Jacky Zhen's paper Neuroevolution for Micromanagement in the Real-Time Strategy Game Starcraft: Brood War was nominated for Best Student paper at the 26th Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AI Communications 25:19-48., has been published. The 2011 Computer Poker Competition was held at the AAAI-11 Twenty-Fifth Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Our case-based poker agent, Sartre, competed in all events this year. Once again, Sartre's performance improved since the previous year's competition, placing 2nd in four events, 4th in one event and achieving a 1st place finish in the multi-player, limit Hold'em competition.

National Australia Bank will begin using voice recognition technology to identify its phone customers in the latest move towards the use of biometric security among the big banks. The company said that the technology, which identifies a person by their speech, will cut waiting times for users and boost security. NAB said up to 40 per cent of customers forget their phone banking passwords. It comes a month after ANZ announced it was looking into retina and fingerprint scanning as part of a $1.5 billion investment to upgrade customer services. In early October, ANZ floated the idea of retina-scanning automatic teller machines and said it was considering using electronic fingerprints as part of an effort to beat rival banks in the realm of technology. NAB's executive general manager of enterprise transformation, Adam Bennett, said speech recognition would save customers "a combined 15 million minutes a year".

Robots may hold the key to preventing an industrial crisis in a country whose geography makes many key jobs undesirable. I knew Australia was big, but it didn't really hit me till I stood on a viewing platform hanging over a valley in the Blue Mountains. As I watched the land fall away below me, giving way to a valley of forest that stretched to the horizon, I could feel thousands of miles of silence sucking me in like a vacuum. Part of Australia's beauty is also its problem. Its untamed, uninhabited interior contains rich pickings, but there are few who want to go and get them.

The Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence is a non-profit organization focused on organizing the annual Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) and, more generally, on promoting research in pursuit of advances in knowledge representation, learning and reasoning under uncertainty. The next UAI conference is the 33rd conference, UAI-2017 in Sydney, Australia. Join our Facebook group or add yourself to the UAI Mailing list to keep updated on announcements and relevant AI news. Principles and applications developed within the UAI community have been at the forefront of research in Artificial Intelligence. The UAI community and annual meeting have been primary sources of advances in graphical models for representing and reasoning with uncertainty.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a common topic of science fiction. Science fiction sometimes emphasizes the dangers of artificial intelligence, and sometimes its positive potential. The general discussion of the use of artificial intelligence as a theme in science fiction and film has fallen into three broad categories including AI dominance, Human dominance, and Sentient AI. The notion of advanced robots with human-like intelligence has been around for decades. Samuel Butler was the first to raise this issue, in a number of articles contributed to a local periodical in New Zealand and later developed into the three chapters of his novel Erewhon that compose its fictional Book of the Machines.

Australian big businesses are spending an average of $6 million a year on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, according to research released at the World Economic Forum. From driverless tractors on farms to banks using machine learning to predict investors, developments in AI can lead to better business outcomes, but they also raise potential concerns around ethics and opportunity. So what does this mean for startups and emerging entrepreneurs? "For startups, the popularity of artificial intelligence amongst big businesses presents a fantastic opportunity from a technology perspective," Infosys Australia and New Zealand vice-president and regional head Andrew Groth tells StartupSmart. Infosys, which conducted the study, is a $US10 billion ($13 billion) Indian-founded multinational firm specialising in new technologies.

When Bob Jones performed one of Victoria's first liver transplants in 1988, he could not imagine that 29 years later he'd be talking about artificial intelligence and online dating. Jones is the director of Austin Health's Victorian liver transplant unit in Melbourne, Australia, and along with his colleague Lawrence Lau, he has helped develop an algorithm that could potentially better match organ donors with organ recipients. Comparing it to the metrics behind dating site eHarmony, Jone said they planned to use the specially-designed AI to improve the accuracy of matching liver donors and recipients, hopefully resulting in less graft failures and fewer patient deaths. "It's a specially designed machine learning algorithm using multiple donor and recipient features to predict the outcome," he explained. The team plugged around 25 characteristics of donors and recipients into their AI, using the data points to retrospectively predict what would happen to organ grafts.

While dating apps have exploded in popularity, they're most often built with straight, cisgender men and women in mind. Founded by Diana Kalkoul and Neda Robat-Meily, two 20-something Sydneysiders who both have backgrounds in technology, the app aims to be LGBTQ-friendly from the start. "We're two queer individuals ... that are kind of frustrated with the lack of inclusivity dating apps present people with," Kalkoul told Mashable. The pair looked at dating apps like OKCupid -- traditional and a bit slow -- and Tinder -- the first to double-down on mobile -- but found none were quite right. "Tinder always catered to the hetero-market first," she said, "so you could either be male, you could either be female ... It was adopted by queer people and kind of augmented, but that was never the purpose."

The World Economic Forum's "Global Risks Report 2017″ says tech firms must take responsibility for the disruption caused by their innovations. A new report by the World Economic Forum lists IoT hacking and weaponized AI among what they say will be the top security threats in 2017. The Global Risks Report 2017 surveyed business executives in the US, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, UEA and other countries across the globe. Those executives cited cyberattacks as the biggest risk facing their businesses. The report pointed out the risks involved with letting decision-making be taken over by AI applications and said both AI and robotics can be serious risks without proper regulation and governance.

The objective of this paper is to present the process of building a Deep Learning Model for optimising the output for a Production Process from a Training sample using Weka Multilayer Perceptron. The scope is limited to implementation only and does not cover the theory behind Artificial Neural Networks. This work is the outcome of a comprehensive prototyping and proof-of-concept exercise conducted at Turing Point (http://www.turing-point.com/) a consulting company focused on providing genuine Enterprise Machine Learning solutions based on highly advanced techniques such as 3D discrete event simulation, deep learning and genetic algorithms. Predictive Analytics is the process of extracting information from the data for predicting future trends. There are a number of Machine Learning approaches available to model the behaviour.