It's one thing to track endangered animals on land, but it's another to follow them when they're in the water. How do you spot individual critters when all you have are large-scale aerial photos? Queensland University researchers have used Google's TensorFlow machine learning to create a detector that automatically spots sea cows in ocean images. Instead of making people spend ages coming through tens of thousands of photos, the team just has to feed photos through an image recognition system that knows to look for the cows' telltale body shapes. An initial version could spot 80 percent of the sea cows that had been confirmed in existing photos.

Can you spot the lone dugong in the image above? Now do that with 45,000 more, and you'll have a general idea of the population of these endangered critters. If that sounds tedious, then perhaps you, like researchers at Murdoch University, would prefer to delegate the duty to a specially-trained computer. Amanda Hodgson, of the school's Cetacean Research Unit, has been using UAVs to capture images of marine animals for years, but the data piles up fast, and there are only so many grad students. Hodgson worked with computer scientist Frederic Maire, of the Queensland University of Technology, to automate the process.

You might expect the operating theatre to be one of the last places you'd find robotics in action but, increasingly, you'd be wrong. The OT is typically the most labour-intensive and expensive part of a hospital -- which, in this age of spiraling health costs, makes it a priority for any cost-savings that can be achieved through systemisation and standardisation. Robotic surgery, or robot-assisted surgery, has the advantage that it allows doctors to perform many types of complex procedures with more precision, flexibility and control than they could with conventional techniques. Given the speed at which robotics is advancing, how long will it be before robots start making all the decisions on surgery without the need for human control or intervention? OK, you say, that's fine where standard and predictable procedures are required.

An Australian man faces a huge fine after using his drone to fly to a local hardware store to pick up a sausage sandwich. SEE ALSO: Australia offers'democracy sausages' to Americans in their hour of need Drone footage obtained by EFTM shows a man placing a note in plastic bag reading "Please buy snag and put in bag, here's $10." He then flies the drone to the local Bunnings Warehouse 2 kilometres (1.24 miles) away to collect his delicious prize. Bunnings is a home and hardware chain that has routine fundraising barbecues at its stores. "Sausage sizzles" are basically social institutions in Australia, offering the opportunity to eat a cheap BBQ lunch and donate money to a local charity at the same time.

So, began Kimberly Nevala, Director of the SAS Business Strategies, Best Practices and Advisory, and Business Solutions who was in Australia for a flying visit. We caught up following an interview in April this year at the SAS Global Forum. Nevala is a well-published expert on most things "Big Data" and she is not afraid to broach the big issues like Big Data for good or evil. Today we mainly chatted about Big Data and machine learning to get her unique perspective on what is a reasonably controversial subject – big data, machine learning, and the insights and patterns relentless machines can uncover. The interview took the form of a chat, so it is all paraphrased and attributed to Nevala.

An Australian man acquitted of murder last month after his Tinder date plummeted off a balcony to her death faced new criticism after he acknowledged in a TV interview that the woman had screamed "no" a reported 33 times before she fell. "Yeah, she was certainly trying to make a lot of noise," Gable Tostee commented in the interview, which aired on the Nine Network's "60 Minutes." Critics also lashed out after The Courier Mail claimed Tostee was paid a six-figure sum for the interview. A senior detective called it "disgusting". The detective continued, "There's a lot of anger among police about this. Of course we respect the court's decision to find him not guilty but for him to now do a paid interview after everything this poor girl's family has been through, is horrific."

Following his acquittal of murder in the death of his Tinder date Warriena Wright, Australian man Gable Tostee has managed to offend several people. Tostee, 30, is scheduled to appear on an episode of "60-Minutes on the Nine Network" set to air Sunday in which he shares details about the woman's death, BBC News reported Monday. Tostee and Wright, 26, met through the popular dating app while the woman was in New Zealand for vacation. The two returned to his apartment where their argument turned physical. Tostee reportedly locked the woman on the balcony, where she later fell to her death. Following a week-long trial that took place in October, Tostee was found not guilty of manslaughter and murder in Wright's death.

The artificial intelligence (AI) currently being developed is largely benevolent. It can mimic the way humans think, complete menial and repetitive tasks, and more. But that doesn't prevent people from being afraid of AI, thinking it will take away jobs or eventually turn Terminator into a documentary. Somebody thought AI wasn't scary enough, and did something to change that. Researchers from MIT and Australia's CSIRO have created AI that actively warps pictures into scary nightmare fuel.

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has signed on for a pair of Nvidia DGX-1 3U boxes to serve as a platform for applying machine learning to its science. Angus Macoustra, acting deputy CIO and executive manager for Scientific Computing at CSIRO, said the boxes would be used for medical image analysis, nano-material modelling, genome analysis, astronomy, and space science. In the realm of space science, Macoustra said machine learning can help with hunting for the signature of pulsars. "Two thirds of all known pulsars discovered in the world have actually been observed on the Parkes radio telescope, and CSIRO holds close to 40 years of data collected from that instrument," Macoustra said during the GTCx Australia conference on Tuesday. "Machine learning gives us mechanisms to interrogate that data and it is the belief of our scientists that there are still a number of unknown pulsars locked up in these data sets that span the past 40 years."

If video games are your passion, good news! You can turn that love into a living. Thousands of people have the same idea. At PAX Australia in Melbourne, Mashable sat down with three people who play games and create online videos full-time. Michael Jones and Lindsay Jones, who are partners, both work for the U.S. gaming-focused production company Rooster Teeth.