Oceania
Australia news live: shadow arts minister Angie Bell, a former musician, says AI giants must pay for content
Follow the day's latest updates Court approves $23.5m fine and costs order against ASX Shadow arts minister says AI companies need to do what everyone else does: 'ask permission and pay for it' Albanese defends gambling reforms, says he's'not against someone having a punt' Pocock says it's'tragic' gambling reforms don't go nearly far enough Shadow arts minister says AI companies need to do what everyone else does: 'ask permission and pay for it' If AI companies want to use Australian creative work, they should do what everyone else does: ask permission and pay for it. Australian creativity is one of our greatest national assets - not a free resource for multinational tech companies. The Coalition will always back the right of artists to control their work and be fairly compensated when others profit from it. This is about consent, fairness and respect for Australian creativity. Court approves $23.5m fine and costs order against ASX Shadow arts minister says AI companies need to do what everyone else does: 'ask permission and pay for it' Albanese defends gambling reforms, says he's'not against someone having a punt' Pocock says it's'tragic' gambling reforms don't go nearly far enough Court approves $23.5m fine and costs order against ASX A federal court judge has ordered the ASX operator to pay $23.5m in penalties and costs after the company admitted to making a misleading statement about a troubled upgrade for technology required to run the stock exchange.
The best new popular science books of July 2026
From friendship in a world of chatbots to what it means to be alive, this month's new popular science books are asking some big questions. Australia's tiger quoll - as featured in Dan Werb's Our Wild Familiars, out this month Life, being alive and death are big themes in the new popular science books out in July, not to mention that small thing of being a human and all the messy feelings and sensory stuff that goes with it. Then there's also AI filling the future - in ways that worry one of the world's leading forensic scientists, as well as ethicists who are paid to think about this sort of thing. I'm looking forward to delving into the worlds of volcanoes and pharmacology, which look positively safe and stable in comparison Can friendship with a chatbot ever be as good as friendship with a gang of flesh-and-blood besties? Is there still and will there - can there - always be something about human friendships that will elude the smartest of simulations?
Creatives sound alarm on copyright as Pocock calls 50bn datacentre proposal 'ultimate dirty deal'
Guardian Australia has been told an industry proposal has been presented to cabinet that would grant AI companies special exemptions to mine creative content. In exchange, the companies would bankroll the artists' fund and commit more than $50bn worth of investment in datacentres. Australia'sleepwalking' into AI crisis and'tech bro free-for-all', says Greens senator The independent senator David Pocock said the proposal was the "ultimate dirty deal" as he demanded the government categorically rule it out. The potential adoption of a text and data mining exemption would represent a major reversal from the federal government, which last year ruled it out after criticism from artists, authors and media groups. Amid fears the government could capitulate to big tech, a delegation of creatives staged a press conference in parliament house on Wednesday to urge the government to hold the line.
Tiny Australian falcons may help aircraft withstand worsening turbulence
More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy . The nankeen kestrel () pulls off aerial maneuvers that put many advanced aircraft to shame. These diminutive falcons rank as some of the most stable fliers in the world, and are evolved to handle Australia's extremely gusty, often violent winds.
Australian rescue team uses AI-powered drone to find lost hikers โ video
Two men in their 20s were found within five hours thanks to an artificial intelligence-powered drone, which used thermal imaging to locate them. Two hikers veered off a walking track in Kosciuszko national park, New South Wales, on Tuesday, and were found about half a kilometre off the track. It was the first time the FRNSW drone's AI detection system had been used to rescue missing people
Hikers lost in Kosciuszko national park rescued within five hours by AI drone
A screengrab from video of the drone and AI assisted search and rescue at Dead Horse Gap in Kosciuszko national park. A screengrab from video of the drone and AI assisted search and rescue at Dead Horse Gap in Kosciuszko national park. Two hikers who veered off a walking track in Kosciuszko national park have been found within five hours using a drone powered by artificial intelligence, a first-of-its-kind mission, Fire and Rescue NSW (FRNSW) has said. The two men, aged in their 20s, were reported missing at 7pm on Tuesday evening after they failed to return to a rendezvous point on time. FRNSW's remote air piloted system was put into the air, and was able to use thermal imaging to find the hikers who had been walking the Dead Horse Gap track, about 35km south-west of Jindabyne.
FedReLa: Imbalanced Federated Learning via Re-Labeling
Hu, Guangzheng, Menรฉndez, Patricia, Liu, Feng, Gong, Mingming, Wang, Guanghui, Peng, Liuhua
Federated learning has emerged as the foremost approach for decentralized model training with privacy preservation. The global class imbalance and cross-client data heterogeneity naturally coexist, and the mismatch between local and global imbalances exacerbates the performance degradation of the aggregated model. The agnosticism of global class distribution poses significant challenges for data-level methods, especially under extreme conditions with severe class absence across clients. In this paper, we propose FedReLa, a novel data-level approach that tackles the coexistence of data heterogeneity and class imbalance in federated learning. By re-labeling samples with a feature-dependent label re-allocator, FedReLa corrects biased global decision boundaries without requiring knowledge of the global class distribution. This modular, model-agnostic approach can be integrated with algorithmic methods to deliver consistent improvements without additional communication overhead. Through extensive experiments, our method significantly improves the accuracy of minority classes and the overall accuracy on stepwise-imbalanced and long-tailed datasets, outperforming the previous state of the art.
Australia 'sleepwalking' into AI crisis and 'tech bro free-for-all', says Greens senator
Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young says Australia can't allow tech firms to'drain our power and water'. Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young says Australia can't allow tech firms to'drain our power and water'. Australia'sleepwalking' into AI crisis and'tech bro free-for-all', says Greens senator Sarah Hanson Young's warning comes as David Pocock urges government to prevent firms using Australian content to train AI models Tue 23 Jun 2026 06.21 EDTFirst published on Tue 23 Jun 2026 05.16 EDT His call came as the Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young called for a moratorium on the building and approval of new datacentres in Australia until "we get the regulations right". She said the nation was "sleepwalking" into an AI crisis and could hand tech companies a greenlight "to drain our power and water". Pocock used Senate question time on Tuesday to ask the government about intense lobbying from AI proprietors over possible new rules and regulations for Australian-made content - including suggestions Labor would create a new "carve out" or extend existing licensing arrangements.
Five Eyes intelligence alliance warns of threats from new AI models
Cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology is poised to supercharge offensive hacking capabilities, and urgent action is needed to face up to the threat, US, UK, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand officials have said. "Frontier AI models are anticipated to exceed current industry expectations, fundamentally transforming both offensive and defensive cyber capabilities," the intelligence alliance commonly known as the Five Eyes said in a three-page statement on Monday. The statement was light on detail and mostly restated core cybersecurity advice, such as swiftly patching faulty software and not putting systems online unless necessary. The officials also urged defenders to use AI "to strengthen defence", for example by identifying weaknesses sooner or responding more quickly to incidents. The warning was another indication of officials' increasing concerns over models such as Anthropic's Mythos or OpenAI's GPT-5.5-Cyber, which are said to allow users to quickly execute complex - and potentially devastating - hacks.
RankMatch: ANovel Approach to Semi-Supervised Label Distribution Learning Leveraging Rank Correlation between Labels
Pseudo label based semi-supervised learning (SSL) for single-label and multilabel classification tasks has been extensively studied; however, semi-supervised label distribution learning (SSLDL) remains a largely unexplored area. Existing SSL methods fail in SSLDL because the pseudo-labels they generate only ensure overall similarity to the ground truth but do not preserve the ranking relationships between true labels, as they rely solely on KL divergence as the loss function during training. These skewed pseudo-labels lead the model to learn incorrect semantic relationships, resulting in reduced performance accuracy. To address these issues, we propose a novel SSLDL method called RankMatch. RankMatch fully considers the ranking relationships between different labels during the training phase with labeled data to generate higher-quality pseudo-labels. Furthermore, our key observation is that a flexible utilization of pseudo-labels can enhance SSLDL performance. Specifically, focusing solely on the ranking relationships between labels while disregarding their margins helps prevent model overfitting. Theoretically, we prove that incorporating ranking correlations enhances SSLDL performance and establish generalization error bounds for RankMatch.