Melbourne was the final stop on this year's Salesforce Basecamp tour, and the final keynote of the event was given by Shaun Paga from Soul Machines, a New Zealand company specialising in building what they call "Artificial Humans". These are digital avatars with very detailed faces that respond to the emotional cues of the person they're talking to. Soul Machines was founded by Dr. Mark Sagar, who started out modelling body parts for medicine, then went into CGI, and has earned himself two Academy Awards for his work on Avatar and King Kong. After leaving the movie industry, Sagar set himself the task of building Artificial Humans, with the aim of radically advancing the interface between humans and computers. We've known for years that babies faces and behaviours have evolved to maximise valuable interactions with adults.

As both businesses and society today continue to embrace digitisation at an uncontrollable rate; fighting financial crime, money laundering and the funding of criminal activity are all growing in importance. The global phenomenon of digitisation has led to an increase in wire banking, thus raising pressure on banks and financial institutions to monitor and detect suspicious activity to prevent it coming to fruition. It is therefore crucial that the banking system today adopts the latest tools for a mature digital service, which include self-learning capabilities that are able to quickly adapt to the ever-changing banking environment. The recent narrative has been primarily focused on regulators ramping up demands for greater scrutiny of transaction monitoring, as well as threatening to impose hefty fines on non-compliant banks. In Australia, for example,The Sydney Morning Herald recently reported that the Commonwealth Bank has come under extensive scrutiny following an internal review of the bank's breach of global anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism laws, with legal proceedings now being levelled against it.

Nuance Nina named Best Intelligent Assistant Innovation during September 27 AIconics Awards ceremony at The AI Summit, the world's largest conference to showcase AI solutions that are transforming organizations. The AIconics Awards are the only independently-judged awards that celebrate AI for businesses and Nuance Nina was selected as part of a competitive analysis of more than 300 entries. Nuance Nina and customers win Intelligent Assistant Awards during September 18 ceremony at the Opus Research IA Conference. Nuance was honored alongside customers FedEx and IP Australia, with partner Datacom, for delivering notable customer experiences through natural language understanding, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. The Opus Research Intelligent Assistant Awards recognize leading brands who are utilizing virtual assistants to redefine digital commerce and customer care.

My colleagues and I had the privilege of attending Tata Consultancy Services' (TCS) Analyst Day event held in Boston on September 21, 2017. There were several interesting and informative presentations covering topics such as the concept of Business 4.0 and how TCS is deploying Digital, deep domain expertise and its deep and vast portfolio of services and solutions to provide its customers with exponential value through mass customization, leveraging ecosystems to help its customers embrace and manage risk while maximizing business outcomes. As one of the ARC Analysts focused on upstream and midstream oil & gas it was great to learn more about how TCS is leveraging'cognitive automation' through its solutions such as Ignio, an product that provides some very powerful horsepower through its self-learning capability, empowered by machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), that can move customers from predictive maintenance to prescriptive maintenance, thereby extending the life (and availability) of an asset such as a pump or compressor and also optimizing that asset's performance and the process for which it is being utilized. I know first-hand that TCS is successfully helping customers in Australia with pump optimization and increasing pump availability as well as, more importantly, helping to increase the customer's gas processing operations by saving over 100-man days per year, reducing pump downtime and increasing production. Harrick Vin, Global Head of Digitate, explained that he envisions advanced analytics platforms such as Ignio as being technology being augmented by people and one that is capable of learning over time.

Uber drivers could one day be spared from engaging in small talk with drunks if a National Transport Commission suggestion to allow people under the influence of alcohol to use fully automated vehicles is adopted by state road authorities. The NTC, an independent statutory body tasked with reforming Australia's driving laws to prepare for the arrival of driverless cars, has recommended an "exemption" from drink and drug-driving laws for people who ride in fully automated vehicles. In a new discussion paper it argues there is a "clear-cut" justification for an exemption from drink-driving laws because there is "no possibility that a human could drive a dedicated automated vehicle". "The situation is analogous to a person instructing a taxi driver where to go," the NTC report states. State traffic laws prohibit driving under the influence of varying levels of alcohol but the NTC says they could be a "barrier" to the benefits of driverless vehicles, which it argues could improve road safety by reducing the incidence of drink-driving.

One of the biggest advances in transportation has been self-driving technology, which has facilitated breakthroughs in not just self-driven cars, but even driverless trains, self-flying planes and self-navigating ships. Rio Tinto, an Australian mining corporation, has unveiled the first operational driverless train in Western Australia, even before China, which has its own similar automated train in the works. The train completed its first run of 100 kilometers (62 miles) in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, without anyone manning the train. "This successful pilot run puts us firmly on track to meet our goal of operating the world's first fully-autonomous heavy haul, long distance rail network, which will unlock significant safety and productivity benefits for the business," Rio Tinto Iron Ore chief executive Chris Salisbury stated in the press release issued Monday. "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."

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.

David Fletcher was born in England in 1952. On leaving school he studied production engineering for five years then jumped on an aircraft bound for New Zealand where he's lived ever since. He was employed as an illustrator and cartoonist by New Zealand's largest daily newspaper, the New Zealand Herald, for three years, but for the last thirty years he's been pretending to work from home as a comic strip artist. He draws two daily strips called The Politician and Crumb the Blackbird, also several weekly strips. His cartoons are syndicated to Europe, Britain, US, Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

September 29, 2017 Adelaide/Sydney, Australia--To cut costs, Elon Musk's SpaceX company has shrunk the size of the rocket ship it is developing to go to Mars, aiming to start construction on the first spaceship in the first half of next year, Mr. Musk said on Friday. SpaceX plans its first trip to the red planet in 2022, carrying only cargo, to be followed by a manned mission in 2024, Musk, who serves as chief executive and lead designer of Space Exploration Technologies, said at a conference in Adelaide. NASA's first human mission to Mars is expected about a decade later. Musk had previously planned to use a suite of space vehicles to support the colonization of Mars, beginning with an unmanned capsule called Red Dragon in 2018, but he said SpaceX is now focused on a single, slimmer and shorter rocket instead. "We want to make our current vehicles redundant," he said.

Lockheed Martin has revealed plans to set up a'Mars base camp' orbiting the red planet - and says it hopes to launch it within ten years. Using NASA's Orion spacecraft as the command deck, the orbiting outpost could give astronauts the ability to operate rovers and drones on the surface in real time, helping us better understand the Red Planet and plan for manned missions. 'The time is now,' Lockheed Martin said in a video revealing the project at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, Australia, where it also showed off a lander that could eventually take astronauts form the station to the red planet's surface. Using NASA's Orion spacecraft as the command deck, the orbiting outpost could give scientists the ability to operate rovers and drones on the surface in real time, helping us better understand the Red Planet and work out where manned missions doulc land'Sending humans to Mars has always been a part of science fiction, but today we have the capability to make it a reality,' said Lisa Callahan, vice president and general manager of Commercial Civil Space at Lockheed Martin. 'We're proud to have Orion powered-on and completing testing in preparation for its Exploration Mission-1 flight and eventually its journey to Mars.' Mars Base Camp is aligned with NASA's recently-announced lunar Deep Space Gateway approach for developing and testing systems, including Orion, in lunar space before using them to go to Mars.