The State Government of South Australia announced their contract with Solar Reserve to build a 150MW solar thermal power plant for Port Augusta, South Australia. This is an addition to the state-owned gas plant and the world's largest lithium ion battery recently announced contract with Tesla. According to State Premier Jay Weatherhill, this solar thermal plant "biggest of its kind in the world" and "will help make our energy grid more secure." This Aurora Solar Energy Project will be ready in 2020 and is expected to supply 100% of the government's anticipated power needs. IntelAI has been collaborating with NASA FDL's Lunar Water and Volatiles team in a 9-week program this year. Working with Intel's team and their deep learning technologies, Intel Nervana, NASA is looking to accelerate the development of a software solution to take AI to the moon.

Everyone's scared to take a bite from the fruit of knowledge. While earth can no longer be referred to as the Garden of Eden, humans, from time unknown, have been hesitant to embrace new knowledge and technology at once. One step at a time, has always been our motto. Be it films, books, music or theatre, our over-active imaginations have always been haunted by a dystopian future of the society. An unseen neural net-based "conscious group mind" and general Artificial Intelligence that is willing to do everything in its power to make sure it survives?

We study the problem of finding a short path from a start to a goal within a two-dimensional continuous and isotropic terrain that has been discretized into an array of accessible and blocked cells. A classic approach obtains a grid path where each step is along the edge of an accessible cell or diagonally across one. Grid paths suffer from `digitization bias' -- even if two locations have line-of-sight, the minimum travelling cost between them can be greater than the distance along the line-of-sight. In a vertex path, steps are allowed from a cell corner to any other cell corner if they have line-of-sight. While the `digitization bias' is smaller, shortest vertex paths are impractical to find by brute force. Recent research has thus turned to methods for finding short (but not necessarily shortest) vertex paths. To establish the methods' potential utility, we calculate upper bounds on the difference in length between the shortest vertex paths versus the shortest r-constrained ones where an r-constrained path consists of line segments that each traverse at most r rows and at most r columns of cells. The difference in length reduces as r increases -- indeed the shortest vertex paths are at most 1 percent shorter than the shortest 4-constrained ones. This article will be useful to developers and users of short(est) vertex paths algorithms who want to trade path length for improved runtimes in a predictable manner.

When we launched the Alternate Realities grant program in May we had no idea what to expect. We saw a need for funding in the arts happening at just the time when new media like AR and VR were starting to go mainstream. So, with support from our parent company, Oath, we set out to fund five immersive art projects that push the limits of storytelling through emerging technologies. Proposals came from as far away as Iran and Australia and ranged in discipline from theater to fashion, documentary to animation. There were multi-million dollar VR productions, animated shorts and escape rooms.

SITTING IN AN office in San Francisco, Igor Barani calls up some medical scans on his screen. He is the chief executive of Enlitic, one of a host of startups applying deep learning to medicine, starting with the analysis of images such as X-rays and CT scans. It is an obvious use of the technology. Deep learning is renowned for its superhuman prowess at certain forms of image recognition; there are large sets of labelled training data to crunch; and there is tremendous potential to make health care more accurate and efficient. Dr Barani (who used to be an oncologist) points to some CT scans of a patient's lungs, taken from three different angles.

Masters of Illusion Xavier Mortimer, Scott Pepper, Chris Randall, Joshua Jay, Murray SawChuck, Billy Kidd and Greg Gleason are the featured magicians in this new episode hosted by Dean Cain. Killjoys As the Killjoys plan to execute a high-risk theft on a well-armored convoy, Aneela (Hannah John-Kamen) is distracted by her own to find Delle Seyah (Mayko Nguyen). Guy's Family Road Trip The Fieris depart Flagstaff, Ariz., and enjoy a flight through the Grand Canyon before heading east on Route 66 and making a few stops before getting to Albuquerque. Dark Matter Former Raza crew member and now emperor Ryo (Alex Mallari Jr.) captures Two (Melissa O'Neil) and holds her hostage in a bid to force the crew of the ship to give up the Blink Drive. Three, Five and Six (Anthony Lemke, Jodelle Ferland, Roger Cross) are ready to deal, but Ryo's negotiating position is undermined by treachery among his own ranks in this new episode of the science-fiction series.

The robots are coming and the world of work is set to change forever: recent research from consultants PWC estimates a third of existing jobs are susceptible to automation, due to the use of robots and artificial intelligence (AI) by 2030. The survey adds more weight to a fast-growing body of work on the impact of AI. Take KPMG's recent global CIO survey in conjunction with recruiter Harvey Nash, which found almost two-thirds of CIOs are investing or planning to invest in digital labour, which broadly covers robotics, automation, and artificial intelligence. A quarter of these technology chiefs have already see very effective results. The survey suggests digital leaders are investing in digital labour at four times the rate of other executives.

Facebook's intelligent assistant M is now available for Facebook Messenger users in Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the U.K. M in Facebook Messenger first became available in April. M uses machine learning to scan words used in conversations to recommend actions or services. Tell someone good night and M may suggest a good night sticker. Chat about a plan and M may suggest you create a calendar event. M also suggests you do things like share your location, save a URL or video, initiate a voice or video call, or send best wishes when you're speaking to someone on their birthday.

AI replacing jobs - It does make for an interesting story. However, one major catch has been pointed out: there is not yet clear enough evidence that it's actually going to happen. Although, automation is not necessarily bad... Suppose it does occur - apart from making things faster with higher accuracy and efficiency, then won't automation through AI also create new categories of jobs? These are just some of the thoughts I had while watching the livestream of the #WatsonSummit in Auckland earlier this week. The one big, repeated theme from @ibmnz reinforced how #AI will augment rather than replace jobs or people.

In July, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Sharon Reardon considered whether to hold Lamonte Mims, a 19-year-old accused of violating his parole, in jail. One piece of evidence before her: the output of algorithms known as PSA that calculated the risk that Mims, who had previously been convicted of burglary, would commit a violent crime or skip court. Based on that result, another algorithm recommended that Mims could safely be released, and Reardon let him go. Five days later, police say, he robbed and murdered a 71-year old man. On Monday, the San Francisco District Attorney's Office said staffers using the tool had erroneously failed to enter Mims' prior jail term.