An upcoming TV interview with the Australian man acquitted of the murder of a New Zealand woman during a Tinder date has met with an online backlash. Gable Tostee, 30, was charged after Warriena Wright, 26, fell in 2014 from his balcony in Queensland's Gold Coast. After a high-profile, week-long trial last month, a jury found him not guilty of murder and manslaughter. The Nine Network's 60 Minutes programme has arranged the exclusive interview which will air on 13 November. "I restrained her to stop her from attacking me," Mr Tostee said in a preview of the interview.

At PAX Australia on Friday, broadcaster and panel host Nic Healey went and asked the question: "When am I going to get my virtual reality Skyrim?" Five leading local voices in VR development were in Melbourne to discuss the VR "hype train," and some of the day's biggest themes were existential. Most of all, how much should the emergent industry take from traditional gaming, and how much should it leave behind? Time seemed on everyone's mind. The most praised video games of recent years often present immersive worlds in which players can get lost for days.

There are some things that machines are simply better at doing than humans, but humans still have plenty going for them. Here's a look at how the two are going to work in concert to deliver a more powerful future for IT, and the human race. With these machines moving toward fully autonomous operation for the first time, balancing the need to exercise control over the systems versus the drive to realize business benefits is crucial, the firm says. Presenting the research findings at a Gartner symposium in Australia, research vice president Brian Prentice said Google's self-driving car project is a prime example of why pursuing full autonomy might be neither possible nor desirable in smart machines. "Human beings are still required as the final point of redundancy in an autonomous vehicle, so a fully autonomous car requires a steering wheel should a driver be required to take control," Prentice said.

Scientists have created a "Nightmare Machine" - an artificial intelligence system that can understand what makes certain images frightening, and tranform harmless-looking images into stuff of nightmares. The primary reason for building Nightmare Machine was to explore the common fear inspired by intelligent computers, said researchers including Pinar Yanardag from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab. They wanted to confront the anxiety inspired by AI, and simultaneously test if a computer is capable of understanding and visualising what makes people afraid. The designers used "deep learning" - a system that mimics the neural connections in a human brain - to teach a computer what makes for a frightening visual, according to Manuel Cebrian, a principal research scientist at CSIRO in Australia. "Deep-learning algorithms perform remarkably well in several tasks considered difficult or impossible," Cebrian said.

Computer Sciences Corp (CSC) has opened an Innovation Centre at Macquarie Park in Sydney's north that will focus on the development of technology solutions in areas such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and virtual and augmented reality. Opening the centre on Friday, CSC managing director Seelan Nayagam said he expects the new centre to serve as a hub to incubate technology and act as a "prototyping sandbox" that will allow clients to experience and test the viability of their own technology solutions before committing to a large scale implementation. "It will be a showcase for the very latest technology solutions from CSC and our partners," he said. According to Nayagam, it is the people involved in the innovation labs that really make a difference, not just the technology. "This innovation centre ... is a place where we want to bring creative people. Innovation is not just about technology, it's about processes, it's about thinking differently," Nayagam said.

In the ocean of online drone videos, every now and then some footage comes along that takes you by surprise. There are few however, that can rock you into a deep state of nature-based relaxation that would make David Attenborough himself weep. Australian man Brett Beswick captured some such footage at Avoca Beach, along Australia's eastern coastline, on the morning of Nov. 1. Beswick managed to film the oceanic interaction of six sharks, a seal and a sizeable sting ray -- all feeding on and around the most enormous school of salmon you could clap eyes on. Captured with a DJI Phantom 4 drone, the video gives a breathtaking perspective on life beneath the ocean's surface, one that humans could never capture from the shore.

Just because Halloween is over doesn't mean the fears have ended. A new project uses autonomous computers to discover your deepest nightmares. The project, dubbed "Nightmare Machine," comes from a partnership between Australia and the U.S. The algorithm would let a computer understand what makes certain videos or images scary. One would hope the algorithm would then remove the scary bits and replace them with something more appealing. However, it uses data to transform any photo into something terrifying.

The idea of artificial intelligence (AI) -- autonomous computers that can learn independently -- makes some people extremely uneasy, regardless of what the computers in question might be doing. Those individuals probably wouldn't find it reassuring to hear that a group of researchers is deliberately training computers to get better at scaring people witless. The project, appropriately enough, is named "Nightmare Machine." Digital innovators in the U.S. and Australia partnered to create an algorithm that would enable a computer to understand what makes certain images frightening, and then use that data to transform any photo, no matter how harmless-looking, into the stuff of nightmares. Images created by Nightmare Machine are unsettling, to say the least.

Cloud accounting firm Xero has released its financial results for the first half of FY17, posting a net loss after tax of NZ$43.9 million. The New Zealand-based company experienced a 48 percent year-on-year increase in revenue to NZ$137 million; however, earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) was down 23 percent over the same period last year, to come in at a loss of NZ$25.9 million. Xero CEO and founder Rod Drury said his company remains focused on driving diversified global growth and executing on its business strategy. "Our focus is to build a sustainable global business with high margins, while managing our cash. Our revenue growth has allowed us to continue the significant investment in our platform, back-office, and team to support our global footprint," Drury said.

Determining the optimal size and orientation of small-scale residential based PV arrays will become increasingly complex in the future smart grid environment with the introduction of smart meters and dynamic tariffs. However consumers can leverage the availability of smart meter data to conduct a more detailed exploration of PV investment options for their particular circumstances. In this paper, an optimization method for PV orientation and sizing is proposed whereby maximizing the PV investment value is set as the defining objective. Solar insolation and PV array models are described to form the basis of the PV array optimization strategy. A constrained particle swarm optimization algorithm is selected due to its strong performance in non-linear applications. The optimization algorithm is applied to real-world metered data to quantify the possible investment value of a PV installation under different energy retailers and tariff structures. The arrangement with the highest value is determined to enable prospective small-scale PV investors to select the most cost-effective system.