Whether a beginner, a serious aviation enthusiast, or just a fan of gadgets, many of you will have received drones as Christmas gifts. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have surged in popularity and affordability in recent years, and there's no doubt that recreational drone use is on the rise as a result. But not all recreational drone users know the law -- or if they do, they don't appear to be following it. There has been a string of near misses between drones and other aircraft, and other cases of irresponsible use. Only last month, a recreational drone user was investigated by Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) after evidently flying a drone over a crowded Bunnings carpark to pick up a sausage at a sausage sizzle.

Most of the time when video games tackle the subject of cults it's to give heavily armed players more robe-wearing demon-worshippers to fire rockets at. Richard Rouse III's The Church in the Darkness takes a different approach. The game's cult, the Collective Justice Mission (CJM), has more in common with real world cults like Jim Jones' People's Temple, of Jonestown Massacre infamy. But -- and this is where Church in the Darkness gets really interesting -- the CJM isn't always doomed. SEE ALSO: Slick action indie game'Tokyo 42' channels'Grand Theft Auto' The game's narrative elements are randomized.

On the west coast of Australia, Amanda Hodgson is launching drones out towards the Indian Ocean so that they can photograph the water from above. The photos are a way of locating dugongs, or sea cows, in the bay near Perth--part of an effort to prevent the extinction of these endangered marine mammals. The trouble is that Hodgson and her team don't have the time needed to examine all those aerial photos. There are too many of them--about 45,000--and spotting the dugongs is far too difficult for the untrained eye. Deep learning is remaking Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon.

That "galaxy, far, far away" in the famed opening lines of "Star Wars" flicks actually is part of "our reality," according to a commentary released on a key site, KurzweilAI, that deals with artificial intelligence and the like. It's because the newest chapter of the long-running series, "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story," has a robot as a key character. The robot previously was part of the "Imperial Empire" but was captured and reprogrammed to become part of the rebel group that sets out to steal plans for the "Death Star" and uncover a fatal flaw. Jonathan Roberts, a professor of robotics at Queensland University of Technology, warns that robotic technology used in military conflicts could be turned back against those who created and released it. "Without giving away too many spoilers, K-2SO is part of the Rebellion freedom fighter group that are tasked with stealing the plans to the first Death Star, the infamous moon-sized battle station from the original Star Wars movie," he said. "Some robotics engineers and researchers are working on exactly this and have started to develop the algorithms that will enable autonomous military robots to be ethical.

Satellite images, with their zoomed-out view, have a way of reducing the world's features to a series of shapes and lines. In a new project called Land Lines, artists Zach Lieberman and Matt Felsen partnered with Google's Data Arts team to create an interactive platform that lets people explore these shapes with the drag of a finger. Think of Land Lines as reverse Google image search, but for lines. Using computer vision technology, Liberman and co were able to build a tool that matches hand-drawn lines to those found in a database of more than 50,000 Google satellite images. Draw a line on your desktop or phone, and Land Lines will find a landmass, freeway, bridge, river--something--that follows the same contour.

A computer's ability to accurately identify images is a white whale for many technology companies, from Baidu to Google. One Australian startup has found a corner of the market to dominate, winning contracts with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and IP Australia for algorithms that can detect and compare logos. SEE ALSO: Airbnb is getting into the airline booking disruption game with'Flights' TrademarkVision, which has support from Australia's CEA Startup Fund, uses machine learning to support image searches that can identify similar trademarks. Having a unique trademark or logo is vital, but many intellectual property registration bodies often require outdated forms of non-visual search that make comparison difficult. Australia, for example, relies on keywords, Europe on Vienna codes and the U.S. on design codes.

Cybercriminals are collaborating to refine their attacks and businesses must do the same by leveraging a growing body of open-source security tools, a security expert has advised as open-source machine learning puts the technology into the mainstream. Mainstream adoption of machine-learning techniques has become crucial for businesses that are being inundated with security-related data and are well past the hope of having humans – or security information and management (SIEM) platforms – keep up with the flood, Cloudera chief security architect Eddie Garcia recently told CSO Australia. "The machine learning part makes a huge difference," he said. "Whereas before SIEM technology searched for known patterns like DDoS or brute-force attacks, machine learning recognises a baseline of what normal activity is, and uses this to recognise anomalies." Machine-learning techniques exploded into the mainstream during 2016, with the launch of the Intel-Cloudera based Apache Spot platform http://spot.incubator.apache.org a turning point in the adoption of machine-learning techniques to security analytics.

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ICML is the leading international machine learning conference and is supported by the International Machine Learning Society (IMLS). The 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2017) will be held in Sydney, Australia, starting on Sunday, August 6th until Friday, August 11th, 2017.

The first successful trials of semi-automated vehicles have just been completed on Melbourne's EastLink with the Volvo S90 driving on its own in live traffic, the Australian Road Research Board (ARRB) has said. The trial forms part of an 18-month research project that aims to enable Victorian drivers to safely commute on the tollway with their hands off the wheel by 2018. NBN connection process adversely impacting 40 percent of businesses: ACMA Dump innovation patents and apply safe harbour to all online services: Productivity Commission Former CBA IT exec sentenced to 3.5 years behind bars Australian data re-identification defendants will need to prove their innocence Former CBA IT exec sentenced to 3.5 years behind bars The research project is being led by ARRB, with support from EastLink and La Trobe University, thanks to AU$578,000 in funding provided by the VicRoads Intelligent Transport System (ITS) Grants Program. The project has been broken down into three stages, with the first to develop a "first of its kind" classification system for assessing Australian roads based on the level of automated vehicle features they support. The ARRB said that in the second half of 2017, stage two will see the testing of a range of Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) technologies that allow communication between vehicles and road infrastructure.