The invasion of robots into factories and offices has long been seen as final blow for workforces ravaged by cheap offshore labour and the never ending quest to cut costs. However, that is a view being seriously challenged in hi-tech steel fabricating factory just south of Brisbane. Having put "artificially intelligent" welding and cutting equipment to work, Smart Steel Systems chief executive Chis Brugeaud said he was now able to bring back jobs "onshore" and reverse the trend of laying off people as technology improves. "What makes us different from the traditional fabricator is we have as many developers as we do welders, so we can process around 42,000 tonnes of steel a year," Mr Brugeaud told The Business program. Robotics has delivered two noticeable outcomes.

"OK Google, what can you do when connected to Talend?" In this tutorial, I will show how to create an Agent in API.AI that will respond to commands spoken to Google Home. The Agent will reverse the words in a sentence spoken to Google Home by making use of a Talend web service which is used to carry out the word reversal. A very simple example, but it demonstrates the ground work you will need to create some really quite interesting applications. You do not need one to try this tutorial out as Google has provided an emulator, but I can highly recommend the device. Recently Google opened up access to the Actions on Google API. You can either use the Actions SDK or use API.AI. API.AI was recently acquired by Google. While API.AI is really quite simple to use, it is quite limited in how it can be used with Google Home at the moment.

Yesterday, AMD showed off the first real-time benchmarks of the Radeon Vega graphics card against the NVIDIA Pascal based Tesla P100 in deep learning benchmarks. In its first attempt, the RTG developed GPU was able to give NVIDIA's best compute card from last year a good beating but there's more to the benchmarks. NVIDIA launched the Tesla P100 based on Pascal GP100 back in early 2016. Since then, it has been the fastest compute solution available to date. NVIDIA kicked off 2017 with the announcement of the next chapter in graphics deep learning.

Making inferences from data streams is a pervasive problem in many modern data analysis applications. But it requires to address the problem of continuous model updating, and adapt to changes or drifts in the underlying data generating distribution. In this paper, we approach these problems from a Bayesian perspective covering general conjugate exponential models. Our proposal makes use of non-conjugate hierarchical priors to explicitly model temporal changes of the model parameters. We also derive a novel variational inference scheme which overcomes the use of non-conjugate priors while maintaining the computational efficiency of variational methods over conjugate models. The approach is validated on three real data sets over three latent variable models.

Is bingeing a good thing? The mobile network Three would like to persuade you it is. Its latest, just-announced phone tariff is called Go Binge and it encourages you to make the most of your 4G connection with streaming that doesn't impact on your monthly data total. Not for just any streaming, you understand, but for four carefully picked apps. They're pretty good apps to choose, though: Netflix, TVPlayer, Deezer and SoundCloud.

If ever there was an event specifically designed to send the regular Sydney Opera House clientele into a near-fatal frenzy of monocle popping, it was this one: a video game festival hosted at Australia's most famous cultural icon. But whatever misgivings one may have about Minecraft at the Opera House, when I arrive the mood is buoyant. More still stand in line to meet the "celebrities of Minecraft" – a concept that would be impossible to even begin to explain to someone 10 years ago. Others are marshalled into groups, waiting side stage in the concert hall to take part in Australia's first Minecraft tournament. The parents take in the scene with an air of contented bafflement. Their confusion is understandable: on the surface, Minecraft as a popular game, let alone an international phenomenon, is hard to explain.

An Australian startup revealed its flagship product, an earpiece that can interpret 8 different languages in real-time, at a United Nations event in Switzerland on Friday. Lingmo International, a startup based in West Gosford north of Sydney, launched its TranslateOne2One earpiece at the UN's Artificial Intelligence for Good Summit in Geneva, revealing that IBM Watson machine learning technology had been used for its algorithms. Traditionally, converting one language to another orally in real-time is called "interpreting" whereas the term "translation" is reserved for processing text across languages with some delay. Lingmo founder Danny May, however, describes his product as performing "translation in real-time". And what I mean by independent is that it doesn't require any connectivity to your phone by Bluetooth or wi-fi.

A species of cuckoo appears to have learned how to use its beak to mimic the teeth chattering of wild pig-like animals called peccaries in order to ward off predators. The ground cuckoo, found in forests in Central and South America, often follow herds of peccaries to feed on the insects disturbed as they walk through leaf litter. Scientists have spotted that the birds use their beaks to sound like the teeth clacks the peccaries make to scare away large predatory cats. Last week, scientists found that parrots can use sticks to create drumming music in a similar way to humans. Wild palm cockatoos were filmed using sticks and seed pods to create rhythmic sounds as part of a complex mating ritual which also includes screeching, head bobbing and blushing, according to researchers.

SummerSlam is still more than a month away, but WWE has its biggest pay-per-view since WrestleMania 33 set for Sunday night. Great Balls of Fire 2017 features a stacked card with several intriguing matches. It'd be stunning to see Joe beat Lesnar and win his first title on the main roster. That doesn't mean it's not a highly anticipated match, and the build towards Sunday's main event has been better than any of Lesnar's recent feuds. Even if Joe does get pinned to end the PPV, he should find himself near the top of the card at SummerSlam because of what he's done in the weeks leading up to this WWE Universal Championship Match.

Forecasting the weather is notoriously difficult, but scientists are using the latest in computer technology to make the process more accurate. By using massive amounts of data, they hope to be able to predict possible weather patterns with greater certainty. If their efforts prove successful, it could enable meteorologists to foresee major events years, or even decades, in advance. This could have enormous life saving potential in the case of extreme weather, like hurricanes, droughts and floods. Experts from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology are using computer modelling to analyse vast amounts of information about the planet's climate.