Elon Musk, founder, CEO and lead designer at SpaceX and co-founder of Tesla, speaks at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference in Washington, U.S., July 19, 2017. A revolution in warfare where killer robots, or autonomous weapons systems, are common in battlefields is about to start. Both scientists and industry are worried. The world's top artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics companies have used a conference in Melbourne to collectively urge the United Nations to ban killer robots or lethal autonomous weapons. An open letter by 116 founders of robotics and artificial intelligence companies from 26 countries was launched at the world's biggest artificial intelligence conference, the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), as the UN delays meeting until later this year to discuss the robot arms race.

David Fletcher was born in England in 1952. On leaving school he studied production engineering for five years then jumped on an aircraft bound for New Zealand where he's lived ever since. He was employed as an illustrator and cartoonist by New Zealand's largest daily newspaper, the New Zealand Herald, for three years, but for the last thirty years he's been pretending to work from home as a comic strip artist. He draws two daily strips called The Politician and Crumb the Blackbird, also several weekly strips. His cartoons are syndicated to Europe, Britain, US, Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

September 29, 2017 Adelaide/Sydney, Australia--To cut costs, Elon Musk's SpaceX company has shrunk the size of the rocket ship it is developing to go to Mars, aiming to start construction on the first spaceship in the first half of next year, Mr. Musk said on Friday. SpaceX plans its first trip to the red planet in 2022, carrying only cargo, to be followed by a manned mission in 2024, Musk, who serves as chief executive and lead designer of Space Exploration Technologies, said at a conference in Adelaide. NASA's first human mission to Mars is expected about a decade later. Musk had previously planned to use a suite of space vehicles to support the colonization of Mars, beginning with an unmanned capsule called Red Dragon in 2018, but he said SpaceX is now focused on a single, slimmer and shorter rocket instead. "We want to make our current vehicles redundant," he said.

Lockheed Martin has revealed plans to set up a'Mars base camp' orbiting the red planet - and says it hopes to launch it within ten years. Using NASA's Orion spacecraft as the command deck, the orbiting outpost could give astronauts the ability to operate rovers and drones on the surface in real time, helping us better understand the Red Planet and plan for manned missions. 'The time is now,' Lockheed Martin said in a video revealing the project at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, Australia, where it also showed off a lander that could eventually take astronauts form the station to the red planet's surface. Using NASA's Orion spacecraft as the command deck, the orbiting outpost could give scientists the ability to operate rovers and drones on the surface in real time, helping us better understand the Red Planet and work out where manned missions doulc land'Sending humans to Mars has always been a part of science fiction, but today we have the capability to make it a reality,' said Lisa Callahan, vice president and general manager of Commercial Civil Space at Lockheed Martin. 'We're proud to have Orion powered-on and completing testing in preparation for its Exploration Mission-1 flight and eventually its journey to Mars.' Mars Base Camp is aligned with NASA's recently-announced lunar Deep Space Gateway approach for developing and testing systems, including Orion, in lunar space before using them to go to Mars.

SAN FRANCISCO/SYDNEY – Entrepreneur Elon Musk, who envisions a human colony on Mars, is planning to create a new, much larger rocket ship code-named "BFR" capable of traveling anywhere on Earth in under an hour. If the concept becomes reality, a journey from New York to Shanghai can be completed in about 30 minutes. The surprise announcement means that Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp., which has already disrupted the aerospace industry with reusable launches, plans to ferry humans not just to distant planets but across this one as well. "If we are going to places like Mars, why not Earth?" Musk said Friday at the 68th International Astronautical Congress on Friday in Adelaide, Australia.

Peer review, evaluation, and selection is a fundamental aspect of modern science. Funding bodies the world over employ experts to review and select the best proposals of those submitted for funding. The problem of peer selection, however, is much more general: a professional society may want to give a subset of its members awards based on the opinions of all members; an instructor for a MOOC or online course may want to crowdsource grading; or a marketing company may select ideas from group brainstorming sessions based on peer evaluation. We make three fundamental contributions to the study of procedures or mechanisms for peer selection, a specific type of group decision-making problem, studied in computer science, economics, and political science. First, we propose a novel mechanism that is strategyproof, i.e., agents cannot benefit by reporting insincere valuations. Second, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our mechanism by a comprehensive simulation-based comparison with a suite of mechanisms found in the literature. Finally, our mechanism employs a randomized rounding technique that is of independent interest, as it solves the apportionment problem that arises in various settings where discrete resources such as parliamentary representation slots need to be divided proportionally.

The European Robotics League (ERL) announced the winners of ERL Emergency Robots 2017 major tournament, during the awards ceremony held on Saturday, 23rd September at Giardini Pro Patria, in Piombino, Italy. In addition to the Competition Awards, Marta Palau Franco from Bristol Robotics Laboratory and ERL Emergency project manager introduced the referees' special awards. "Behind a multi-domain competition there is always a large technical committee, I feel privileged to have worked with such an amazing team of volunteer referees, technical assistants and safety pilots and divers. We were delighted to give these awards to recognise teams' effort, fair play and hard work. The experience of participating in this robotics competition will prove beneficial for team members to develop further their professional career", said Marta Palau Franco.

BCS Technology, a Global IT company headquartered in Australia providing end to end solutions in big data and analytics, announced the launch of their chatbot solution -- Interactive Social Airline Automated Companion (ISAAC) built on Cloudera's modern platform for machine learning and analytics optimized for the cloud -- Cloudera Enterprise. ISAAC is now available on Cloudera's Solutions Gallery. ISAAC, analyses customer conversations in the airline and travel industry to derive insights and gain a 360-degree view of their customers in the easiest and most convenient way possible. The solution combines the use of modern big data analytics technologies and natural language processing (NLP) by leveraging Microsoft's LUIS framework and the Cloudera Enterprise platform. Businesses are able to create a customer experience using ISAAC that not only generates effective communication using predictive analytics, but also has the ability to collect this data and transform and translate it into prospective strategies and opportunities.

Drones using artificial intelligence will be deployed off beaches in New South Wales, Australia, to detect sharks and warn swimmers. The new drones will patrol beaches and use artificial intelligence to detect sharks in the water. It's not the first time drones have been used in Australia to detect sharks, but what makes the new drones interesting is that they do not rely on human operators controlling the drones to look for sharks. Instead, they use artificial intelligence software so they can spot sharks by themselves. To improve the results, additional software is also deployed to analyze the video feed from the drones to doubly make sure that sharks aren't missed.

It's a role-playing video game that, like many of its kind, allows users to choose and customize their own avatar, including a hairstyle and clothing. Set in a medieval fantasy world, users build up their power as their character travels across "provinces," overcoming obstacles and challenges along the way. What's unique about SPARX -- which stands for smart, positive, active, realistic, X-factor thoughts -- is that it's designed specifically for people with mild to moderate depression. SPARX was developed in the late 2000s by researchers and clinicians at the University of Auckland in New Zealand who became alarmed by the high suicide rate among teenagers in the country. They decided to develop a way to reach out to young people who shy away from seeking face-to-face counseling. The game's original English version is currently available only in New Zealand.