I have emerged, blinking, from the darkness of grant/paper writing purgatory (a.k.a December to March in Australia). It is time to get the blog going again, and to make up for the long gap in posts I'm going to start with the big one. The question I get every time I tell a colleague what I am working on, every time I give a lecture, every time I chat with someone new on social media. Over the course of the coming few blogposts, I intend to give my best answer to that question. I hope I can do it justice, because I don't really think it has been adequately explored elsewhere.

According to IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, it isn't going to be long ( 5 years-- according to the statement at ThinkForum) before every decision that is made by business is partly made by a cognitive system. These systems are touted as being systems that can learn, can understand and can help to define best practice in business. Last summer, when Rometty was speaking at Thinkforum in Sydney Australia, it didn't sound as though she considered it fiction on any level and in fact, much of what she's discussing already exists and is working to save us time and money. "Every industry has its Uber or Tesla, and many people say they are going to be a technology company of some kind. An important question is: When everyone is digital, who wins? "Digital for all has to be the foundation, but it's not the destination.

Australia's former world snooker champion Neil Robertson says an addiction to video games across his career has harmed both his professional and personal life. The 35-year-old Melburnian says longstanding obsessions with the Fifa football games, World of Warcraft and League of Legends deprived him of sleep and adversely affected his performances. "If you are a single guy and work in a normal job you can get around it," Robertson told Eurosport. "But you can't win professional snooker matches when you are tired." "The years I had the 100 centuries, I should probably have had around 120 because I got addicted like hell to Fifa 14," Robertson said. "That really affected the second half of my season.

Amazon is the exception to nearly every rule in business. Rising from humble beginnings as a Seattle-based internet bookstore, Amazon has grown into a propulsive force in at least five different giant industries: retail, logistics, consumer technology, cloud computing, and most recently, media and entertainment. The company has had its share of missteps -- the expensive Fire phone flop comes to mind -- but is also rightly known for strokes of strategic genius that have put it ahead of competitors in promising new industries. This was the case with the launch of cloud business AWS in the mid-2000s, and more recently the surprising consumer hit in the Echo device and its Alexa AI assistant. Today's Amazon is far more than just an "everything store," it's a leader in consumer-facing AI and enterprise cloud services. And its insatiable appetite for new markets mean competitors must always be on guard against its next moves.

Problem decomposition and theory reformulation, integrated cognitive architectures for autonomous robots, distributed constraint satisfaction problems, semigroup theory and dynamical systems, category theory in software design. Interests include machine learning, approximation algorithms, on-line algorithms and planning systems. Calvin, William H. – Theoretical neurophysiologist and author of "The Cerebral Code", and "How Brains Think". Gesture and narrative language, animated agents, intonation, facial expression, computer vision. Intersection of computer science and game theory, computer science and economics, multiagent systems, automated negotiation and contracting.

As American soldiers were being maimed by roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military was working feverishly on a solution. One problem: It wasted nearly a decade developing one that was available off the shelf in Israel, a staunch U.S. ally. "That's just one anecdote of the kind of parochialism that's been the case at the Pentagon. That mentality, that mindset needs to change," said Ken Weinstein, president and CEO of the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank on international affairs and technology. More collaboration with foreign partners is needed, but that might be easier said than done, Dr. Weinstein said during a trip to Atlanta to speak at the annual AmCham Germany Business Day event organized by BridgehouseLaw at the Porsche Experience Center.

Hollywood gave us Sharknado, but real-life scientists have given us "Sharkcano" -- a highly active underwater volcano that is infested with sharks. And recently, those scientists presented us with another gift: They sent in a bunch of robots to get blown up in the eruptions. The robots, which were just some PVC pipes stacked with electronics, were necessary to take measurements of the Kavachi volcano in the South Pacific Ocean because it's too dangerous for humans to visit in the flesh, according to National Geographic. The scientific team was looking for things like temperature, carbon dioxide levels and acidity. After one enormous eruption, the researchers got even more than that when the robot caught pieces of ash that had just erupted as lava out of the Earth.

From phone support and mobile apps to ATMs and chatbots -- when it comes to customer service, banking automation has come a long way. However, the one missing piece that these automated banking features lack is a real human being to interact with during a transaction. That's something that Soul Machines, a New Zealand-based startup, is hoping to change. The company's new technological development is intended to bring back the human component to customer service without relying on actual people. To meet this goal, Soul Machines is producing artificial intelligence-powered avatars that are designed to emotionally engage with banking customers.

The New South Wales government looks set to allow home owners to rent out spare rooms and entire homes using Airbnb and similar sites but has committed to giving strata corporations greater powers to deal with problems in apartment blocks. The state government on Wednesday released its long-awaited response to last year's parliamentary inquiry into short-term holiday letting, offering "qualified support" to changes that would see the industry regulated in NSW for the first time. It has offered early support for exemptions from planning and development restrictions that would allow the short-term letting of spare rooms and empty properties that do not exceed undefined "impact thresholds". The government will now release a paper canvassing options for regulating the booming sector, prompting a fresh round of consultation. The NSW government has, however, made a firm commitment to give strata corporations greater powers to deal with "adverse behaviour" from properties being used as party houses.

Researchers used a drone to capture rare aerial images of blue whale's feeding. Blue whales, the largest creature on Earth, get their energy by consuming krill - some of the smallest animals on Earth. With the drone, the researchers were able to gain an aerial perspective of a blue whale on its side, lunging to eat a large plume of krill in one big bite. In the video taken in New Zealand, the whale sees that there is a large krill patch in the water. Dr Leigh Torres, Assistant Professor at Oregon State University's Marine Mammal Institute, said that the behavior'is something we often see from the boat, and we see splashing and we can tell the animal turns on its side but - but with the drone we were able to get this remarkable new perspective'.