It organizes an annual conference, the first of which was held in 1996 in Hong Kong. Since then, 20 conferences have been held in Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand. The next conference, in 2015, will be held in Kyungpook National UniversityDaegu, Korea. The conferences provide an opportunity for teachers, students, researchers, and practitioners to meet each other and learn about the latest research in the field. The proceedings of the conferences are available both on line and in research libraries around the world.

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.

Sleepiness and stress are perennial risks for the long distance lorry driver, and accidents are sadly too frequent. However, a radical new driverless truck being trialled by Daimler may offer a solution. Earlier this month, the automotive giant was granted the first licence ever to test such a vehicle on a public highway by the US state of Nevada. Using a combination of GPS, radar and video cameras, the Freightliner Inspiration can drive by itself on open stretches of road, freeing a driver to take breaks, check his emails and even watch DVDs. The catch is that a qualified person must remain in front of the wheel at all times so they can take control if something goes wrong.

Two-thirds of the earth is underwater. We glide over the surface of the oceans, but we still have very little idea what is going on even a few metres down. We spend billions sending craft and people into space, but we do not really know what happens under the waves. One man who finds that more than curious is Graham Hawkes, a beneath-the-sea maverick who has been working on underwater craft for most of his life. It is a lonely, driven quest, relying rather dangerously on the engagement and backing of a few wealthy enthusiasts. Born in London, Mr Hawkes learnt his engineering expertise in the defence industry, working initially on torpedoes in Norfolk, England.

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.

Published by The AAAI Press, Menlo Park, California. This proceedings is available in book format. Please Note: Abstracts are linked to individual titles, and will appear in a separate browser window. Full-text versions of the papers are linked to the abstract text. Access to full text may be restricted to AAAI members.

ACCESS: a computer vision art project (ACCESS) - This project uses computer vision to track users and control a robotic spotlight. Users online can view two webcams and the tracking information. Behavioral model of active visual perception and invariant recognition (BMV) (Rostov State U) Content-Based Image Retrieval: Interactive Learning and Search - This demo has a supervised learning capability to fine tune search queries. Corner Detection in Curves - Five algorithms for corner detection in planar curves are described and presented for online comparison. Test images are provided, including defects in textiles.

Willow Garage, the now-disbanded Silicon Valley robotics incubator, unleashed some of the most impactful robot technologies of the past half-decade. Today, this formidable legacy lives on, in great part, through a host of Willow spin-offs that remain at the forefront of robotics. This article is not about them. It's about a Willow Garage project that was, at one point, on the verge of being spun out of the incubator, but is now all but forgotten. The project, called Heaphy, recognized that robots were still too limited in what they could do autonomously, and that instead of improving artificial intelligence, an alternative would be relying on more human intelligence.

I really need him back on the blog. We first wrote about Roombots three years ago, and back then the researchers at the EPFL Biorobotics Lab, led by Professor Auke Ijspeert, were just getting started with their self-assembling robotic furniture. Now the researchers have some real robots to show off. As Ijspeert himself puts it, this is a "crazy project" to create adaptive furniture that can change shape and functionality and even move around. His group has built robotic modules that can attach to one another and use onboard motors to change their shape.