Customers at H&R Block will be able to get tax advice from IBM’s famous supercomputer, Watson. Watson has been fed all 74,000 pages of the US tax code and will use its natural language processing to interact with clients in order to answer questions, uncover deductions and credits, and help calculate refunds.
Beth Romanik is TechWell's online editor, managing everything you see published on our family of thought-leadership sites. She edits and publishes articles for TechWell Insights, StickyMinds, AgileConnection, CMCrossroads, and Better Software magazine. She has worked for several other newspapers, magazines, and sites of all kinds. Beth is excited about new developments in technology, but she'll always have a soft spot for paper and ink.
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When natural disasters strike, technology can streamline relief efforts. The charity Humanitarian Toolbox creates apps and maintains a “toolbox” of software and solutions for disaster aid organizations all over the world. Testers at STARWEST will donate their time and talents to the cause.
Apple unveiled a new biomedical platform called ResearchKit, an iOS framework that will let people opt in to join medical research studies. Volunteers can use their Apple devices to participate in various tests, and the information will be shared with medical research institutions to find cures.
Today's connected cars offer many technological conveniences. But with those features come some risks. The Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cellular connections in these cars can fall prey to hacking attacks, which can jeopardize people’s physical safety and private information—and the security is pretty lax.
The US military command’s Twitter and YouTube accounts were hacked recently. Though the episode essentially amounted to little more than an annoyance, it should lead to an investigation into whether there are any more vulnerabilities in the administration's online accounts and profiles.
Paco Hope, principal consultant for Cigital, presented the last keynote of STARWEST 2014: “Softwarts: Security Testing for Muggles.” He exposed some testing fallacies, gave four principles for security testing, and detailed some charms every good testing wizard should have in his spell book.
In her STAREAST 2014 keynote—Extreme Automation: Software Quality for the Next Generation Enterprise—Theresa Lanowitz covered the global trends in testing, emerging technologies, and (of course) extreme automation. Read on for more insights on modern testing from Theresa's talk.