Mining heavyweights BHP, Roy Hill and Alcoa have joined forces with universities and the CSIRO to develop a new data science training centre to upskill workers in the local resources sector. The $3.9 million Training Centre for Transforming Maintenance being funded by the Australian Research Council will be based at Curtin University and will be supported by Adelaide and Western Australia universities. Federal Education and Training Minister Senator Simon Birmingham says the new centre will equip engineers and graduates with data analytics skills to better manage the vast and expensive array of assets owned by mining and energy operators around the country. The centre's director, professor Andrew Rohl, said the effective maintenance of those assets is essential for the $205 billion annual output of the Australian resources sector. "However, maintenance management practices have changed little in the last 20 years and are ripe for a digital overhaul that will bring developments in computational methods, statistics, applied mathematics and artificial intelligence to determine how, when and why maintenance is conducted," said Rohl. "The new centre, which will bring together the relevant research and industry expertise, will enable the development and adoption of new practices to improve productivity and asset reliability for industry and to foster a new maintenance technology service sector for national and international markets."

Machine learning software accounts for a significant amount of energy consumed in data centers. These algorithms are usually optimized towards predictive performance, i.e. accuracy, and scalability. This is the case of data stream mining algorithms. Although these algorithms are adaptive to the incoming data, they have fixed parameters from the beginning of the execution. We have observed that having fixed parameters lead to unnecessary computations, thus making the algorithm energy inefficient. In this paper we present the nmin adaptation method for Hoeffding trees. This method adapts the value of the nmin parameter, which significantly affects the energy consumption of the algorithm. The method reduces unnecessary computations and memory accesses, thus reducing the energy, while the accuracy is only marginally affected. We experimentally compared VFDT (Very Fast Decision Tree, the first Hoeffding tree algorithm) and CVFDT (Concept-adapting VFDT) with the VFDT-nmin (VFDT with nmin adaptation). The results show that VFDT-nmin consumes up to 27% less energy than the standard VFDT, and up to 92% less energy than CVFDT, trading off a few percent of accuracy in a few datasets.

Deep learning models have lately shown great performance in various fields such as computer vision, speech recognition, speech translation, and natural language processing. However, alongside their state-of-the-art performance, it is still generally unclear what is the source of their generalization ability. Thus, an important question is what makes deep neural networks able to generalize well from the training set to new data. In this article, we provide an overview of the existing theory and bounds for the characterization of the generalization error of deep neural networks, combining both classical and more recent theoretical and empirical results.

Apple has become the world's first publicly traded company to be valued at $1 trillion - 42 years after Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak began the firm in a Silicon Valley garage. The stock rose nearly 3 percent following a strong third-quarter earnings report earlier this week, briefly hitting a session high of $207.05 in midday trading before falling back below $207. This briefly pushed Apple over the historic trillion dollar mark. Apple chief executive officer Steve Jobs stands in front of a photo of himself, right, and Steve Wozniak, left, during an Apple event in San Francisco in 2011. Apple's stock market value is greater than the combined capitalization of Exxon Mobil, Procter & Gamble and AT&T. It now accounts for 4 percent of the S&P 500.

Now artificial intelligence (AI) has come up with a detailed breakdown of someone's character by mapping tiny eye movements against a list of personality traits. A study, by the University of South Australia, tracked the eye movements of 42 participants as they went about their daily lives doing ordinary tasks around a university campus. The recorded movements were then compared to the result of personality questionnaires completed by the subjects. Next, researchers used machine learning algorithms to map individual's eye movements with the'big five' personality traits - openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. They found that each individual's unique pattern of eye movements could be linked to their personality traits.

The HPC Advisory Council has posted the Agenda for their upcoming meeting in Perth, Australia. Hosted by the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, the event takes place August 28-29. The hosts have added a powerful international dialog session to the second annual conference agenda featuring an impressive list of leading HPC centres and industry representatives. This year's program also includes a wide variety of invited and contributed talks on high performance computing, artificial intelligence, and cutting-edge research and development from industry notables throughout the region and beyond. The 2018 agenda also features hands-on tutorials, the latest trends, newest technologies and breakthrough works along with the latest best practices in applications, tools and techniques.

Chatbots continue to make an impact around the world, from major players in big-bucks verticals to helping fans get involved in their favourite sports. That's as developers are building the next big thing in chat. See what news is making summer even hotter for chatbots. Starting in Asia, insurance giant Prudential continues to roll out its bots with four now operating across Hong Kong, China, Singapore and Vietnam. They help consumers and businesses in the increasingly automated sector where around 60% of new business is submitted electronically and 51% is auto-underwritten.

The University of Sydney's Brain and Mind Centre will partner with the Sydney Neuroimaging Analysis Centre to improve diagnostic neuroimaging of brain ailments such as multiple sclerosis and dementia. The Brain and Mind Centre is an institute within the University researching and developing treatments for conditions of the brain and mind. According to the report released by the University, funding amounting to A$ 2.36 million will be awarded to the project through the government's Cooperative Research Centre-Project (CRC-P) Program as announced by Assistant Minister for Science, Jobs and Innovation the Hon Zed Seselja. The CRC-P Program is a competitive merit-based program supporting industry-led, outcomes-focused partnerships between industry, researchers and the community. The investment made by the government is matched by nearly A$ 2.8 million of cash and in-kind contributions by the project partners of both the University and the Brain and Mind Centre, including Sydney Neuroimaging Analysis Centre (SNAC) and the I-MED Radiology Network.

AUCKLAND, New Zealand – New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said Thursday the world is watching closely to see if recent optimism over North Korea leads to the elimination of its nuclear weapons program. In an interview with The Associated Press, Ardern also said New Zealand is among many nations concerned about the tit-for-tat trade war between China and the U.S. She said the idea of New Zealand becoming a republic is not a priority for her government. Ardern spoke with the AP at her home in Auckland as she prepared to return to the capital, Wellington, after six weeks of leave following the birth of her daughter, Neve. Ardern, 38, is just the second elected world leader in recent history to give birth while holding office.

A new study has shown how computers and robots powered by artificial intelligence can read human eye movements to'read' human personalities. The eyes, they say, are the windows to the soul. And if that is true, computers and robots powered by sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms may soon have the ability to peer into your soul. That is the result of a new study on the connection between eye movements and personality, conducted by neuroscience researchers based at the University of South Australia and published in the scientific journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. "Eye movements during an everyday task predict aspects of our personality," wrote the researchers, led by University of South Australia neuroscientist Tobias Loetscher, whose team follows 42 study subjects around the university campus recording their eye movements, then determines their personality traits with "well-established questionnaires" for deterring personality type, according to a summary of the study published by the site Science Daily.