider ahead of the EU regulatory framework.

Read more: Regulation with reward: How DORA can enhance businesses

Globally, a data breach costs an estimated €3m and yet less than a third of Irish companies are well prepared.

Read more: Only 28pc of Irish companies have ‘robust’ cybersecurity measures

Zama’s Prof Nigel Smart spoke to Prof Florian Kerschbaum about the challenges of harnessing data to make supply chains more efficient while protecting privacy.

Read more: Can this cryptography tool secure your supply chain data?

Microsoft’s Kieran McCorry talks about what the future of tech will look like in Dublin, Ireland and beyond as AI, quantum and more continue to evolve.

Read more: How these tech trends could shape Ireland’s future

More than two-thirds of Irish cybersecurity leaders believe that reputational damage from a cyberattack would 'significantly' damage their business.

Read more: 74pc of Irish businesses report increase in cyberattacks this year

Huawei Ireland CEO Calvin Lan calls for larger companies to play a 'supporting role' to boost digital adoption.

Read more: Very small Irish businesses are less likely to embrace AI

More than half of all breaches occurred in the Department of Social Protection, data revealed.

Read more: Human error the leading cause of Government data breaches

Eligible SMEs can apply for funding of 80pc of their project costs, with a maximum grant of €60,000.

Read more: New €2m fund launched for SMEs to improve cybersecurity

The operation has led to the arrest of 41 individuals, with 65 others still under investigation.

Read more: Interpol takes down 22,000 servers and IP addresses linked to cyberthreats

HP’s Val Gabriel discusses nation-state cyberthreats in the hardware supply chain and how to mitigate these types of attacks.

Read more: Tech tampering: Are hardware supply chain attacks on the rise?

The company will use some of the funding to advance its wildfire suppression project, which uses autonomous drones and acoustic waves.

Read more: Dryad Networks raises €6.3m to drive wildfire prevention tech

The funding comes from the US Department of Energy and will be used to demonstrate the scalability of the company’s technology.

Read more: Dublin’s GridBeyond bags $7.8m for grid services project

The innovative biotech company plans to hire 60 people over the next five years.

Read more: Mayo biotech Ovagen raises €2m and plans to hire 60

xWave, which is headquartered at NovaUCD, has also announced the launch of a crowdfunding campaign.

Read more: Health-tech firm xWave Technologies secures NHS tender

The funding round, which was supported by the Enterprise Ireland High Potential Start-Up (HPSU) fund, will assist the company in scaling into the UK market.

Read more: Dublin regtech secures €800,000 to target UK market

Commissioner-designate Ekaterina Zaharieva wants to push for 50pc women on all Horizon-related boards and expert groups.

Read more: EU to appoint first ever commissioner for start-ups, research and innovation

The jobs will be in areas such as software engineering, applied sciences, data science, design, technical writing and analytics.

Read more: Microsoft to create 550 Irish-based jobs in R&D investment

C-suite roles have changed significantly in the last decade, so how can a modern CEO upskill and stay ahead of the crowd?

Read more: Modern leadership and those crucial CEO skills

The annual event will see a number of familiar Irish start-ups make an appearance, including Manna, Lua Health and Binarii Labs.

Read more: Enterprise Ireland announces a 24-company delegation to Slush

The latest fundraising round included participation from multiple Canadian entrepreneurs such as the CEOs of Roblox and Shopify.

Read more: Canadian fintech Neo Financial secures multimillion funding round

Expleo’s research indicates that larger Irish firms are prioritising company culture investment amid efforts to attract and retain talented employees.

Read more: Irish businesses to spend nearly €8bn on company culture plans

Mytaxi has quietly revealed that you may have to pay a bit more for every booking made through its app, starting from 21 September.

Read more: Irish Mytaxi users could now have to pay a little more for app bookings

Instagram is making a big change to its Stories feature.

Read more: Instagram now allows users to add any video or image to Stories

Never lose a gem of a tweet to the ravages of the algorithmic timeline again.

Read more: Twitter is testing a feature allowing users to bookmark tweets

The preview of Messenger Kids is launching in the US first.

Read more: Facebook launches Messenger Kids app for under-13s

Google has launched its new router – Google Wifi – in Ireland, with the promise of ending the dreaded reception blackspots found in some people’s homes.

Read more: Google’s new Wi-Fi router promises to end reception ‘blackspots’

The Unicode Consortium has unveiled a new generation of emojis coming out this year, including images of people with disabilities.

Read more: Inclusive new emojis offer representation for people with disabilities

Users can find if an image has been altered with AI in the photo details, under file name and size.

Read more: Google Photos increases transparency with new AI label

The new quantised models are 56pc smaller and use 41pc less memory when compared to the full-size models released last month.

Read more: Meta releases compact versions of Llama 3.2 AI models

ChatGPT Plus and Team users will have access to the function from today, while free users will gain access in the coming months.

Read more: OpenAI adds search engine to ChatGPT

Robot developers keep making it seem like housebots are imminent when they’re decades away, argue Dr Carl Strathearn and Dr Dimitra Gkatzia from Edinburgh Napier University.

Read more: How soon will robots be doing our household chores?

The energy company said that the project has the potential to power 115,000 Irish homes for up to two hours at a time.

Read more: SSE Renewables to develop battery storage site in Offaly

The judge ruled in favour of OpenAI stating that the outlets were unable to prove 'concrete injury'.

Read more: News outlets lose copyright lawsuit against OpenAI

The aim of the project is to develop and test AI tools to boost the efficiency and sustainability of Europe's energy sector.

Read more: Dublin’s EPRI leads European project to advance AI use in the energy sector

The piece draws 'heavily' from Pablo Picasso, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, according to art broker Sotheby's.

Read more: AI artwork made by robot Ai-Da sells for more than $1m

The team will work with CKDelta to deliver predictive maintenance models that could improve efficiency.

Read more: Trinity researchers will use AI to tackle utilities sector challenges

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Anton Shilov reports via Tom's Hardware: FFmpeg is an open-source video decoding project developed by volunteers who contribute to its codebase, fix bugs, and add new features. The project is led by a small group of core developers and maintainers who oversee its direction and ensure that contributions meet certain standards. They coordinate the project's development and release cycles, merging contributions from other developers. This group of developers tried to implement a handwritten AVX512 assembly code path, something that has rarely been done before, at least not in the video industry. The developers have created an optimized code path using the AVX-512 instruction set to accelerate specific functions within the FFmpeg multimedia processing library. By leveraging AVX-512, they were able to achieve significant performance improvements -- from three to 94 times faster -- compared to standard implementations. AVX-512 enables processing large chunks of data in parallel using 512-bit registers, which can handle up to 16 single-precision FLOPS or 8 double-precision FLOPS in one operation. This optimization is ideal for compute-heavy tasks in general, but in the case of video and image processing in particular. The benchmarking results show that the new handwritten AVX-512 code path performs considerably faster than other implementations, including baseline C code and lower SIMD instruction sets like AVX2 and SSSE3. In some cases, the revamped AVX-512 codepath achieves a speedup of nearly 94 times over the baseline, highlighting the efficiency of hand-optimized assembly code for AVX-512.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Sweden has vetoed plans for 13 offshore windfarms in the Baltic Sea, citing unacceptable security risks. The country's defence minister, Pal Jonson, said on Monday that the government had rejected plans for all but one of 14 windfarms planned along the east coast. The decision comes after the Swedish armed forces concluded last week that the projects would make it more difficult to defend Nato's newest member. The proposed windfarms would have been located between Aland, the autonomous Finnish region between Sweden and Finland, and the Sound, the strait between southern Sweden and Denmark. The Russian exclave of Kaliningrad is only about 310 miles (500km) from Stockholm. Wind power could affect Sweden's defence capabilities across sensors and radars and make it harder to detect submarines and possible attacks from the air if war broke out, Jonson said. The only project to receive the green light to was Poseidon, which will include as many as 81 wind turbines to produce 5.5 terawatt hours a year off Stenungsund on Sweden's west coast. "Both ballistic robots and also cruise robots are a big problem if you have offshore wind power," Jonson said. "If you have a strong signal detection capability and a radar system that is important, we use the Patriot system for example, there would be negative consequences if there were offshore wind power in the way of the sensors."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Starting November 11, TSMC plans to stop supplying 7 nm and smaller chips to Chinese companies working on AI processors and GPUs. "The move is reportedly to ensure it remains compliant with US export restrictions," reports The Register. From the report: This will not affect Chinese customers wanting 7 nm chips from TSMC for other applications such as mobile and communications, according to Nikkei, which said the overall impact on the chipmaker's revenue is likely to be minimal. TrendForce further cites another China-based source who claims the move was at the behest of the US Department of Commerce, which informed TSMC that any such shipments should not proceed unless approved and licensed by its BIS (Bureau of Industry and Security). We asked the agency for confirmation. Any moves by the silicon supremo is likely to be out of caution to pre-empt accusations from Washington that it isn't doing enough to prevent advanced technology from getting into the hands of Chinese entities that have been sanctioned. As TrendForce notes, it "highlights the foundry giant's delicate position in the global semiconductor supply chain amid the heating chip war between the world's two superpowers."

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Wednesday Cuba was hit by a major hurricane which took down its entire power grid again, this time for about 24 hours, according to CNN: Videos of the aftermath showed power infrastructure turned into a mangled mess and power poles down on streets. Hundreds of technicians were mobilized Thursday to reestablish power connections, according to state media... Operations at two electrical plants were partially restored and parts of eastern and central Cuba had electricity back up by Thursday afternoon, state media reported... The country's power grid has collapsed multiple times, including when Hurricane Oscar hit in October and killed at least 7 people. In the capital of Havana, where 2 million people live, power had been restored to less than 20% of the city by late Friday afternoon, . "Authorities had not yet given an estimate for when power would be fully restored..." Then tonight, CNN reported: A 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of eastern Cuba on Sunday, causing material damage in several regions as the island continues to recover from widespread blackouts and the impact of two hurricanes over the past few weeks. The earthquake was reported about 39 km (24 miles) south of Bartolomé Masó before noon local time, about an hour after a 5.9 magnitude quake rocked the area, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said. "There have been landslides, damage to homes and power lines," Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said, adding that authorities are evaluating the situation to start recovery efforts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The pilot programme funding marks the largest single investment in lung cancer in Ireland’s history.

Read more: Lung cancer research gets €4.9m boost for early detection

Projects funded include a study to reduce seizures in epilepsy, the development of antimicrobial food packaging and the use of AI in speech and language therapy.

Read more: 290 ‘exceptional’ early-career researchers awarded €27.5m