Samsung has confirmed the firm will'soon' release a smart speaker designed to take on Amazon's Echo, Google's Home and Apple's HomePod. DJ Koh, the president of Samsung's mobile division, told CNBC a smart speaker was on the way. 'Maybe soon we will announce it. I am already working on it,' Koh said. 'As I mentioned I wanted to provide a fruitful user experience at home with Samsung devices, and I want to be moving quite heavily on it,' he added.

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.

The incredible possibilities artificial intelligence (AI) presents - and also its potential challenges - have made it an important talking point. Of course, there are a lot of myths out there about AI. Some like Alibaba founder Jack Ma said AI is not only a massive threat to jobs but could also spark World War III. Not only Ma, opinions are divided in the industry on whether AI is a job killer or a job creator. According to a recent report published by MIT Technology Review, Artificial Intelligence will not exactly eliminate jobs, but it will deconstruct them in the near future.

Disney's cuddly toys of the future could be smart enough to pick out the perfect bedtime story, thanks to a clever new artificial intelligence engine that's been trained to judge short works of fiction. Using neural networks designed to mimic the learning processes of human brains, the AI was trained using sample stories to recognise particular traits and patterns that would appeal to a broad range of readers. The team from Disney Research and the University of Massachusetts Boston says it's the first large-scale study of its kind on getting bots to evaluate the quality of texts, and could eventually lead to AI systems that are able to tell a good story as well as spot one in a crowd of literary tales. "Our neural networks had some success in predicting the popularity of stories," says one of the team, Boyang Albert Li from Disney Research. "You can't yet use them to pick out winners for your local writing competition, but they can be used to guide future research."

Sydney-based startup, Hyper Anna, has secured $16 million in funding to fuel a global rollout of'Anna', a virtual data scientist that taps into business intelligence and delivers real-time insights based on natural language requests. The Series A round of funding was led by Sequoia China, with significant investments from Airtree Ventures, Westpac Reinventure and IAG Firemark Ventures. Both Westpac and general insurer, IAG, are early adopters of Hyper Anna and use the platform internally to answer questions about business performance. Hyper Anna co-founder and CEO, Natalie Nguyen, told CMO customers have largely been SSI and in the financial and insurance sectors, but said the product could easily apply to other sectors such as media and technology. "The fact that some of our investors are also our customers gives us great confidence in the company, in ourselves, and the product," she said.

I applaud Peter J. Denning's Viewpoint "Remaining Trouble Spots with Computational Thinking" (June 2017), especially for pointing out the subject itself is often characterized by "vague definitions and unsubstantiated claims"; "computational thinking primarily benefits people who design computations and . . . Moreover, the accompanying table outlined various historic definitions of "computational thinking," including a comparison of what Denning called the "new" and the "traditional" view of the subject. However, my own interest in computational thinking differs somewhat from Denning's. First, I question the legitimacy of the term "computational" itself. Why say it, when the very subject is "computers" and the chief academic approach to their study is "computer science"? If one looks at how computers are actually used, it may come as a surprise to learn that few such uses actually involve computing. For example, applications that deal with scientific and engineering problems are of ...