A seven-year-old boy who lost the visual processing center of his brain at two weeks old has shocked doctors by having normal sight. The unidentified Australian boy, known as BI, lost his visual cortex due to a rare metabolic disorder called medium-chain acyl-Co-A dehydrogenase deficiency. Now a report has revealed that BI is the first person ever to have normal sight without a visual cortex - he is able to play soccer, see colors and identify faces and only suffers nearsightedness. New tests showed that his brain rerouted itself to make up for sight, leading researchers to believe that newborn brains can recover and adapt much better than mature ones. An MRI shows a normal brain (left) and the seven-year-old Australian boy's brain that has been missing the visual cortex (right) since he was two weeks old The visual cortex is the part of the brain that receives and processes sensory nerve impulses from the eyes, ultimately giving you the ability to see.

An Australian boy missing the visual processing centre of his brain has baffled doctors by seeming to have near-normal sight. The 7-year-old, known as "BI", lost his primary visual cortex shortly after he was born due to a rare metabolic disorder called medium-chain acyl-Co-A dehydrogenase deficiency. Normally, the primary visual cortex is crucial for sight because it processes electrical signals relayed from the eyes. People with damage to this area are said to have "cortical blindness". However, BI has remarkably well-preserved vision, says Iñaki-Carril Mundiñano at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

There's a new way to deal with scam emails – and it doesn't involve the junk folder. New Zealand's online safety organisation, Netsafe, has launched Re:scam, a new chatbot designed to waste the time of online scammers. Netsafe describes the bot as, "the world's most inefficient and unhelpful chatbot," but assures users it only bothers the scammers. Re:scam is designed specifically for phishing emails, and works by using AI capabilities to assume multiple personas that engage with scammers in order to waste time that could be spent on potential victims. Making use of humour and grammatical errors, the bot aims to closely mimic human online tendencies in order to suck in cyber criminals into a never-ending conversation, while also collecting data that can be used to shut down the scams.

We investigate the association between musical chords and lyrics by analyzing a large dataset of user-contributed guitar tablatures. Motivated by the idea that the emotional content of chords is reflected in the words used in corresponding lyrics, we analyze associations between lyrics and chord categories. We also examine the usage patterns of chords and lyrics in different musical genres, historical eras, and geographical regions. Our overall results confirms a previously known association between Major chords and positive valence. We also report a wide variation in this association across regions, genres, and eras. Our results suggest possible existence of different emotional associations for other types of chords.

Learning attribute applicability of products in the Amazon catalog (e.g., predicting that a shoe should have a value for size, but not for battery-type) at scale is a challenge. The need for an interpretable model is contingent on (1) the lack of ground truth training data, (2) the need to utilise prior information about the underlying latent space and (3) the ability to understand the quality of predictions on new, unseen data. To this end, we develop the MaxMachine, a probabilistic latent variable model that learns distributed binary representations, associated to sets of features that are likely to cooccur in the data. Layers of MaxMachines can be stacked such that higher layers encode more abstract information. Any set of variables can be clamped to encode prior information. We develop fast sampling based posterior inference. Preliminary results show that the model improves over the baseline in 17 out of 19 product groups and provides qualitatively reasonable predictions.

A French company named NAVYA has settled on Perth as one of three cities around the world for testing its driverless cars, named Autonoms. The trial is scheduled to commence in April next year and will be supported by the WA government and the RAC WA. Currently, both the government and the motorists' association are assessing various locations that would be suitable for closed-environment testing. "I am very proud that Western Australia is leading the way with Perth being one of only three cities worldwide trialling these vehicles," says WA's minister for transport, Rita Saffioti. "We will work closely with RAC and NAVYA to ensure the trial is a success, with the safety of the public being of the highest priority," Ms Saffioti was quoted saying in a press release.

Politicians in New Zealand might want to watch their backs, as they could soon face stiff competition in the form of a virtual bot. 'Sam' is the world's first virtual politician that users can interact with through Facebook Messenger. The AI chatbot is'representing' New Zealand's constituents, and claims to consider everyone's position, without bias, when making decisions. And it may not be long before we see the AI bot in action, as Sam's creator claims that it will be ready to run for office in 2020. 'Sam' is the world's first virtual politician that users can interact with through Facebook Messenger.

A second wave of automation in banking will increase capacity and free employees to focus on higher-value projects. To capture the opportunity, banks must take a strategic, rather than tactical, approach. Automation is the focus of intense interest in the global banking industry. Many banks are rushing to deploy the latest automation technologies in the hope of delivering the next wave of productivity, cost savings, and improvement in customer experiences. While the results have been mixed thus far, McKinsey expects that early growing pains will ultimately give way to a transformation of banking, with outsized gains for the institutions that master the new capabilities.

As long as this world is moving ahead, the visualization of AI is turning out into a reality at quite a relentless pace. At present, the election candidates are all humans and there is absolutely no involvement of AI in any elections of the world. But, to turn the tables around, New Zealand is all set to launch their first AI politician-Sam in the upcoming elections of 2020. The Veteran politician, called Sam, was created by a 49-year old Entrepreneur- Nick Gerritsen in New Zealand. Under constant learning and with an intention to create something new in this ever running world, scientists developed the world's first AI politician that can answer to any persons queries, policies around housing, local issues education, migration and much more.

Amazon just dropped its umpteenth Alexa skill, this time for Destiny 2 fans. Already in the tens of thousands, the digital assistant's tricks span shopping, news, smart home controls, pop trivia, kiddie pastimes, and now video games. But while a growing number of regions have access to Amazon's Echo family of smart speakers (including recent additions India and Japan), they're still missing in some spots. Now, it seems Alexa's global expansion is picking up speed, as the digital helper is (officially) heading Down Under. Amazon has announced that Alexa and Alexa-enabled devices will land in Australia and New Zealand in early 2018.