Australia's international airports are in the process of automating 90 percent of air traveler processing by 2020 by implementing facial recognition technology that involves biometric recognition of faces, irises and/or fingerprints, hence eliminating the need to carry essential traveling documents such as passports. The Department of Immigration and Border Protection, while building on the Seamless Traveller initiative announced in 2015, said Sunday that it will make a transition toward a "contactless" system for arrivals this year, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Under the new system, manned counters will be replaced by automatic electronic booths and the existing SmartGate that scan passports electronically will also be overhauled. Before introducing it to a major airport (scheduled for November), the program is to be piloted in July at Canberra Airport where international flight operations are limited to New Zealand and Singapore. The Department of Immigration and Border Protection is scheduled to implement the technology in all major airports by March 2019.

Australians reacted more "positive" than "negative" to the election of Donald Trump as the next president of the United States, according to a sentiment analysis study of tweets that were posted at the time. Only tweets sent on November 10, 2016, (just after the result of the US election) that included the word "Trump" and were sent from an Australian capital city were analysed. This resulted in 32,908 tweets including retweets being retrieved. For the purpose of this analysis we classified the tweet sentiment as either positive, negative or neutral. The figures (above) display the sentiment for each capital city and show that in Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra and Hobart there were more positive tweets about Trump. In Darwin, Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth there were more negative tweets.

When psychologist Dr. Paul Ekman visited the Fore tribe in the highlands of Papua New Guinea in 1967, he probably didn't imagine that his work would become the foundation for some of the latest developments in artificial intelligence (AI). After studying the tribe, which was still living in the preliterate state it had been in since the Stone Age, Ekman believed he had found the blueprint for a set of universal human emotions and related expressions that crossed cultures and were present in all humans. A decade later he created the Facial Action Coding System, a comprehensive tool for objectively measuring facial movement. Ekman's work has been used by the FBI and police departments to identify the seeds of violent behavior in nonverbal expressions of sentiment. He has also developed the online Atlas of Emotions at the behest of the Dalai Lama.

Originally from Leeds, U.K., Andy Russell received his BEng (Hons) and Ph.D degrees from the University of Liverpool. Prior to immigrating to Australia in 1982, Andy worked as a design engineer in private industry and at the Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University. He is currently Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering at Monash University, where his primary areas of research are mechatronics and intelligent robotics. Particular interests include humanoid robotics, robot tactile sensing, olfactory sensing for robots, the design of robotic mechanisms and robot learning.

Is it acceptable for a driverless car to deliberately swerve in a way that saves its own passengers yet kills a pedestrian? That and other ethical dilemmas related to artificial intelligence will be put under the microscope by Kiwi researchers receiving $400,000 in funding from the charitable Law Foundation trust. With AI technology set to increasingly transform transport, crime prevention and other areas the Otago University research aims to inform public policy over three years. "New technologies are rapidly transforming the way we live and work, and (this funding) will help ensure that New Zealand's law and policy keeps up with the pace of change," Law Foundation executive director Lynda Hagen said. Research project leader Colin Gavaghan said the legal, practical and ethical challenges posed by AI technologies, which learn and adapt for themselves, fascinated him.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is coming at us before we fully understand what it might mean. Established ways of doing things in areas like transport regulation, crime prevention and legal practice are being challenged by new technologies such as driverless cars, crime prediction software and "AI lawyers". The possible implications of AI innovations for law and public policy in New Zealand will be teased out in a new, ground-breaking Law Foundation study. The three-year multi-disciplinary project, supported by a $400,000 Law Foundation grant, is being run out of the University of Otago. Project team leader Associate Professor Colin Gavaghan of the Faculty of Law says that AI technologies – essentially, technologies that can learn and adapt for themselves – pose fascinating legal, practical and ethical challenges.

The couple have a 5-year-old daughter, Hailie Jade. U.S. Fulbright scholar JOHN EDWARD TOBIN, 24; with possession of marijuana; in Voronezh, Russia, where he was studying. In a bizarre chain of events, the Russian security service arrested Tobin on drug charges, then accused him of being a spy, an allegation denied by the State Department. The spy insinuations were later dropped, but officials may now charge him with drug dealing. A.R. AMMONS, 75, gregarious, self-effacing poet whose deceptively simple riffs on the relationship between Man and Nature have been likened to those of the 19th century transcendentalists Whitman and Emerson; of cancer; in Ithaca, N.Y.

The day we can't tell the difference between a human and robot just got a little bit closer. A Turing Test of sorts has been put to humans to see if they could differentiate between their fellow human and non-human combatants in a first-person shooter game. For the first time in the five years that the contest has run, humans couldn't tell the difference. The contest, conceived of and organized by Philip Hingston, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia, puts human and computer players on the battlefields of the first-person shooter game UT2004. After a few rounds of combat, the humans have to decide which players are human and which are bots.

"Alexa, why are you winning the smart home market?" It seems every appliance that's any appliance is adding Alexa support at CES 2017, giving Amazon a commanding lead in the race to become the de facto smart home standard. As someone who lives in Australia, where Amazon Echo hasn't launched, though, I'm left wondering when we'll get to join Alexa's gang. In the battle to become the brand that's synonymous with the smart home experience, building a global footprint will become important very soon. In a global market, selling to two of 200 countries won't keep you in the driver's seat for long.

It is vital to the economy that Australia embraces innovation, according to Andrew Penn, with the Telstra CEO saying Australia should mimic the telecommunications company's strategy of combining incubation and collaboration with building human skills and developing new technologies. Speaking at the Charles Todd Oration 2015 in Sydney on Thursday, Penn outlined the three drivers of innovation as being a combination of the move to mobile and consequently the Internet of Things (IoT); the widespread usage of cloud computing; and the rise of machine-to-machine (M2M) learning and artificial intelligence. "The exponential growth in data, driven by a massive shift to mobile and the Internet of Things with the ability to store and access that data in the cloud in real-time and the computing power with advanced algorithms and machine learning -- these factors together are providing the capacity to solve almost limitless problems," the CEO said. Citing a recent Deloitte report, Penn claimed that the digital sector contributed AU$79 billion in 2014 -- or 5.1 percent of the GDP -- making it the largest segment of the Australian economy. He said that the rapidity of technological innovation has had far-reaching implications for traditional business, however.