The global AIaaS market is predicted to gather pace in terms of growth as it registers a healthy CAGR during the forecast period 2018-2026. Well-established tech companies such as Microsoft, IBM, and Google offer AI services alongside their technology services in order to stay competitive in the industry. They realize that offering AI tools and software is not enough to maintain their supremacy in the technology world. Other software or professional service firms may partner with AI solutions providers to expand their customer base. In this regard, it could be said that the demand in the global AIaaS market will increase in the next few years.

Many fear the potential for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to be weaponised against humanity, but Australian lifesavers are showcasing the positive power of the technology with a drone that can prevent crocodile attacks. On Thursday, lifesavers in Queensland demonstrated how a drone backed by a'CrocSpotter' AI-algorithm can reveal the presence of crocs before they become a danger to humans. Developed by researchers from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in collaboration with Westpac Little Ripper and Amazon Web Services, the technology was initially designed to protect beachgoers from sharks. CrocSpotter and SharkSpotter are two of five'spotter' AI algorithms developed by The Ripper Group and UTS. In 2018, a Westpac Little Ripper drone performed the world's first rescue by a drone at Lennox Head in NSW, dropping an inflatable pod to save two teenagers in massive surf.

In order to satisfy safety conditions, a reinforcement learned (RL) agent maybe constrained from acting freely, e.g., to prevent trajectories that might cause unwanted behavior or physical damage in a robot. We propose a general framework for augmenting a Markov decision process (MDP) with constraints that are described in formal languages over sequences of MDP states and agent actions. Constraint enforcement is implemented by filtering the allowed action set or by applying potential-based reward shaping to implement hard and soft constraint enforcement, respectively. We instantiate this framework using deterministic finite automata to encode constraints and propose methods of augmenting MDP observations with the state of the constraint automaton for learning. We empirically evaluate these methods with a variety of constraints by training Deep Q-Networks in Atari games as well as Proximal Policy Optimization in MuJoCo environments. We experimentally find that our approaches are effective in significantly reducing or eliminating constraint violations with either minimal negative or, depending on the constraint, a clear positive impact on final performance.

In this work, we propose a simple model that provides permutation invariant maximally predictive prototype generator from a given dataset, which leads to interpretability of the solution and concrete insights to the nature and the solution of a problem. Our aim is to find out prototypes in the feature space to map the collection of instances (i.e. bags) to a distance feature space and simultaneously learn a linear classifier for multiple instance learning (MIL). Our experiments on classical MIL benchmark datasets demonstrate that proposed framework is an accurate and efficient classifier compared to the existing approaches.

We study the problem of local causal discovery learning which identifies direct causes and effects of a target variable of interest in a causal network. The existing constraint-based local causal discovery approaches are inefficient, since these approaches do not take a triangular structure formed by a given variable and its child variables into account in learning local causal structure, and hence need to spend much time in distinguishing several direct effects. Additionally, these approaches depend on the standard MB (Markov Blanket) or PC (Parent and Children) discovery algorithms which demand to conduct lots of conditional independence tests to obtain the MB or PC sets. To overcome the above problems, in this paper, we propose a novel Efficient Local Causal Discovery algorithm via MB (ELCD) to identify direct causes and effects of a given variable. More specifically, we design a new algorithm for Efficient Oriented MB discovery, name EOMB. EOMB not only utilizes fewer conditional independence tests to identify MB, but also is able to identify more direct effects of a given variable with the help of triangular causal structures and determine several direct causes as much as possible. In addition, based on the proposed EOMB, ELCD is presented to learn a local causal structure around a target variable. The benefits of ELCD are that it not only can determine the direct causes and effects of a given variable accurately, but also runs faster than other local causal discovery algorithms. Experimental results on eight Bayesian networks (BNs) show that our proposed approach performs better than state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Artificial intelligence shouldn't be an afterthought for marketers, says new martech vendor Acoustic. Formerly known as IBM Watson Marketing, Acoustic was sold off by tech giants IBM earlier this year and rebranded with a sole focus on marketers. The independent marketing cloud company has since rebuilt a cloud that it says has a "modern architecture" and brings "humanity" to AI-powered marketing. Jay Henderson, senior vice president of product management at Acoustic, says at the moment a lot of the company's competitors aren't enabling marketers to use AI easily. "I think marketers, generally at the moment, have a little bit of fatigue around the way we've all talked about AI," Henderson says.

I have years of experience in the enterprise software space, starting in my early years as a Customer Representative for WebHelp before expanding into market development for Intel which saw me take on a more Business Development role. My roles in companies such as Intel, Softwin and ABC Data were very Business Development-orientated which meant that I had to become an expert in the technology and in understanding how that technology could solve the problems that my customers faced. It also meant that I had to build and maintain relationships, skills that have served me very well in my recent role at UiPath. Throughout my career I saw how good quality enterprise technologies can really help drive a company's competitiveness and productivity, so UiPath was a natural fit for me when I joined them in 2016. I have helped drive UiPath's expansion into ASEAN, from setting up offices in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea, to hiring staff and providing strategic oversight of operations.

Activision has released a mobile version of the popular Call of Duty video game that is free-to-play on Android and iOS devices. 'Call of Duty' is firing a salvo at'Fortnite,' with a new, mobile video game that includes a battle royale mode for up to 100 players. "Call of Duty: Mobile," out Tuesday for Android and iOS devices, is a free-to-play game featuring a variety of maps, weapons, characters and play modes from the multibillion-dollar "Call of Duty: Black Ops" and "Modern Warfare" video game franchises. Other popular multiplayer modes in the game include Team Deathmatch, Search and Destroy, and Domination. Popular maps from the game franchise that will be included are Nuketown, Crash, Hijacked and more.

Healthcare workers can often feel like a very small cog in the very big machine that is the healthcare system. From doctors and nurses to administration staff, there is little doubt that with an increasing ageing population in both Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), healthcare workers are expected to find ways to do more with less. Recent research suggests that ANZ-based healthcare workers are very open to embracing new technologies in the workplace, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, especially if it can help to make their jobs more efficient. This is according to findings from a survey by technology provider Genesys. The survey, which focused on employee attitudes about the implementation of advanced technologies in the workplace, found almost 70% of respondents from the healthcare sector believe technology makes them more efficient at work, and 35% responded saying AI had already made a positive impact on their job.

In Part 1 of a 3-part series, Marcell Vollmer, chief digital officer at SAP Ariba, shares his take on where digital procurement is headed. What is the role of e-procurement in B2B e-commerce and what is the role of the chief procurement officer? Vollmer: Procurement has earned an unfair reputation of being a complicated process, but let's break it down simply here. Procurement's role in B2B e-commerce is to streamline the purchasing process and ensure that businesses get the right goods and services that meet all of their specifications, from a corporate-approved vendor, for the right price. Call this the golden triangle of procurement.