After the commander ill-advisedly opened the gate, the social network's alien horde stormed in and slaughtered forces stationed inside, in a battle fought on the frontiers of artificial-intelligence research. The bloody incident was part of an annual competition of the videogame StarCraft for AI software bots that wrapped up Sunday. Facebook quietly entered a bot called CherryPi designed by eight people employed by or affiliated with its AI research lab. The social network's stealthy space war suggests Facebook is serious about competing with Google and others to set showy new milestones in AI smarts. Google's London-based DeepMind AI research unit made headlines last year when its AlphaGo software defeated a champion at the board game Go.

With billions of sensors, smart machines and connected devices generating data every second, the Internet of Things (IoT) is placing unprecedented demands on organisations' data storage, processing and analytic capabilities. Cloudera (NYSE: CLDR), the modern platform for machine learning and analytics, optimized for the cloud, announced that more enterprises across an array of sectors are turning to Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub to power their IoT journey, generate actionable insights and as a result, disrupt their own industries. Cloudera is enabling real-time data insights and predictive analytics to help companies use IoT to drive operational efficiencies, introduce new products and services, improve the customer experience and create wholly new business models. Customers today are increasingly utilising components such as Apache Kudu and Apache Spark to drive real-time processing, machine learning, and analytics on all of their IoT data, including data in motion and data at rest. "Organisations who use machine learning and analytics to deliver new insights from the explosion of IoT data, have enormous power to disrupt entire industries," said Tom Reilly, chief executive officer at Cloudera.

This chapter provides an accessible introduction for point processes, and especially Hawkes processes, for modeling discrete, inter-dependent events over continuous time. We start by reviewing the definitions and the key concepts in point processes. We then introduce the Hawkes process, its event intensity function, as well as schemes for event simulation and parameter estimation. We also describe a practical example drawn from social media data - we show how to model retweet cascades using a Hawkes self-exciting process. We presents a design of the memory kernel, and results on estimating parameters and predicting popularity. The code and sample event data are available as an online appendix

Tesla founder Elon Musk believes he can rebuild Puerto Rico's power grid. Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks during a news conference at the Adelaide Oval in Adelaide, Australia on July 7, 2017. Tesla will partner with French renewable energy developer Neoen to build the world's biggest Lithium IIon Battery, a 100MW battery that will be built in James Town, the South Australian government announced on the day. SAN FRANCISCO -- Elon Musk has so many irons in the fire, you can't see the fire. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO tweeted Friday that he is delaying the unveiling of a self-driving truck in order to focus his attention on smoothing out Model 3 production issues and helping devastated Puerto Rico switch over to solar power. "Tesla Semi unveil now Nov 16," Musk tweeted, pushing it back around three weeks from the original Oct. 26 event.

Melbourne was the final stop on this year's Salesforce Basecamp tour, and the final keynote of the event was given by Shaun Paga from Soul Machines, a New Zealand company specialising in building what they call "Artificial Humans". These are digital avatars with very detailed faces that respond to the emotional cues of the person they're talking to. Soul Machines was founded by Dr. Mark Sagar, who started out modelling body parts for medicine, then went into CGI, and has earned himself two Academy Awards for his work on Avatar and King Kong. After leaving the movie industry, Sagar set himself the task of building Artificial Humans, with the aim of radically advancing the interface between humans and computers. We've known for years that babies faces and behaviours have evolved to maximise valuable interactions with adults.

As both businesses and society today continue to embrace digitisation at an uncontrollable rate; fighting financial crime, money laundering and the funding of criminal activity are all growing in importance. The global phenomenon of digitisation has led to an increase in wire banking, thus raising pressure on banks and financial institutions to monitor and detect suspicious activity to prevent it coming to fruition. It is therefore crucial that the banking system today adopts the latest tools for a mature digital service, which include self-learning capabilities that are able to quickly adapt to the ever-changing banking environment. The recent narrative has been primarily focused on regulators ramping up demands for greater scrutiny of transaction monitoring, as well as threatening to impose hefty fines on non-compliant banks. In Australia, for example,The Sydney Morning Herald recently reported that the Commonwealth Bank has come under extensive scrutiny following an internal review of the bank's breach of global anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism laws, with legal proceedings now being levelled against it.

Nuance Nina named Best Intelligent Assistant Innovation during September 27 AIconics Awards ceremony at The AI Summit, the world's largest conference to showcase AI solutions that are transforming organizations. The AIconics Awards are the only independently-judged awards that celebrate AI for businesses and Nuance Nina was selected as part of a competitive analysis of more than 300 entries. Nuance Nina and customers win Intelligent Assistant Awards during September 18 ceremony at the Opus Research IA Conference. Nuance was honored alongside customers FedEx and IP Australia, with partner Datacom, for delivering notable customer experiences through natural language understanding, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. The Opus Research Intelligent Assistant Awards recognize leading brands who are utilizing virtual assistants to redefine digital commerce and customer care.

My colleagues and I had the privilege of attending Tata Consultancy Services' (TCS) Analyst Day event held in Boston on September 21, 2017. There were several interesting and informative presentations covering topics such as the concept of Business 4.0 and how TCS is deploying Digital, deep domain expertise and its deep and vast portfolio of services and solutions to provide its customers with exponential value through mass customization, leveraging ecosystems to help its customers embrace and manage risk while maximizing business outcomes. As one of the ARC Analysts focused on upstream and midstream oil & gas it was great to learn more about how TCS is leveraging'cognitive automation' through its solutions such as Ignio, an product that provides some very powerful horsepower through its self-learning capability, empowered by machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), that can move customers from predictive maintenance to prescriptive maintenance, thereby extending the life (and availability) of an asset such as a pump or compressor and also optimizing that asset's performance and the process for which it is being utilized. I know first-hand that TCS is successfully helping customers in Australia with pump optimization and increasing pump availability as well as, more importantly, helping to increase the customer's gas processing operations by saving over 100-man days per year, reducing pump downtime and increasing production. Harrick Vin, Global Head of Digitate, explained that he envisions advanced analytics platforms such as Ignio as being technology being augmented by people and one that is capable of learning over time.

Uber drivers could one day be spared from engaging in small talk with drunks if a National Transport Commission suggestion to allow people under the influence of alcohol to use fully automated vehicles is adopted by state road authorities. The NTC, an independent statutory body tasked with reforming Australia's driving laws to prepare for the arrival of driverless cars, has recommended an "exemption" from drink and drug-driving laws for people who ride in fully automated vehicles. In a new discussion paper it argues there is a "clear-cut" justification for an exemption from drink-driving laws because there is "no possibility that a human could drive a dedicated automated vehicle". "The situation is analogous to a person instructing a taxi driver where to go," the NTC report states. State traffic laws prohibit driving under the influence of varying levels of alcohol but the NTC says they could be a "barrier" to the benefits of driverless vehicles, which it argues could improve road safety by reducing the incidence of drink-driving.

One of the biggest advances in transportation has been self-driving technology, which has facilitated breakthroughs in not just self-driven cars, but even driverless trains, self-flying planes and self-navigating ships. Rio Tinto, an Australian mining corporation, has unveiled the first operational driverless train in Western Australia, even before China, which has its own similar automated train in the works. The train completed its first run of 100 kilometers (62 miles) in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, without anyone manning the train. "This successful pilot run puts us firmly on track to meet our goal of operating the world's first fully-autonomous heavy haul, long distance rail network, which will unlock significant safety and productivity benefits for the business," Rio Tinto Iron Ore chief executive Chris Salisbury stated in the press release issued Monday. "New roles are being created to manage our future operations and we are preparing our current workforce for new ways of working to ensure they remain part of our industry."