Tens of thousands of college students nationwide will cheer for their football teams this weekend. Some of those who show up for the game after tailgate drinking may not remember the highlight touchdowns that they cheered so loudly for. Others may have trouble remembering even a rousing celebration of victory. Binge drinking, the leading type of alcohol misuse for college students, is the culprit. Drinking too much too fast can cause memory loss, sometimes called a blackout, erasing any recollection of an enjoyable life event.

Developing automated methods to give advance warning of large gatherings of people, such as protests and social unrest events, are of interest to government agencies worldwide. With such events often being organised over online social media platforms, there exists the possibility to provide prior warning of large events solely through monitoring online data streams. Researchers have used open online data sources such as Twitter (Borge-Holthoefer et al., 2016; Agarwal and Sureka, 2016), Facebook, Tumblr (Xu et al., 2014), and Flickr (Alanyali et al., 2015) to characterise information propagation processes around protests, and have deployed machine learning methods on social media as well as blogs, news sources, and the dark web (Korkmaz et al., 2016) to predict civil unrest events. Twitter data in particular has been used broadly to monitor diverse largescale trends such as stock behaviour (Bollen et al., 2011), public opinion polling around 1 issues like climate change (Cody et al., 2015), and health characteristics (Alajajian et al., 2017). Recent studies have focussed on Twitter's role in particular in mobilisation and discourse around protest action in the United States (Theocharis et al., 2015; Gallagher et al., 2018).

Big tech can be hard to visualize at times, and we're now talking about the blockchain, AI and even the Cloud as separate and competing technologies. The thing is they're not going to compete at all. They're going to work together, and the results will blow your collective mind. Right now, AI roots round badly organized information like a sniffer dog. The fact that modern AI succeeds at all is a testament to its skills, but it is totally crippled by the system that contains it.

We are really pleased to announce the date of our second Meetup for the IBM PowerAI Melbourne group. Access to Level 28 requires a pass to activate the lifts after 18:30. Please try to arrive before then. The agenda has not yet been finalised, but will loosely follow: 17:30 - 18:00 - Arrive (& drink a refreshment or two) 18:00 - Intro 18:15 - Dr Adam Makarucha - IBM Systems 18:45 - Ben Swinney - IBM Lab Services - "Using PowerAI Vision inc. Our Presenters.... Dr Adam Makarucha is a data scientist within the IBM Systems team where he is developing deep learning use cases and demonstrations for clients on IBM's PowerAI platform.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - When Reuters photographer Lucas Jackson headed to Greenland in June, he traveled with a heavy, oversized rolling bag containing a crucial piece of equipment to document climate change. Jackson, one of a handful of Reuters photographers licensed to operate a drone, spent seven rainy days camped alongside Greenland's Helheim glacier, near the small seaside village of Tasiilaq. Using an Inspire 1 Pro drone, Jackson captured more than 700 gigabytes of footage and images in Greenland (here). Drones are an emerging tool for newsgathering, but they potentially pose several legal and ethical challenges, including the violation of privacy. Until now, Reuters has used drones only on rare occasions. But Greenland provided a perfect opportunity since a drone is inexpensive to operate.

Member-owned financial services provider CUA is currently piloting a chatbot for its health insurance business that Head of Digital Innovation Melissa Witheriff said helps customers move through the process of purchasing insurance. Speaking at D61 LIVE in Brisbane on Tuesday, Witheriff said that CUA is pushing itself into emerging technologies such as AI, and is doing so with the help of partners, in particular fintechs. "Because we're a small organisation, or relatively small, we need to innovate through partnerships, whether that's with universities, corporates, or the fintech ecosystem," she explained. "In this situation, we're partnering with fintechs to be able to bring AI into the experience that we offer for our members." Specifically, CUA is working with AI-focused Flamingo and the Sydney-based firm's virtual sales assistant Sam.

In many parts of the world, mosquitoes are more than just a campsite nuisance -- they carry that cause an estimated 725,000 deaths per year. On Singapore, the effect isn't so terrible -- some mosquitoes carry dengue fever, but it affects less than a dozen people per year. But because it's a city and an island, Singapore is the perfect testing ground to see how easy it might be to get rid of the disease-carrying bugs, all sans gene editing. That's what Alphabet-owned healthcare company Verily hopes to do. The company, along with Singapore's environmental agency, plans to release male mosquitoes that carry Wolbachia, a naturally-occurring bacteria that reduces the bugs' ability to transmit disease and prevents their eggs from hatching.

Combining machine learning and kinetic architecture, a team of computational design students in Australia have developed a unique origami-style meeting room that can learn human behaviour and change shape in response to the behaviour of people. The interactive'Centaur Pod' is set to adapt to external environmental and human stimuli by moving up and down and changing its shape, said Hank Haeusler, Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia. "At the moment, a human can be in the same space as a robot and can interact in the space with the robot, but what we want to do is make space itself become the robot," Haeusler said. "Thus when a person in a building moves, behaves or operates in any way, the'robot' will sense this behaviour and starts learning from this behaviour and other people's behaviour and will create knowledge from the behaviour and the knowledge will translate into the space to change," he noted. The approximately six-to-nine square metre pavilion explores three main areas, machine learning and artificial intelligence; digital fabrication and robot fabrication; and augmented reality and virtual reality.

The science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein once wrote, "Each generation thinks it invented sex." He was presumably referring to the pride each generation takes in defining its own sexual practices and ethics. But his comment hit the mark in another sense: Every generation has to reinvent sex because the previous generation did a lousy job of teaching it. In the United States, the conversations we have with our children about sex are often awkward, limited, and brimming with euphemism. At school, if kids are lucky enough to live in a state that allows it, they'll get something like 10 total hours of sex education.1

Recently IT Brief had the opportunity to get in touch with Adrian Jones, Automation Anywhere APJ EVP, to discuss AI and its impact on the modern workforce. Can you tell me a bit more about Automation Anywhere? Automation Anywhere is a global leader in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software and AI technology for enterprises looking to deploy intelligent digital workforces. Our technology uses software bots that work alongside the human workforce to take on repetitive, mundane work, allowing people to do more meaningful work. Beyond automating tasks, Automation Anywhere's platform also helps improve them on the back-end by enhancing efficiency, minimising error and reducing operational costs, while helping enterprises manage and scale business processes faster.