Soul Machines, a New Zealand startup, thinks so. It builds a customer service bot with an amazingly human face and a simulated nervous system that interprets how customers feel and reacts accordingly--in part by watching them over a webcam. As I reported today, design software maker Autodesk will be the first big client to try out the technology next year--what Soul Machines calls a "digital human"--with a remake of its AVA customer service bot. While many companies boast about personalized service but can't afford to hire enough people (and while most existing customer service bots haven't exactly managed to fill in the gap), Soul Machines sees an opportunity for new CGI and AI-driven techniques. AVA's photorealistic appearance--based on scans and recordings of actress Shushila Takao--is an outgrowth of the work the company's founder, Mark Sagar, has done as a CGI engineer for Hollywood films like Avatar; her "emotional intelligence," guiding how she responds to human cues, comes from his AI research simulating a human nervous system in software.

Dr. Leila Etaati gained her PhD in University of Auckland. She is world well-known speaker in Machine Learning and Analytics topics, and spoke in world's best international conferences in Data Platform topics, such as; PASS Summits, Data Insight Summit, PASS Rally, SQL Nexus, Microsoft Ignite, and so on. She has more than 10 years experience in Data Mining and Analytics. She is also Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) because of her dedication on Microsoft Analytics and Machine Learning technologies. She writes blog posts in RADACAD and also publishes YouTube videos in our channel.

Among the attributes credited for Apple's famous customer loyalty is a network of stores where curious or frustrated consumers can meet the company face-to-face. The 3D design software maker Autodesk is trying to achieve something similar online with a help service that allows people to interact with what sure looks like an actual human. The company says that next year it will introduce a new version of its Autodesk Virtual Agent (AVA) avatar, with an exceedingly lifelike face, voice, and set of "emotions" provided by a New Zealand AI and effects startup called Soul Machines. Born in February as a roughly sketched avatar on a chat interface, AVA's CGI makeover will turn her into a hyper-detailed, 3D-rendered character–what Soul Machines calls a digital human. The Autodesk deal is Soul Machines' first major gig, following a pilot project with the Australia National Disability Insurance Agency from February to September, 2016, and some proof-of-concept demos, like a recent one with Air New Zealand.

There is an extensive literature on the complexity of planning, but explicit bounds on time and space complexity are very rare. On the other hand, problems like the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) have been thoroughly analysed in this respect. We provide a number of upper- and lower-bound results (the latter based on various complexity-theoretic assumptions such as the Exponential Time Hypothesis) for both satisficing and optimal planning. We show that many classes of planning instances exhibit a dichotomy: either they can be solved in polynomial time or they cannot be solved in subexponential time. In many cases, we can even prove closely matching upper and lower bounds. Our results also indicate, analogously to CSPs, the existence of sharp phase transitions. We finally study and discuss the trade-off between time and space. In particular, we show that depth-first search may sometimes be a viable option for planning under severe space constraints.

In 2013 Bagnall wrote a Gstreamer plug-in that used a recurrent neural network (RNN) to generate video in imitation of a program it was watching. Pretty soon the same RNN library was being used in another Gstreamer plug-in to classify speech on the radio according to language, and to detect birds by listening for their calls (the language classification is quite accurate and runs at 1500 faster than real time on an old laptop, which is at least a data-point for those wondering about spying capabilities). The RNN has also been used to generate text and code, and to classify text by language and author at a fine-grained level. He shows how the RNN is trained, and how it might be adapted for other forms of time-series data. He demonstrates the various plug-ins and text utilities and, for excitement, execute RNN-generated code on the fly.

They're usually a waste of your time, so why not have them waste someone else's instead? Better yet: why not have them waste an email scammer's time. That's the premise behind Re:scam, an email chatbot operated by New Zealand cybersecurity firm Netsafe. Next time you get a dodgy email in your inbox, says Netsafe, forward it on to me@rescam.org, You can see a few sample dialogues in the video above, or check out a longer back-and-forth below.

"ROBOTS ARE NOT taking over the world", was the message given this week during United Nations talks on the issue of autonomous weapons. That's according to the diplomat leading the first official talks on the issue, the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW), as they sought to ease criticism over slow progress towards restricting the use of so-called "killer robots". The United Nations was wrapping up an initial five days of discussions on weapons systems that can identify and destroy targets without human control, which experts say will soon be battle ready. The meeting of the CCW marked an initial step towards an agreed set of rules governing such weapons. But activists warned that time was running out and that the glacial pace of the UN-brokered discussions was not responding to an arms race already underway.

Australia's Chief Scientist, Alan Finkel, has called on governments and businesses across the world to consider developing a regulatory framework for artificial intelligence devices, ranging from the likes of Apple's Siri to weaponised drones. Dr Finkel, who was speaking at the Creative Innovation Global conference, said he was optimistic about AI, but an ethical stamp needed to be developed, similar to a Fair Trade label, in order to give consumers trust that the AI in a device had been developed according to specified global standards. "Two years ago I published an article in Cosmos magazine calling for a global accord [on weaponised drones]. In the same year, more than 3000 AI and robotics researchers signed an open letter urging the leaders of the world to take action to prevent a global arms race," he said. "On the other end of the spectrum are tools in everyday use, such as social media platforms and smartphones.

Australian experts have spoken out about a recent US study that claimed to show artificial intelligence can identify people with suicidal thoughts - by analysing their brain scans. It sounds promising - but it's worth pointing out only 79 people were studied, so are the results enough to show this is a path worth pursing? The research, published in Nature, studied brain activity in subjects when presented with a number of different words - like death, cruelty, trouble, carefree, good and praise. A machine-learning algorithm was then trained to see the nureal response differences between the two groups involved - those with suicidal thoughts, and those with non-suicidal thoughts. And it showed promise - the algorithm correctly identified 15 of 17 patients as belonging to the suicide group, and 16 of 17 healthy individuals as belonging to the control group.

GENEVA – "Robots are not taking over the world," the diplomat leading the first official talks on autonomous weapons assured the meeting Friday, seeking to ease criticism over slow progress toward restricting the use of "killer robots." The United Nations was wrapping up an initial five days of discussions on weapons systems that can identify and destroy targets without human control. Experts say such weapons will soon be ready for battle. The meeting of the U.N.'s Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) marked an initial step toward rules governing such weapons. But activists warned that time is running out and that the glacial pace of the U.N.-brokered discussions is not responding to an arms race already underway.