SCA has become an early-stage investor in Melbourne-based Sonnant Pty Ltd, a transformational artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) company that provides content discovery for the spoken word. According to the GfK Australian Share of Audio 2019, consumption of digital audio is growing in Australia and is expected to reach 80% of the population by 2024 and SCA's recent launch of LiSTNR is designed to be a best in class consumer digital audio experience. SCA's in-house technical capability will be enhanced by Sonnant's AI intelligence, providing an in-depth of understanding of SCA content that allows for rich meta data and exciting new user experiences. Sonnant allows SCA to enhance the key product pillars of LiSTNR delivering a personalised experience to each user based on the topics they most enjoy listening to. SCA Head of Digital and Innovation, Chris Johnson, says "SCA is a proud supporter of the Australian entrepreneurial ecosystem, so when we found a company of Sonnant's calibre in Melbourne, we knew that an investment partnership would provide significant long term value to both parties. "We were delighted when Sonnant's tech outperformed several'off the shelf' products we pitted it against in testing.

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is often characterized as being able to recognize the same place despite significant changes in appearance and viewpoint. VPR is a key component of Spatial Artificial Intelligence, enabling robotic platforms and intelligent augmentation platforms such as augmented reality devices to perceive and understand the physical world. In this paper, we observe that there are three "drivers" that impose requirements on spatially intelligent agents and thus VPR systems: 1) the particular agent including its sensors and computational resources, 2) the operating environment of this agent, and 3) the specific task that the artificial agent carries out. In this paper, we characterize and survey key works in the VPR area considering those drivers, including their place representation and place matching choices. We also provide a new definition of VPR based on the visual overlap -- akin to spatial view cells in the brain -- that enables us to find similarities and differences to other research areas in the robotics and computer vision fields. We identify numerous open challenges and suggest areas that require more in-depth attention in future works.

Several pieces of work have uncovered performance disparities by conducting "disaggregated evaluations" of AI systems. We build on these efforts by focusing on the choices that must be made when designing a disaggregated evaluation, as well as some of the key considerations that underlie these design choices and the tradeoffs between these considerations. We argue that a deeper understanding of the choices, considerations, and tradeoffs involved in designing disaggregated evaluations will better enable researchers, practitioners, and the public to understand the ways in which AI systems may be underperforming for particular groups of people.

A fingerprint scanner is one of the advanced AI tools used almost everywhere schools, offices, banks, airports where ever we work or have some of our data saved. It is the most forwarding step to link everything that relates to the user and to keep it safe it is locked or secured by the fingerprint. We use smartphones or laptops that are secured by fingerprints that cannot be accessed by others except the user. There is a various tool which keeps the data of the fingerprint through which the scanned pattern is matched and the user get the access of it. It is widely used all over the world not just for securing the data, there is a various system which is a link with the fingerprint scanner. Fingerprint attendance system is used widely in schools, offices to keep the record of the available employee, teacher, and students.

Imagine if artificial intelligence (AI) could pick the next Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Bill Gates or Elon Musk? It may be just around the corner according to a QUT researcher into entrepreneurship. A QUT study is looking for thousands of people to complete a short online survey asking them to look at photographs and identify which people are entrepreneurs. The results will be compared to the performance of AI models given the same challenge. Led by Professor Martin Obschonka Director of QUT's Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research, the aim of the project is to gauge the capacity of modern AI in recognising entrepreneurship potential in a variety of people.

A novel reinforcement learning algorithm is introduced for multiarmed restless bandits with average reward, using the paradigms of Q-learning and Whittle index. Specifically, we leverage the structure of the Whittle index policy to reduce the search space of Q-learning, resulting in major computational gains. Rigorous convergence analysis is provided, supported by numerical experiments. The numerical experiments show excellent empirical performance of the proposed scheme.

Training machine learning (ML) models typically involves expensive iterative optimization. Once the model's final parameters are released, there is currently no mechanism for the entity which trained the model to prove that these parameters were indeed the result of this optimization procedure. Such a mechanism would support security of ML applications in several ways. For instance, it would simplify ownership resolution when multiple parties contest ownership of a specific model. It would also facilitate the distributed training across untrusted workers where Byzantine workers might otherwise mount a denial-of-service by returning incorrect model updates. In this paper, we remediate this problem by introducing the concept of proof-of-learning in ML. Inspired by research on both proof-of-work and verified computations, we observe how a seminal training algorithm, stochastic gradient descent, accumulates secret information due to its stochasticity. This produces a natural construction for a proof-of-learning which demonstrates that a party has expended the compute require to obtain a set of model parameters correctly. In particular, our analyses and experiments show that an adversary seeking to illegitimately manufacture a proof-of-learning needs to perform *at least* as much work than is needed for gradient descent itself. We also instantiate a concrete proof-of-learning mechanism in both of the scenarios described above. In model ownership resolution, it protects the intellectual property of models released publicly. In distributed training, it preserves availability of the training procedure. Our empirical evaluation validates that our proof-of-learning mechanism is robust to variance induced by the hardware (ML accelerators) and software stacks.

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is a decision-making algorithm that consists in searching large combinatorial spaces represented by trees. In such trees, nodes denote states, also referred to as configurations of the problem, whereas edges denote transitions (actions) from one state to another. MCTS has been originally proposed in the work by Kocsis and Szepesvári (2006) and by Coulom (2006), as an algorithm for making computer players in Go. It was quickly called a major breakthrough (Gelly et al., 2012) as it allowed for a leap from 14 kyu, which is an average amateur level, to 5 dan, which is considered an advanced level but not professional yet. Before MCTS, bots for combinatorial games had been using various modifications of the min-max alpha-beta pruning algorithm (Junghanns, 1998) such as MTD(f) (Plaat, 2014) and hand-crafted heuristics. In contrast to them, MCTS algorithm is at its core aheuristic, which means that no additional knowledge is required other than just rules of a game (or a problem, generally speaking). However, it is possible to take advantage of heuristics and include them in the MCTS approach to make it more efficient and improve its convergence. Moreover, the given problem often tends to be so complex, from the combinatorial point of view, that some form of external help, e.g.

In 2013, Peter Ceglinski and Andrew Turton set up their firm, Seabin, with a selfless ambition: "our ultimate goal is pretty simple. It's a world where sea bins are no longer needed for clean up," Ceglinski said, speaking at IBM Think Australia and New Zealand last month. As a report by ZDNet explains, the creators behind Seabin are focusing on building a future where their own product is only used for monitoring the sea, not for cleaning garbage. The cornerstone to this development is artificial intelligence (AI). "What started out as a garbage can has evolved into this global mission focused on data and behavioral change," Ceglinski said at IBM Think.

The Panel Vector Autoregressive (PVAR) model is a popular tool for macroeconomic forecasting and structural analysis in multi-country applications since it allows for spillovers between countries in a very flexible fashion. However, this flexibility means that the number of parameters to be estimated can be enormous leading to over-parameterization concerns. Bayesian global-local shrinkage priors, such as the Horseshoe prior used in this paper, can overcome these concerns, but they require the use of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods rendering them computationally infeasible in high dimensions. In this paper, we develop computationally efficient Bayesian methods for estimating PVARs using an integrated rotated Gaussian approximation (IRGA). This exploits the fact that whereas own country information is often important in PVARs, information on other countries is often unimportant. Using an IRGA, we split the the posterior into two parts: one involving own country coefficients, the other involving other country coefficients. Fast methods such as approximate message passing or variational Bayes can be used on the latter and, conditional on these, the former are estimated with precision using MCMC methods. In a forecasting exercise involving PVARs with up to $18$ variables for each of $38$ countries, we demonstrate that our methods produce good forecasts quickly.