Augmented reality and machine learning will be embedded into business practices in 2018, according to Deloitte's 2018 Technology, Media and Telecommunications Predictions. And the annual predictions show that smartphones will be more distracting than ever before as they become more a part of the business day. "We're at the tipping point of widespread adoption of a number of technologies," says Kimberly Chang, Deloitte Australia's Technology, Media and Telecommunications leader. "In 2018 we will finally see business challenges being addressed by what has to date been consumer driven technology. But it will be a year of trial and error," Augmented reality, a special effect that enables digital images to be superimposed on real ones, has become an increasingly popular smartphone application, often for entertainment applications such as face swapping or live face filters.

The actual impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the world's economy and jobs will likely be somewhere between the utopian and dystopian futures that it is often discussed in terms of, according to a new report from the Economist Intelligence Unit. The report, commissioned by Google, examined how AI will impact certain industries in the US, the UK, Australia, Japan, and Asia as a whole. The findings are based on econometric modelling, desk research, and interviews with academic and industry experts. Firms developing and using machine learning need to better communicate among themselves as well as with the public and policymakers, the report stated. This means doing more to manage expectations around the impact of machine learning, acknowledging the potential risks and rewards, improving trust and transparency, and educating the public.

In media stories last week, for example this one in The West Australian, former airline Captain Kevin Sullivan broke his long silence on what happened on Qantas Airways flight QF72 in October 2008. Traveling from Singapore to Perth, the Airbus A330-300 aircraft suddenly lost altitude over the north-west of Western Australia, causing unrestrained passengers and crew to be flung around the cabin. The injuries were serious, and included fractures, lacerations and spinal injuries. Captain Sullivan called a mayday and made an emergency landing at the remote Learmonth Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) base. At least 110 of the 303 passengers and nine of the 12 crew members had been injured.

Health insurer Nib is running a proof-of-concept to improve its ability to extract claim information from photos of medical receipts submitted by customers through an app. The PoC is one of a number either underway or completed by Nib as it explores how artificial intelligence might improve both its backend and customer-facing activities. The insurance industry in general has been quick to find AI use cases, as evidenced by recent deployments by the likes of Suncorp, as well as iTnews' recent study of the AI space. Nib has publicly discussed its entry into the chatbot space, with its IBM Watson-based'Frankie' bot and AWS Lex-based'Nibby' bot launched in New Zealand and Australia respectively late last year. But behind the scenes it is already pursuing a wide range of different use cases for AI, as long as there is demonstrable value to be had.

Artificial intelligence is proving to be a revolutionary tool across many industries, but the technology is having a particularly big impact when it comes to healthcare. Researchers are using AI to combat the flu, by building improved seasonal forecasts that inform the development of influenza vaccines, and the technology is already helping to diagnose rare diseases so that patients can get the treatments they need. Now, scientists have found a new medical application for AI: predicting when a seriously ill patient admitted to the hospital will likely die. In hospitals, palliative care teams are charged with improving the quality of life of gravely ill patients and making sure their final wishes are carried out. But clinicians sometimes don't refer their patients to these specialists because they believe their patients are better off than they really are.

Cross-industry collaboration Announced in a blog post today, Microsoft said the institute will look for ways to directly integrate AI research into Cortana. The organisation is being co-funded by Microsoft Research, Cortana Research and the RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. The Institute is unique in its intention to directly combine research with real-world implementation. Currently, AI researchers tend to operate independently of the engineers building applications such as Cortana. The Cortana Intelligence Institute will bridge the gap, providing researchers and engineers with a two-way link to each other.

In its latest bid to become the go-to flight management mobile tool, Google has added a new feature to Google Flights which can predict flight delays. "One of the most stressful parts of traveling happens between heading to the airport and waiting to board your flight, as you start checking to see if your flight is on time. Flights already shows delays, and now we're sharing reasons for those delays and delay predictions too. Using historic flight status data, our machine learning algorithms can predict some delays even when this information isn't available from airlines yet--and delays are only flagged when we're at least 80% confident in the prediction. "We still recommend getting to the airport with enough time to spare, but hope this information can manage expectations and prevent surprises.

During Microsoft's earnings call earlier this week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that Cortana digital assistant has its own strength when compared to other assistants like Alexa as Cortana has a lot of unique information sources to draw from, including Windows 10, Office 365, Xbox and more. It's good to to see Satya's defending for Cortana, but I would like to see his words in action. The rate at which Cortana is gaining capabilities is nowhere near to Alexa or Google Assistant. Similar to how Windows Phone was never able to catch up with 3rd apps ecosystem, Cortana will never be able to catch up with Alexa's 3rd party skills ecosystem. According my sources inside Microsoft, Microsoft is not even considering Cortana as a as true competitor to Alexa.

The company on Thursday announced the establishment of the Cortana Intelligence Institute, a collaboration with the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology focused on broadening the capabilities of its virtual assistant. RMIT, as the university is most commonly known, is Australia's largest by enrollment. Researchers from the school will work with Microsoft personnel to apply AI to new tasks that currently can't be handled by neural networks.

At Search Party we are in the business of creating intelligent recruitment software. One of the problems we deal with is matching candidates and vacancies in order to create a recommendation engine. This usually requires parsing, interpreting and normalising messy, semi-/unstructured, textual data from résumés and vacancies, which is where the following come in: conditional random fields, bag-of-words, TF-IDFs, WordNet, statistical analysis, but also a lot of manual work done by linguists and domain experts for the creation of synonym lists, skill taxonomies, job title hierarchies, knowledge bases or ontologies. While these concepts are valuable for the problem we try to solve, they also require a certain amount of manual feature engineering and human expertise. This expertise is certainly a factor that makes these techniques valuable, but the question remains whether more automated approaches can be used to extract knowledge about the job space to complement these more traditional approaches.