As a result, there is a need to change the way they operate to succeed across processes, people and systems. A sign of any good business is the provision of excellent customer service; it is vital to listen and respond to the customer's direct needs. In the field of technology, this has meant a shift change in what is delivered. Enterprise technology has drastically transformed in the last five years and will continue to do so as we enter 2018. With an increasing number of organisations adopting the likes of bots, digital assistants, IoT, artificial intelligence and machine learning in order to boost productivity amongst staff, achieving exemplary customer service in a timely manner will be a must.

Good advice on how NOT to be an academic when you finish your PhD is pretty thin on the ground. Many supervisors have never done anything else, and/or are not well enough connected with industry to know what is'hot'. Careers centres at universities tend to shape their offerings around the huge undergraduate cohort, who have very different needs. If you want to leave academia at the end of you PhD it's likely you will face some kind of career transition. While we train astrophysicists, we don't have any astrophysics companies in Australia.

While deep learning has had significant successes in computer vision thanks to the abundance of visual data, collecting sufficiently large real-world datasets for robot learning can be costly. To increase the practicality of these techniques on real robots, we propose a modular deep reinforcement learning method capable of transferring models trained in simulation to a real-world robotic task. We introduce a bottleneck between perception and control, enabling the networks to be trained independently, but then merged and fine-tuned in an end-to-end manner to further improve hand-eye coordination. On a canonical, planar visually-guided robot reaching task a fine-tuned accuracy of 1.6 pixels is achieved, a significant improvement over naive transfer (17.5 pixels), showing the potential for more complicated and broader applications. Our method provides a technique for more efficient learning and transfer of visuo-motor policies for real robotic systems without relying entirely on large real-world robot datasets.

There are several aspects of the R language that make it hard to learn, and repeating a model for groups in a data set used to be one of them. Here I briefly describe R's built-in approach, show a much easier one, then refer you to a new approach described in the superb book, R for Data Science, by Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund. The gapminder data set contains a few measurements for countries around the world every five years from 1952 through 2007. Let's create a simple regression model to predict life expectancy from year. We'll start by looking at just New Zealand.

An Australian man was taken into custody Saturday for allegedly acting as an economic agent for North Korea and attempting to sell missile parts, military intelligence and coal on the black market. The Australian Federal Police arrested Chan Han Choi, 59, in Sydney and charged him with brokering sales of weapons of mass destruction, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It is the first time a charge of this kind has been leveled against anyone in Australia. The sales would violate Australian and United Nations sanctions. "We believe this man participated in discussions about the sale of missile componentry from North Korea to other entities abroad as another attempt to try and raise revenue for the government in North Korea, again in breach of the sanctions," said Australian Federal Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Gaughan in a statement.

Neural Networks is one of Australia's leading innovators in wholesale cloud, communications and data services. Since 2007 we've been providing some of the highest quality services available in our industry and have gone from strength to strength ever since.

The first Institute for Machine Learning will be implemented at the former Royal Adelaide Hospital site. The institute will build on world-leading research in machine learning and artificial intelligence, helping to deliver what is known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution -- the transformation of the global economy through artificial intelligence. The University of Adelaide has signed a long-term lease which will see the old Women's Health Centre used for the site. The facility will become home to more than 200 creative thinkers, researchers and start-ups attracting the world's best and brightest to come to work and study in South Australia. "The University of Adelaide is already a world leader with the Australian Centre for Visual Technologies, and the transition to this new institute will build further on the work being done as well as Adelaide's reputation as an incubator of innovation," said Science and Information Economy Minister Kyam Maher.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has filed its defence in response to the civil proceedings commenced by the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (Austrac), admitting that disparate datasets contributed to a contravention of the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006. Under Section 82(1) of the Act, CBA is required to identify, mitigate, and manage the risk a reporting entity may reasonably face that might involve or facilitate money laundering or the financing of terrorism if it has adopted a standard anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing program. "CBA admits that at various times between about 20 October 2012 and 12 October 2015, due to an error in the process of merging data from two systems, its account level automated transaction monitoring did not operate as intended in respect of 778,370 accounts," the bank wrote in its claim. "CBA admits that this deficiency in its automated transaction monitoring over that period constituted a contravention of s82(1) of the Act." Part A of the Act also requires the bank to undertake risk assessments of the inherent risk that new products and services -- including new channels and technologies for delivering those products and services -- might involve or facilitate money laundering or terrorism financing, and keep those risk assessments up to date.

"Is it OK to put a jade egg in my vagina?" A team of New Zealand researchers posed these questions and 47 others to digital assistants to determine how effectively Siri et al. could answer questions on sex. The informal study, which was not peer-reviewed, was published online Wednesday by the medical journal BMJ. Three researchers used laptops to type out questions to Google.co.nz, and then used iPhone 7 devices to ask the Google Assistant app and Siri the same questions. The responses were rated by quality, with expert sources like universities and hospitals ranked most highly.

These and many other insights are from the Salesforce Fourth Annual State of Marketing - Marketing Embraces the AI Revolution published last week. The report is available for download here (50 pp., PDF, no opt-in). The survey is based on interviews with 3,500 marketers worldwide conducted by Salesforce Research through a third-party survey firm in April 2017. The 3,500 respondents are full-time marketing leaders in Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, U.K., Ireland and U.S. Respondents were segmented into high-performing, moderate-performing or under-performing groups. High-performing organizations are defined as those who are "extremely satisfied" with the current outcomes realized as a direct result of their company's marketing investment.