Queensland artificial intelligence technology has joined forces with the state's world-leading medical research institute to tailor cancer patients' treatment and improve its effectiveness. The collaboration is an Australian first, according to the researchers involved, and will span at least two years after receiving $2.6 million in funding from the federal government last week. The project will bring together medical institutes and specialised Brisbane research companies. Brisbane AI company Max Kelsen has partnered with the internationally renowned QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, precision-analytics start-up genomiQa, genomics researcher BGI Australia and the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital. Cancer patients' genetics will be analysed by AI in the hope of finding more complex patterns and therefore helping doctors to decide which treatment would be most effective for the individuals.

Original and learnt clauses in Conflict-Driven Clause Learning (CDCL) SAT solvers often contain redundant literals. This may have a negative impact on performance because redundant literals may deteriorate both the effectiveness of Boolean constraint propagation and the quality of subsequent learnt clauses. To overcome this drawback, we propose a clause vivification approach that eliminates redundant literals by applying unit propagation. The proposed clause vivification is activated before the SAT solver triggers some selected restarts, and only affects a subset of original and learnt clauses, which are considered to be more relevant according to metrics like the literal block distance (LBD). Moreover, we conducted an empirical investigation with instances coming from the hard combinatorial and application categories of recent SAT competitions. The results show that a remarkable number of additional instances are solved when the proposed approach is incorporated into five of the best performing CDCL SAT solvers (Glucose, TC_Glucose, COMiniSatPS, MapleCOMSPS and MapleCOMSPS_LRB). More importantly, the empirical investigation includes an in-depth analysis of the effectiveness of clause vivification. It is worth mentioning that one of the SAT solvers described here was ranked first in the main track of SAT Competition 2017 thanks to the incorporation of the proposed clause vivification. That solver was further improved in this paper and won the bronze medal in the main track of SAT Competition 2018.

New research proves that eyes might in fact be windows to the soul. Over the past few years, eye tracking technology has emerged as a field of much academic and corporate interest. With major acquisitions by Apple (SMI) and Oculus (The Eye Tribe), it's clear that major international companies regard eye tracking technology as an vital facet of Industry 4.0 -- particularly in its integration with virtual and augmented reality technologies (VR/AR), which involve persistent interaction with the human eye. In the study, researchers tracked 42 participants' eye movements while going about their day on a university campus, and matrixed these findings against user questionnaires. The results assert that machine learning can in fact deduce important personality traits with appropriate datasets -- with the algorithm reliably identifying four of the "Big Five" human personality traits: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, and neuroticism. In a statement from UniSA, Senior Lecturer of Psychology Dr. Tobias Loetscher explained that this research establishes a meaningful link between our eye motions and our innate and learned characteristics: People are always looking for improved, personalised [sic] services.

President Donald Trump's July 19 executive order establishing the President's National Council for the American Worker is directed at preparing Americans for the workplace of the future. Although short on specifics, the order sends a powerful message about the need for revitalizing educational opportunities if Americans are to thrive in the era of big data, robots and artificial intelligence. The president's intent is to lay the groundwork for tackling a national "skills crisis." His order accepts that Americans need additional skills to fill the current 6.7 million job vacancies. In fact, the executive order gives official imprimatur to what many in industry and academia have feared for some time: "The economy is changing at a rapid pace because of the technology, automation, and artificial intelligence," and existing programs have "prepared Americans for the economy of the past."

Winemaking contributes over A$ 40 billion to the Australian economy each year. Among the many challenges being faced by this centuries-old industry are managing pests and diseases, producing a consistent crop and using water efficiently. According to the report made by the University of Melbourne, artificial intelligence and machine learning have the potential to change the face of winemaking. Dr Sigfredo Fuentes is a plant physiologist and agronomist at the University of Melbourne. He explained how they are able to make use of cutting-edge technology to keep wine racks stocked with high-quality drinks.

The capability of making explainable inferences regarding physical processes has long been desired. One fundamental physical process is object motion. Inferring what causes the motion of a group of objects can even be a challenging task for experts, e.g., in forensics science. Most of the work in the literature relies on physics simulation to draw such infer- ences. The simulation requires a precise model of the under- lying domain to work well and is essentially a black-box from which one can hardly obtain any useful explanation. By contrast, qualitative reasoning methods have the advan- tage in making transparent inferences with ambiguous infor- mation, which makes it suitable for this task. However, there has been no suitable qualitative theory proposed for object motion in three-dimensional space. In this paper, we take this challenge and develop a qualitative theory for the motion of rigid objects. Based on this theory, we develop a reasoning method to solve a very interesting problem: Assuming there are several objects that were initially at rest and now have started to move. We want to infer what action causes the movement of these objects.

This technology could be put in smartphones that understand and predict our behaviour, potentially offering personalised support. They could also be used by robot companions for older people, or in self-driving cars and interactive video games. Dr Loetscher says the findings also provide an important bridge between tightly controlled laboratory studies and the study of natural eye movements in real-world environments. 'This research has tracked and measured the visual behaviour of people going about their everyday tasks, providing more natural responses than if they were in a lab. 'And thanks to our machine-learning approach, we not only validate the role of personality in explaining eye movement in everyday life, but also reveal new eye movement characteristics as predictors of personality traits.' 'Personality traits characterise an individual's patterns of behaviour, thinking, and feeling', researchers wrote previously in their paper published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 'Studies reporting relationships between personality traits and eye movements suggest that people with similar traits tend to move their eyes in similar ways.' Researchers found that people who were neurotic usually blinked faster while people who were open to new experiences moved their eyes more from side-to-side. People who had high levels of conscientiousness had greater fluctuations in their pupil size. Optimists spent less time looking at negative emotional stimuli (such as image of skin cancer) than people who were pessimistic.

Researchers have revealed an AI that they hope will one day write a perfect Shakespearean sonnet. Researchers at IBM used created a sonnet writing AI. Researchers at IBM used created a sonnet writing AI. Sonnets come in many different variations but they always have 14 lines and usually include a regular rhyme scheme of some sort. Shakespeare pioneered his own version in which the lines were divided into 3 verses (or stanzas) of four lines (quatrains), finished with a rhyming couplet.

In January, Amazon opened Amazon Go, a high-tech, cashierless convenience store in Seattle. There are no checkout lines and few employees. The only requirement to shop is downloading an app. Customers just walk in, load up their bags, and go. There's no need to even scan purchases; cameras positioned overhead take note of items in customers' carts and add them to a virtual bill. Amazon Go is both an interesting novelty -- and a profound challenge to the livelihoods of the more than 3.5 million Americans who work as cashiers. Rumors of a coming wave of similar stores and robot-run factories have provoked apocalyptic predictions of mass unemployment among pundits and politicians.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Japan's edition of Hebocon (the "best worst robot competition") took place at the end of last month, I think, and while we hope to get a bunch of really good videos at some point, here's a tiny teaser fight that's too good not to share. On the left, we have "Transparent Robot," which consists mostly of a GoPro pointing backwards, and a phone that displays the video feed from the GoPro pointing forwards, making the robot "invisible."