According to a recent revelation by Elon Musk, a nation's Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities will determine its power. Economies and organizations globally are pursuing everything possible to utilize the benefits of AI in a bid to emerge as a superpower. In the wake of the growing awareness of AI's potential to propel business growth, Silverpond, an Australia-based firm, utilizes the technology to accelerate their customer's adoption of the technology. The company employs AI to engineer solutions for sectors like utilities, property, retail, healthcare, education, and research. "AI will transform the way services and products are delivered. Organizations need to re-think how they build, test, and deliver these solutions as AI makes previous approaches obsolete," states Jonathan Chang, Director, Silverpond.

Weka is a collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks. The algorithms can either be applied directly to a dataset or called from your own Java code. Weka contains tools for data pre-processing, classification, regression, clustering, association rules, and visualization. It is also well-suited for developing new machine learning schemes. Found only on the islands of New Zealand, the Weka is a flightless bird with an inquisitive nature.

In this paper we analyse the benefits of incorporating interval-valued fuzzy sets into the Bousi-Prolog system. A syntax, declarative semantics and im- plementation for this extension is presented and formalised. We show, by using potential applications, that fuzzy logic programming frameworks enhanced with them can correctly work together with lexical resources and ontologies in order to improve their capabilities for knowledge representation and reasoning.

Is the effort that AI/machine learning requires worthwhile? Usually when a new technology starts getting noticed, the subsequent hype in the industry is inevitable. The hype is partly created by the vendor and consulting community looking for new business, partly created by professionals in the industry wanting to keep up and comment on the latest trends, partly created by companies with the ambition to be seen moving with the times and becoming early adopters. Some hypes even have their lifecycle traced by Gartner, which coined the term "hype cycle". As all this energy and enthusiasm sometimes ignores "the gap from an academic paper to reality and the application to an engineered product."

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.