Whether or not shark attacks are a major problem in Australia (spoiler alert: they're not), the Australian government has devoted an enormous amount of resources into trying to mitigate the risk of sharks near popular beaches. They've tried nets to keep the sharks out, they've tried electronic gadgets to dissuade them, and they've tried lots of different ways of killing them, without much in the way of evidence that any of it is particularly effective. After six months of trials, the latest and most robot-y idea is about to be implemented: drones will start patrolling some Australian beaches next month, using cameras and some AI-backed image analysis software to spot lurking sharks much better than humans can. We can manage a 20-30 percent accuracy rate, which means both identifying other things as sharks (kinda bad) and misidentifying sharks as other things (way worse). As with many tasks of this kind, a machine learning system does much better: once it's been trained on labeled aerial videos of sharks, whales, dolphins, surfers, swimmers, boats, and whatever else, the software is 90 percent accurate at telling humans to panic because there's a shark somewhere.

Pioneers from the worlds of artificial intelligence and robotics – including Elon Musk and Deepmind's Mustafa Suleyman – have asked the United Nations to ban autonomous weapon systems. A letter from the experts says the weapons currently under development risk opening a "Pandora's box" that if left open could create a dangerous "third revolution in warfare". The open letter coincides with the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, which is currently being held in Melbourne, Australia. Ahead of the same conference in 2015, the Telsa founder was joined by Steven Hawking, Steve Wozniak and Noam Chomsky in condemning a new "global arms race". Suggestions that warfare will be transformed by artificially intelligent weapons capable of making their own decisions about who to kill are not hyperbolic.

Drones are harnessing artificial intelligence to detect sharks approaching Australian beaches. Starting next month, Little Ripper drones will be able to monitor sharks in real-time with approximately 90 percent accuracy. By contrast, humans are only about 20 to 30 percent accurate when spotting sharks. "It's not about replacing human beings all together, it's about assisting human beings to get the work done in a better way with more accuracy," Dr. Nabin Sharma, a research associate at the University of Technology Sydney's School of Software said in an interview with Reuters. "That's what the application is meant for."

With shark attacks increasing every year, more vigilance is needed, especially at beaches popular for surfing. Since it has become evident that human vigilance is just not enough, technology is coming to the fore -- starting next month, the Australian government will deploy artificially intelligent'Little Ripper' drones on the country's beaches for enhanced surveillance. Little rippers cost $250,000 and can stay in the air for two and a half hours at a time. In case of an imminent attack, the drone will carry inflatable rafts and GPS beacons to aid rescuers. They will monitor the beaches using on board cameras.

At best, they'll accurately pinpoint sharks 30 percent of the time -- not very helpful for swimmers worried about stepping into the water. Australia, however, is about to get a more reliable way of spotting these undersea predators. As of September, Little Ripper drones will monitor some Australian beaches for signs of sharks, and pass along their imagery to an AI system that can identify sharks in real-time with 90 percent accuracy. Humans will still run the software (someone has to verify the results), but this highly automated system could be quick and reliable enough to save lives. The detection AI is a quintessential machine learning system.

At 23, Ally McLean already has what many would consider an enviable career. Currently the project lead at Sydney independent game development studio Robot House, McLean got her start as a professional cosplayer – designing and wearing elaborate gaming and pop-culture character costumes at comic book and gaming conventions. She spent years working directly with companies like Microsoft and Hi-Rez, before moving to community and marketing roles on video games The Witcher 3 and Warhammer 40,000: Regicide. But as for so many other young women trying to break into a male-dominated industry, it took her a long time to stop feeling like an outsider. "I lost count of the number of male executives or established developers who behaved excruciatingly sexist either towards me or in my presence," she says.

Australia's famed Gold Coast, a 43-mile surfing mecca along the country's eastern shores, is looking to use AI-powered drones to warn people of sharks, lest they become chum. The humid, subtropical climate has seen fourteen shark attacks in the last two years that have resulted in two deaths, but a new shark-spotting initiative will officially debut in September after a year of R&D. It involves quad-copters that will fly above the greenish-blue water, relaying video to image-recognition technology that will determine if the footage is of mere dolphins, or something more deadly. And if a Jaws-like creature is confirmed, the drone sounds an alarm and can drop a four-person life raft and communication device that could enable swimmers to call for help. Australia's the Ripper Group is supplying the actual drones, while a team from the University of Technology Sydney developed the AI.

More than 100 of the world's top robotics experts wrote a letter to the United Nations recently calling for a ban on the development of "killer robots" and warning of a new arms race. But are their fears really justified? Entire regiments of unmanned tanks; drones that can spot an insurgent in a crowd of civilians; and weapons controlled by computerised "brains" that learn like we do, are all among the "smart" tech being unleashed by an arms industry many believe is now entering a "third revolution in warfare". "In every sphere of the battlefield - in the air, on the sea, under the sea or on the land - the military around the world are now demonstrating prototype autonomous weapons," says Toby Walsh, professor of artificial intelligence at Sydney's New South Wales University. "New technologies like deep learning are helping drive this revolution. The tech space is clearly leading the charge, and the military is playing catch-up."

R is considered as lingua franca of Data Science. Candidates with expertise in R programming language are in exceedingly high demand and paid lucratively in Data Science. IEEE has repeatedly ranked R as one of the top and most popular Programming Languages. Almost every Data Science and Machine Learning job posted globally mentions the requirement for R language proficiency. All the top ranked universities like MIT have included R in their respective Data Science courses curriculum.

SpaceX is poised to fire off a fresh Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday, delivering a comically tiny payload for Taiwan's National Space Organization. At 1,047 pounds, the Formosat-5 Earth-observing satellite is almost light enough for a human to deadlift--but it'll launch atop a Falcon 9 rocket with 50 times more capacity. The overkill is thanks to a years-long delay, and SpaceX will take a substantial financial hit to make good on a contract it signed in 2010. Elon Musk's spaceflight company will attempt to launch the rocket from Vandenberg Air Force base in California during a 42-minute window opening at 11:51am PDT on Thursday. The satellite is bound for heliosynchronous orbit, where it will pass over Taiwan every two days for data retrieval. After the lightest single payload to ever hitch a ride on a Falcon 9 separates, the booster will fly back for a drone ship landing--hopefully to be reused in future, more economically viable missions.