Just like many organisations, Australian airline Qantas is grappling with the challenge of how to be innovative while managing risk. But according to its new CTO Rob James, the flying kangaroo is fast evolving into a digital business. Having joined Qantas in August from a four-year tenure as CIO at online betting player William Hill, James said the contrast between an all-online company to one that delivers tangible services to customers is what attracted him to the role. He touted Qantas as an organisation that is performing well financially, but one that has a strong desire to look at technology to help it keep the numbers up. "Coming across to Qantas, what has been interesting is that Qantas as an organisation has really started to embrace technology as a differentiator in the business," James told the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo on the Gold Coast this week.

Team NZ intern Juan Perdomo proved invaluable to the Kiwi America's Cup campaign. Team New Zealand used an artificial intelligence agent to help set up their stunning America's Cup victory. The genius innovations behind the successful Kiwi campaign in Bermuda continue to emerge four months after they blitzed the challenger series and defenders Oracle Team USA to win back the Auld Mug. Stuck in New Zealand and short on money and time to build a second test boat to engage their cycle-powered AC50, the Kiwis went to the computers to find a "virtual" rival to train against. By the time Emirates Team New Zealand lined out against Oracle Team USA for the America's Cup match, helmsman Peter Burling was well schooled in tactics thanks to battling an artificial intelligence agent. The AI was crucial to getting Cup rookie Peter Burling up to speed with starting manoeuvres and tactics in the lightning-fast foiling catamarans.

In the computer game StarCraft, humans still have an edge over artificial intelligence. That was clear on Tuesday after professional StarCraft player Song Byung-gu defeated four different bots in the first contest to pit AI systems against pros in live bouts of the game. One of the bots, dubbed "CherryPi," was developed by Facebook's AI research lab. The other bots came from Australia, Norway, and Korea. The contest took place at Sejong University in Seoul, Korea, which has hosted annual StarCraft AI competitions since 2010.

Australians needs to have a diplomatic discussion about the potential impact of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and the boundaries that need to be established to ensure AI is developed and used for good, according to federal parliamentarians Bridget McKenzie and Ed Husic. Speaking at the Australian Computer Society's (ACS) Reimagination Thought Leaders Summit, Senator McKenzie, chair of Foreign Affairs, Defence, and Trade Legislation Committee, said if bright minds like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk are warning of "evil AI" destroying humankind if not properly monitored and regulated, then this is something that as a nation needs to be publicly discussed. "I think'man against machine' has been a powerful narrative with our species for a very, very long time," McKenzie said during a panel discussion. "We always end up winning because somehow we always write the script so that we're smarter in the end than the machine." "But I think when the creators of this technology ... have concerns, I think we mere mortals really should pay attention because they're the guys that have actually developed this technology, they understand its potential. "Sometimes I think we can get very excited about the potential development of the next step in your scientific endeavour, and forget that it is part of a wider ... society and a civilisation." McKenzie referenced the view of Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, that we could end up creating and designing our own demise. "I think we do need to be very, very cognisant of that fact because there's not a lot of research.

Research analysts are the most likely employees on Wall Street to find themselves working with--or being replaced by--robots, according to a survey by Greenwich Associates. By next year, some 75% of banks and financial firms will either explore or implement artificial intelligence technologies, harnessing a variety of digital services to extract insights from mountains of data. While AI is probably near the peak of its hype cycle, several factors have helped it gain traction in recent years, according to Greenwich. Billions of images and documents are now available online for training computers to spot patterns and other high-level tasks. Advances in graphical processing units, which are adept at the kind of data crunching required by AI, are making sifting through daunting datasets much easier.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is the great story of our time, thanks to the low cost of computing, storage, and off-the-shelf machine algorithms. However, cyber criminals also have access to these resources and are able to build smarter malware. This means that the attackers of the future will be machines that think, as hackers will look for new ways to use AI to their own benefit. We will witness sophisticated attacks launched on a large scale both quickly and intelligently, with little human intervention. As the digital economy expands, cybersecurity threats will also grow.

This paper introduces Scavenger, the first theorem prover for pure first-order logic without equality based on the new conflict resolution calculus. Conflict resolution has a restricted resolution inference rule that resembles (a first-order generalization of) unit propagation as well as a rule for assuming decision literals and a rule for deriving new clauses by (a first-order generalization of) conflict-driven clause learning.

Will a robot steal my job? This age-old question of threat of artificial intelligence and automation is a common one, and as AI continues to change existing roles and create new ones, another question has popped up – how can we prepare for jobs that don't even exist yet? From upskilling to having an innovative employer and working for a company with'cultural intelligence', there are ways you can safeguard your employability, says Hays, a global recruitment company. "Advances in technology are disrupting the world of work and the future jobs in demand, making it difficult to know how to develop your skills," says Nick Deligiannis, managing director of Hays in Australia & New Zealand. "However, there are certain behaviours that you can work on now to help you prepare for the jobs of the future," he said.

The outlook for AI is not all dystopian. Used wisely, automation can provide a big boost to productivity. Artificial Intelligence is the defining technology of our generation and, surprisingly, some experts think New Zealand is well placed to take advantage. Partly that's to do with our perceived ability to adapt to the great changes that AI will bring about. Tom White, a senior lecturer in media design at Victoria University, is one of this country's foremost experts in AI.

Over-subscription, that is, being assigned too many things to do, is commonly encountered in temporal scheduling problems. As human beings, we often want to do more than we can actually do, and underestimate how long it takes to perform each task. Decision makers can benefit from aids that identify when these failure situations are likely, the root causes of these failures, and resolutions to these failures. In this paper, we present a decision assistant that helps users resolve over-subscribed temporal problems. The system works like an experienced advisor that can quickly identify the cause of failure underlying temporal problems and compute resolutions. The core of the decision assistant is the Best-first Conflict-Directed Relaxation (BCDR) algorithm, which can detect conflicting sets of constraints within temporal problems, and computes continuous relaxations for them that weaken constraints to the minimum extent, instead of removing them completely. BCDR is an extension to the Conflict-Directed A* algorithm, first developed in the model-based reasoning community to compute most likely system diagnoses or reconfigurations. It generalizes the discrete conflicts and relaxations, to hybrid conflicts and relaxations, which denote minimal inconsistencies and minimal relaxations to both discrete and continuous relaxable constraints. In addition, BCDR is capable of handling temporal uncertainty, expressed as either set-bounded or probabilistic durations, and can compute preferred trade-offs between the risk of violating a schedule requirement, versus the loss of utility by weakening those requirements. BCDR has been applied to several decision support applications in different domains, including deep-sea exploration, urban travel planning and transit system management. It has demonstrated its effectiveness in helping users resolve over-subscribed scheduling problems and evaluate the robustness of existing solutions. In our benchmark experiments, BCDR has also demonstrated its efficiency on solving large-scale scheduling problems in the aforementioned domains. Thanks to its conflict-driven approach for computing relaxations, BCDR achieves one to two orders of magnitude improvements on runtime performance when compared to state-of-the-art numerical solvers.