For the first time in Australia, a Melbourne surgeon used robot technology to remove an inoperable tumor from a six-year-old girl's head, reports said Tuesday. The successful operation was recently performed on Freyja Christiansen from Canberra at the Epworth Hospital in Richmond. The six-year-old was diagnosed with a rare sarcoma near the base of her skull in December 2016, along with other tumors in her head and neck. Due to the location of the child's tumor -- between a main artery and the base of her skull -- several specialists refused to operate on her. Due to this, she underwent immunotherapy since last year, which helped shrink the tumors.

Born in New Zealand and raised in Australia, I'm a lifelong techie with a passion for all things startup. When I realized that CRMs weren't delivering on their promise ...

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Kitty Hawk, an aviation company backed by Google co-founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page, unveiled its autonomous air taxi, named Cora, on Monday*. The two-person passenger vehicle, which has rotors along its wings so it can take off like a helicopter and then fly like a plane without a runway, has undergone a number of "stealth" test flights in New Zealand since October. Kitty Hawk announced that it has been working with the New Zealand government to prepare a fleet of Coras for commercial use over the past 18 months. The company has also been developing a ride-hailing app for the future travel service. So what exactly is this flying taxi capable of?

The approximately 400 languages of Aboriginal Australia can be grouped into 27 different families. To put that diversity in context, Europe has just four language families, Indo-European, Basque, Finno-Ugric and Semitic, with Indo-European encompassing such languages as English, Spanish, Russian and Hindi. Australia's largest language family is Pama-Nyungan. Before 1788 it covered 90% of the country and comprised about 300 languages. The territories on which Canberra (Ngunnawal), Perth (Noongar), Sydney (Daruk, Iyora), Brisbane (Turubal) and Melbourne (Woiwurrung) are built were all once owned by speakers of Pama-Nyungan languages. Australia's largest language family is Pama-Nyungan.

Gone are the days when developers needed to painstakingly handcraft machine learning algorithms and big data analytics frameworks to power their big data and AI-based applications. With a plethora of cloud services available through providers such as AWS, they can get up to speed quickly and keep up with growing business needs. In this e-guide, find out how Australia's Mojo Power is tapping into cloud services to disrupt the energy market, how you can incorporate AWS functionality onto IoT and edge services to reshape a hybrid deployment, and implementing data lakes in the public cloud.

Autonomous flying taxis just took one big step forward to leaping off the pages of science fiction and into the real world, thanks to Google co-founder Larry Page's Kitty Hawk. The billionaire-backed firm has announced that it will begin the regulatory approval process required for launching its autonomous passenger-drone system in New Zealand, after conducting secret testing under the cover of another company called Zephyr Airworks. The firm's two-person craft, called Cora, is a 12-rotor plane-drone hybrid that can take off vertically like a drone, but then uses a propeller at the back to fly at up to 110 miles an hour for around 62 miles at a time. The all-electric Cora flies autonomously up to 914 metres (3,000ft) above ground, has a wingspan of 11 metres, and has been eight years in the making. "Designing an air taxi for everyday life means bringing the airport to you. That's why Cora can take off and land like a helicopter, eliminating the need for runways," says Kitty Hawk.

The long-awaited benefits of artificial intelligence and big data have become so elaborate, that now over 97.2 percent of executives in Australia report that their organizations have started plans to launch AI and big data projects. Among the executives who volunteered in the survey, 76.5 percent agree that extensive availability of quality data is what has empowered AI and more so cognitive initiatives within their businesses. Now, experts and managers alike see a serious connection between big data and AI capabilities. However, credit goes to technological advancement that has made possible easy access to meaningful volumes of data, with the potential to feed algorithms that can in return understand patterns and behaviors. Data plays the biggest role in building intelligent systems, that's why many AI projects remained halted for decades, only to blossom back to life in the 21st century when data became sufficient.

The number of jobs in the merging industry around artificial intelligence (AI), including work on self-driving cars and smart digital assistants, is growing in Australia but so is interest from job seekers. Analysis by global job site Indeed shows rapid growth in the number of AI-related jobs over the past 18 months with that growth matched by increasing job seeker interest. Indeed says the number of AI-related job posts has doubled since 2015 and, at the same time, search activity by job seekers has tripled. "It is true that new technologies and innovation will destroy some jobs and we have seen this for example in automated areas of manufacturing," says Callam Pickering, Indeed's APAC Economist. "But at the same time, new AI technologies will increasingly require highly-skilled workers who can develop and maintain complex systems and applications."

We present Generative Adversarial Capsule Network (CapsuleGAN), a framework that uses capsule networks (CapsNets) instead of the standard convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as discriminators within the generative adversarial network (GAN) setting, while modeling image data. We provide guidelines for designing CapsNet discriminators and the updated GAN objective function, which incorporates the CapsNet margin loss, for training CapsuleGAN models. We show that CapsuleGAN outperforms convolutional-GAN at modeling image data distribution on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, evaluated on the generative adversarial metric and at semi-supervised image classification.

Software and web development companies these days, especially those in Australia, bring technology and innovation to customers wherever they may be located in the world. The two most popular technology innovations these days are Big Data and AI. Service providers make use of these hottest technology trends to keep pace with the tough competition and to provide clients only with highly effective and dynamic solutions. At the intersection of smart technology and analytics, companies are beginning to realize the long-awaited benefits of Artificial Intelligence. After years of promise and hope, this year may be the year when AI gains meaningful traction within Fortune 1000 organizations.