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Drones and machine learning combine to indentify, protect endangered sea cows - Drones at Work

#artificialintelligence

It's one thing to want to protect endangered animals, but another entirely to keep track of them. Case in point: the dugong, a medium-sized marine mammal often referred to as a sea cow. Cute they may be, but spotting them in large bodies of water is easier said than done. Since marine researchers want to do so to keep tabs on population sizes, conservation status, and their important habitat areas, that poses a bit of a problem. Fortunately, this is where Dr. Amanda Hodgson of Australia's Murdoch University comes in.


PayPal For iOS 10 Update Comes With Siri Integration But App Won't Accept Shopping Commands Just Yet

International Business Times

PayPal users who rely on the money transfer service's iOS app for all their electronic transactions can now use their voice to command the app on what to do. This is thanks to a new update that brings Siri integration to the mobile payments application for iPhones and iPads. In an online blog post for its users, PayPal Senior Director for Core Consumer Products Meron Colbeci stated that the company has found that around $41 billion was processed for peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions in 2015. Colbeci then added that the company is expecting over 17 million transactions in time for the holidays this month of December. Because of this projected number of transactions, PayPal is proud to present that its iOS 10 app will be accepting transactions this holiday season with the help of Siri.


PayPal update lets users transfer funds to friends and family with Siri

Daily Mail - Science & tech

PayPal users can now send money to friends and family using just their voice, after the payment service announced it was to integrate into Apple's Siri. Siri is the voice-based virtual assistant embedded into the iPhone, and can be used to set reminders, answer questions and help with tasks. From today, PayPal said users running iOS 10 on their iPhone will be able to use commands such as'Hey Siri, send John ยฃ25 using PayPal' to transfer money as an alternative to using the official app. From today, PayPal said users running iOS 10 on their iPhone will be able to use commands such as'Hey Siri, send John ยฃ25 using PayPal' to transfer money as an alternative to using the official app Apple's software uses voice recognition so only the known owner of the device can use the voice commands. PayPal's Meron Colbeci said consumers in 30 countries would be able to use the new service.


You can now tell Siri to send money via PayPal

Engadget

Siri is still very much a walled garden, but Apple has slowly begun opening its voice assistant to third parties. At its WWDC keynote back in June, the company confirmed app makers could let iPhone and iPad users send and receive money via Siri, with Square Cash and Monzo becoming the first to tap into that functionality. Now, bigger players are tapping into hands-free money transfers, after PayPal announced it too now lets users in over 30 countries send and request money via using only their voice. Sending and receiving is very easy, but you'll first need to link Siri with your PayPal account. This involves granting PayPal access to your Contacts and confirming via two-factor authentication (a code sent via text message) that you are who you say you are.


Hot dog to hot tub: Australian's drone delivery hits snag

BBC News

An Australian man's idea to use a drone to bring a hot dog to his hot tub hit a snag when aviation authorities warned he could face fines of up to A$9,000 (about $6,970; ยฃ5,600) for breaching drone flight safety rules. The man, named by local media as "Tim", has insisted the stunt was safe but that the sky-borne sausage was "freezing" by the time it reached him.


AI experts help in needle-in-haystack search for dugongs

#artificialintelligence

AI experts build'neural network' to help researchers search for dugongs Dugong expert Dr Amanda Hodgson estimates she has stared at more than 30,000 photographs of blue water. "It's really taxing on your eyes and it's hard to maintain concentration." The researcher from WA's Murdoch University has been scanning pictures captured by aerial drones in a search for dugongs, to work out their population, size and location. Globally dugongs are classed as "vulnerable to extinction" and are found in waters off the northern half of Australia. "There are areas where they're quite vulnerable because their habitat overlaps with coastal development."


Trump's Win Isn't the Death of Data--It Was Flawed All Along

WIRED

The lesson of Trump's victory is not that data is dead. The lesson is that data is flawed. It has always been flawed--and always will be. Before Donald Trump won the presidency on Tuesday night, everyone from Nate Silver to The New York Times to CNN predicted a Trump loss--and by sizable margins. "The tools that we would normally use to help us assess what happened failed," Trump campaign reporter Maggie Haberman said in the Times. As Haberman explained, this happened on both sides of the political divide.


Google machine learning can protect endangered sea cows

Engadget

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.


Counting endangered sea cows is hard, so we're going to make AI do it

#artificialintelligence

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.


Data mining reveals the world's healthiest cuisines

#artificialintelligence

Jean Brillat-Savarin was a 19th-century French lawyer famed for his writings on gastronomy. In his most famous work, he said: "Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es." Or "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are." This idea--that you are what you eat--has become increasingly popular. Since Brillat-Savarin's time it has been used as the title of various cookbooks and health guides; for some it is a way of life.