For the people most immersed in the tech sector, it's hard to think of a more controversial topic than the ultimate impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on society. By eventually empowering machines with a level of superintelligence, there are many different possible outcomes ranging from Kurzweil's technological singularity to the more dire predictions popularized by Elon Musk. Despite this wide gap in potential outcomes, most technologists do agree on one thing: AI will have a profound impact on the society and the way we do business. Today's infographic comes from the Extraordinary Future 2017, a new conference in Vancouver, BC that focuses on emerging technologies such as AI, autonomous vehicles, fintech, and blockchain tech. In the below infographic, we look recent projections from PwC and Accenture regarding AI's economic impact, as well as the industries and countries that will be the most profoundly affected.

Artificial intelligence platforms are the next big battleground in mobile devices. Google is investing heavily in its platform, Google Assistant, and Samsung is taking its AI platform so seriously that it has even dedicated an entire button to it: that button on the left hand side of the Galaxy S8 and S8, that you can short press to call up Bixby's (currently barely populated) news service/reminders page, or that you can long press to call up . . . Well, to call up nothing at the moment, but when the Bixby updates roll out a long press of that button should open up an Australia version of the voice-recognition engine, one that officials say will be able to recognise even the most bogan Australian accent, and that will eventually speak back in an Australian accent, too. Getting Bixby to talk like an Australian may take a couple more updates, however, officials say. A Bixby that can understand American accents was released in a US in mid July.

Participants run ahead of Puerto de San Lorenzo's fighting bulls during the third bull run of the San Fermin festival in Pamplona, northern Spain. Each day at 8:00 am hundreds of people race with six bulls, charging along a winding, 848.6-metre (more than half a mile) course through narrow streets to the city's bull ring, where the animals are killed in a bullfight or corrida, during this festival, immortalised in Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel "The Sun Also Rises" and dating back to medieval times and also featuring religious processions, folk dancing, concerts and round-the-clock drinking. Iraqi women, who fled the fighting between government forces and Islamic State (IS) group jihadists in the Old City of Mosul, cry as they stand in the city's western industrial district awaiting to be relocated

Elon Musk and more than 100 leaders and experts in artificial intelligence (AI) have come together urging the UN to commit to an outright ban on killer robot technology. An open letter signed by Musk, Google Deepmind's Mustafa Suleyman, and 114 other AI and robotics specialists urges the UN to prevent "the third revolution in warfare" by banning the development of all lethal autonomous weapon systems. The open letter, released to coincide with the world's largest conference on AI – IJCAI 2017, which is taking place in Melbourne, Australia this week – warns of a near future where independent machines will be able to choose and engage their own targets, including innocent humans in addition to enemy combatants. "Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend," the consortium writes. "These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways."

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.

Samsung's Bixby voice assistant for the Galaxy S8 and galaxy S8 Plus is finally available worldwide. Bixby Voice is now being rolled out to more than 200 countries. Unfortunately, the service will only work in English and Korean languages for now. "Now millions of customers worldwide have access to a new and intelligent way of interacting with their phone," executive VP and head of R&D for Samsung's Mobile Business Injong Rhee said. "The expansion of Bixby's voice capabilities is an initial step in the continued rollout of Bixby functionality. In the future, Bixby will have the learning power to offer more intelligent and personalized interactions and seamless connections across more devices."

After months of delays, Samsung has finally launched its Bixby voice assistant in more than 200 countries worldwide. Among the countries with access to the smart assistant are the UK, Australia, Canada and South Africa – although it can only understand American English and Korean. The launch will come as a huge relief to Samsung, which suffered major delays as Bixby'struggled to understand English.' It operates through'Quick Commands' – a feature that allows users to create custom voice commands. For example, users can use the command'good night' as a shortcut for'Turn on Do-not-disturb mode, set an alarm for 6:00am and turn on blue light filter.'

Samsung has faced a tough slog getting Bixby to the masses, but now its voice assistant is accessible in more than 200 countries including the UK, Australia, Canada and South Africa. It's been available in South Korea and the US since July, when it launched after months of delays. Part of Bixby's appeal is its positioning beyond that of a simple voice assistant. Samsung claims it learns over time, recognizing "natural language" to make interacting with your phone easier and more intuitive. It understands cross-application commands and thanks to deep integration it can be accessed without any interruptions to what you're already doing on-screen.

Australian aged care provider, the IRT Group, has announced a world-first partnership with UK-based technology firm RDM Autonomous to develop driverless vehicles for residential aged care facilities. The Australian Ageing Agenda (AAA) reports that RDM Autonomous has recently opened its first satellite office in South Australia, and will be working with the IRT Group to bring autonomous cars to retirement homes. Details of the program will be revealed at the 2017 Information Technology in Aged Care (ITAC) Conference on the Gold Coast in late November, though the AAA reports that the companies plan to introduce RDM's Pod Zero (pictured) for initial testing at IRT's Kangara Waters facility in Canberra. Following the ITAC Conference, the Pod Zero will also make its way to one of the IRT Group's bases in Brisbane. Speaking with the AAA, Winston Mitchell, IRT IT project coordinator, said: "Piloting the technology on private roads within aged care communities hasn't been done before and IRT is eager to understand how driverless cars can improve residents' independence and quality of life". "Pod Zero will be programmed to safely navigate private roads within IRT Communities and residents will be able to hail Pod Zero and travel independently to appointments and social activities within their community."

Tropical cyclone wind-intensity prediction is a challenging task considering drastic changes climate patterns over the last few decades. In order to develop robust prediction models, one needs to consider different characteristics of cyclones in terms of spatial and temporal characteristics. Transfer learning incorporates knowledge from a related source dataset to compliment a target datasets especially in cases where there is lack or data. Stacking is a form of ensemble learning focused for improving generalization that has been recently used for transfer learning problems which is referred to as transfer stacking. In this paper, we employ transfer stacking as a means of studying the effects of cyclones whereby we evaluate if cyclones in different geographic locations can be helpful for improving generalization performance. Moreover, we use conventional neural networks for evaluating the effects of duration on cyclones in prediction performance. Therefore, we develop an effective strategy that evaluates the relationships between different types of cyclones through transfer learning and conventional learning methods via neural networks.