"AI is not far off, it's just the next layer of automation," he said. He gave example of how photography jobs have changed since the early 1990s. He said the number of photographic developers and printers declined but the number of photographers has increased, which shows how automation and innovation allow people to focus on creative work. Kaila Colbin, New Zealand ambassador of Silicon Valley think tank Singularity University, said automation and subsequent loss of jobs have been happening for a long time but the emergence of AI posed threats for jobs that humans were traditionally considered to be more capable at. She said inventions such as AI lawyer "Ross" and chatbot which contested 160,000 parking tickets in London and New York - presents threats for humans.

If you've got a friend you're dying to set up on a date, then there's good news as a new online dating app lets you play'virtual Cupid.' Hinge has unveiled a new standalone app called Hinge Matchmaker that lets people help their single friends to find love by suggesting matches based on your Facebook friends. The beta test version of the app is free to download, and is available to all Hinge markets in the UK, US, Canada, Australia and India. Hinge Matchmaker gives people in a relationship a chance to set up their single friends, based on your Facebook friends who have a profile on Hinge. As the matchmaker, the power is left in your hands to decide whether your friend should connect on Hinge, with the option to send an icebreaker message to get the conversation started. As well as randomly recommending potential couples, Hinge Matchmaker also has an option for you to take control and select a specific friend you'd like to help by selecting the'lock' option on their profile.

The power of machine learning, data science and big data is no longer considered a hype or fad. Data has emerged as a real competitive edge and disruptive force for enterprises. Companies that make the most of data by using machine learning and data science will win and outlast in this digital world. IBM recently extended its partnership with Hortonworks to better help businesses accelerate data-driven decision making. Hortonworks is the leading industry and only pure open source Hadoop platform.

The field of AI has reached an inflection point today, where it is on the cusp of revolutionising areas as diverse as security, finance, transport, healthcare and government service delivery. Availability of massive volumes of data, relatively inexpensive computational capabilities and improved training techniques, such as deep learning, have led to significant leaps in AI capabilities and will only continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The pace is accelerating and governments need to figure out how to deal with this era of AI 2.0, where AI is becoming all-pervasive. Where if they want to unlock the potential of the data being generated at an ever-increasing velocity, government departments need AI at their fingertips, in the here and now. On September 14, senior executives from a wide range of key public sector agencies in Singapore and institutes of higher learning gathered for a vibrant, insightful discussion on the next stage of artificial intelligence.

ETF Securities Australia has launched an exchange-traded product on the ASX that provides access to global robotics, artificial intelligence and automation stocks. The ETF Securities ROBO Global Robotics and Automation ETF (ROBO), which tracks the ROBO Global Robotics and Automation Index, began trading on the ASX yesterday. According to a statement by ETF Securities, the robotics economy is estimated to be worth US$1.2 trillion by 2025, driven by demand for higher productivity and applications in various industries. Commenting on the launch of the ETF, head of ETF Securities Australia Kris Walesby said, "The robotics and automation industries are part of a global megatrend which is expected to outperform the broader market in coming decades. "ROBO Global is the pioneer in this area, having created the first robotics and automation ETF on the NASDAQ in 2013, and continues to work with a strategic advisory team including leading robotics experts.

Aussie investors have eagerly embraced Initial Public Offerings (IPO's) in the past few years, especially in companies operating in "hot" sectors like technology. Unfortunately, many of these stocks see significant drops in share price following a hot start. One stock breaking that trend dramatically is Appen Limited (ASX), debuting on the ASX on 7 January of 2015. The share price has been on a steady climb since and is now up over 800% from its first day of trading. The Appen website describes the company as a global leader in the development of high-quality, human-annotated datasets for machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Finally, a solution for our increasingly congested roads is on the horizon. In last week's Huawei Connect conference, Shenzhen's Traffic Police Technology Chief Li Quiang announced the launch of their Traffic Brain system. Shenzhen is basically like the "Silicon Valley of Hardware", with some of the world's largest hardware manufacturers and tech companies setting up shop there. So it's no surprise that one of the most advanced traffic management systems in the world is being rolled out there first. This traffic management system represents some seriously advanced tech.

Come January, the "Westworld" concept of lifelike sex robots will get one step closer. That's when a San Marcos company will unveil Harmony, an anatomically correct sex doll with a patented animatronic talking head with programmable personality and memory. News of creator Matt McMullen's latest invention -- he's been making lifelike silicone sex dolls for 20 years -- has created international media interest and a firestorm of criticism from ethicists and futurists who see a dark side to a sex doll that becomes more "human" with each technological innovation. One critic worries that the doll's artificial intelligence app could be hacked to make it kill its owner (like the vengeance meted out by sex robots in the film "Ex Machina" and TV show "Westworld"). And women's advocates say owners could realistically rehearse plans for violent sexual acts with the interactive dolls.

Abstract-- An accurate and reliable image based fruit detection system is critical for supporting higher level agriculture tasks such as yield mapping and robotic harvesting. This paper presents the use of a state-of-the-art object detection framework, Faster R-CNN, in the context of fruit detection in orchards, including mangoes, almonds and apples. Ablation studies are presented to better understand the practical deployment of the detection network, including how much training data is required to capture variability in the dataset. Data augmentation techniques are shown to yield significant performance gains, resulting in a greater than twofold reduction in the number of training images required. In contrast, transferring knowledge between orchards contributed to negligible performance gain over initialising the Deep Convolutional Neural Network directly from ImageNet features. Finally, to operate over orchard data containing between 100-1000 fruit per image, a tiling approach is introduced for the Faster R-CNN framework. The study has resulted in the best yet detection performance for these orchards relative to previous works, with an F1-score of 0.9 achieved for apples and mangoes. I. INTRODUCTION Vision based fruit detection is a critical component for infield automation in agriculture. With accurate knowledge of individual fruit locations in the field, it is possible to perform yield estimation and mapping, which is important for growers as it facilitates efficient utilisation of resources and improves returns per unit area and time. Precise localisation of the fruit is also a necessary component of an automated robotic harvesting system, which can help mitigate one of the most labour intensive tasks in an orchard [1].

Artificial intelligence has jumped from sci-fi movie plots into mainstream news headlines in just a couple of years. And the headlines are often contradictory. AI is either a technological leap into greater prosperity or mass unemployment; it will either be our most valuable servant or terrifying master. But what is AI, how does it work, and what are the benefits and the concerns? AI is a computer system that can do tasks that humans need intelligence to do. "An intelligent computer system could be as simple as a program that plays chess or as complex as a driverless car," Mary-Anne Williams, professor of social robotics at the University of Technology, Sydney, said.