Ahead of China's own autonomous train reveal, mining corporation Rio Tinto have given the world its first fully-autonomous train, and it's currently in operation in Western Australia. Mining corporation Rio Tinto, which also developed the train, announced earlier this week the train had successfully completed its first unmanned mission, traveling nearly 100 kilometers (62 miles) without a person on board. "Rio Tinto is proud to be a leader in innovation and autonomous technology in the global mining industry which is delivering long-term competitive advantages as we build the mines of the future," said Rio Tinto Iron Ore Chief Executive Chris Salisbury, in a statement. "New roles are being created to manage our future operations and we are preparing our current workforce for new ways of working to ensure they remain part of our industry." The mission, located at Rio Tinto's iron ore operations in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, is the first big step in the company's plans to have a fully autonomous train network.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Mint's win at the first ever TechCrunch Startup Battlefield competition (back then – lost in the mists of time – it was known as TechCrunch 40). But what is less known about founder Aaron Patzer is that he's one of the pioneers of AI. Now based in the Southern Hemisphere, he's coming to speak at Techcrunch Battlefield Australia. In January this year, he started Vital Software, with Dr. Justin Schrager of Emory University, which makes software for hospital emergency rooms. When you include the fact that it's a mobile patient check-in for patients, and automatically creates electronic medical records designed for doctors and nurses, with the aim being to cut ER wait times in half, you start to understand the AI heritage it's come from. Patzer will join us as a speaker at TechCrunch Battlefield Australia in partnership with ELEVACAO, on November 16th at Australian Technology Park in Sydney.

Every year, artificial intelligence (AI) software bots compete and battle it out in the video game Universe of StarCraft. But a new player representing (of all things) Facebook entered into this arena -- CherryPi, an AI player designed by a team of eight people from or involved with Facebook's AI research lab. This foray into multiplayer gaming established Facebook as direct competition for others, like Google and even individual hobbyists (three of whom finished in the top three places). Gabriel Synnaeve, a researcher at Facebook, described CherryPi as a "baseline" prototype to learn and build from, he said, "We wanted to see how it compares to existing bots, and in particular test if it has flaws that need correcting." Some expect Facebook and Google to lag behind independently-designed bots for awhile, despite the tech giants' inexhaustible resources; "For a couple of years I predict the hobbyist, mostly rule-based bots, will still do well," said David Churchill, a professor of the Memorial University of Newfoundland, which organized AIIDE, an academic conference that includes contests like the StarCraft competition.

AI has been a hot topic among loyalty marketers in recent years, and even more this year. Can AI transform and elevate a loyalty marketer's approach to customer experience? A new study from Emarsys, conducted by Forrester Consulting, examines Artificial Intelligence (AI) marketing readiness in the retail and e-commerce industries. The study, "Building Trust and Confidence: AI Marketing Readiness in Retail and e-Commerce," sought to understand if there is still a gap between the readiness of AI marketing solutions to execute on real-time B2C marketing campaigns, and the readiness of marketing tech users and business decision makers to adopt AI marketing technology. The study surveyed companies in the U.S., U.K, Germany, France, and Australia that each had revenue of at least $50 million upward to $5 billion.

How far will AI take us in areas such as healthcare? Will we see medical pods like this one featured in science fiction film Prometheus to treat future patients? CIO veteran and industry consultant, Geoff Wenborn, sees enormous opportunity for artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare - identifying 35 use cases alone for robotics and AI at places like UnitingCare Queensland. Wenborn, who provides IT transformation consulting to several organisations including UnitingCare Queensland and Starlight Children's Foundation Australia (and built some proof of concepts), said the sky's the limit in terms of use case possibilities. At UnitingCare, he was the interim CIO charged with doing transformation, and is currently the chair of the Starlight IT Advisory Board.

How far will AI take us in areas such as healthcare? Will we see medical pods like this one featured in science fiction film Prometheus to treat future patients? CIO veteran and industry consultant, Geoff Wenborn, sees enormous opportunity for artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare - identifying 35 use cases alone for robotics and AI at places like UnitingCare Queensland. Wenborn, who provides IT transformation consulting to several organisations including UnitingCare Queensland and Starlight Children's Foundation Australia (and built some proof of concepts), said the sky's the limit in terms of use case possibilities. At UnitingCare, he was the interim CIO charged with doing transformation, and is currently the chair of the Starlight IT Advisory Board.

After the commander ill-advisedly opened the gate, the social network's alien horde stormed in and slaughtered forces stationed inside, in a battle fought on the frontiers of artificial-intelligence research. The bloody incident was part of an annual competition of the videogame StarCraft for AI software bots that wrapped up Sunday. Facebook quietly entered a bot called CherryPi designed by eight people employed by or affiliated with its AI research lab. The social network's stealthy space war suggests Facebook is serious about competing with Google and others to set showy new milestones in AI smarts. Google's London-based DeepMind AI research unit made headlines last year when its AlphaGo software defeated a champion at the board game Go.

With billions of sensors, smart machines and connected devices generating data every second, the Internet of Things (IoT) is placing unprecedented demands on organisations' data storage, processing and analytic capabilities. Cloudera (NYSE: CLDR), the modern platform for machine learning and analytics, optimized for the cloud, announced that more enterprises across an array of sectors are turning to Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub to power their IoT journey, generate actionable insights and as a result, disrupt their own industries. Cloudera is enabling real-time data insights and predictive analytics to help companies use IoT to drive operational efficiencies, introduce new products and services, improve the customer experience and create wholly new business models. Customers today are increasingly utilising components such as Apache Kudu and Apache Spark to drive real-time processing, machine learning, and analytics on all of their IoT data, including data in motion and data at rest. "Organisations who use machine learning and analytics to deliver new insights from the explosion of IoT data, have enormous power to disrupt entire industries," said Tom Reilly, chief executive officer at Cloudera.

This chapter provides an accessible introduction for point processes, and especially Hawkes processes, for modeling discrete, inter-dependent events over continuous time. We start by reviewing the definitions and the key concepts in point processes. We then introduce the Hawkes process, its event intensity function, as well as schemes for event simulation and parameter estimation. We also describe a practical example drawn from social media data - we show how to model retweet cascades using a Hawkes self-exciting process. We presents a design of the memory kernel, and results on estimating parameters and predicting popularity. The code and sample event data are available as an online appendix

Tesla founder Elon Musk believes he can rebuild Puerto Rico's power grid. Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks during a news conference at the Adelaide Oval in Adelaide, Australia on July 7, 2017. Tesla will partner with French renewable energy developer Neoen to build the world's biggest Lithium IIon Battery, a 100MW battery that will be built in James Town, the South Australian government announced on the day. SAN FRANCISCO -- Elon Musk has so many irons in the fire, you can't see the fire. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO tweeted Friday that he is delaying the unveiling of a self-driving truck in order to focus his attention on smoothing out Model 3 production issues and helping devastated Puerto Rico switch over to solar power. "Tesla Semi unveil now Nov 16," Musk tweeted, pushing it back around three weeks from the original Oct. 26 event.