WHEN it comes to following the money, the authorities have their work cut out. Every year, criminals are thought to launder more than 1.5 trillion worldwide. Which is why Australia's financial intelligence agency is turning to AI for help. In Australia, the scale of the problem could amount to some US 4.5 billion annually. There, the task of cracking down on illegally obtained funds falls to the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC).

Researchers at IBM Australia will play a role in building a "cognitive assistant" the IT giant hopes will help ophthalmologists diagnose eye conditions from medical image data. The company recruited a batch of research interns to lend their expertise to the project via the IBM Australia research lab in Melbourne. The interns were slated to begin work last month. "IBM research is building the next generation cognitive assistant with advanced multi-media capability for early detection and management of diseases that can affect both the eyes and overall health of a person," the firm said in a now closed advertisement. "We are building the image-guided informatics system that acts as a filter to extract the essential clinical information ophthalmologists need to know about a patient for diagnosis and treatment planning. "This filtering employs sophisticated medical image processing, pattern recognition and machine learning techniques guided by advanced clinical knowledge.

Multi-view spectral clustering, which aims at yielding an agreement or consensus data objects grouping across multi-views with their graph laplacian matrices, is a fundamental clustering problem. Among the existing methods, Low-Rank Representation (LRR) based method is quite superior in terms of its effectiveness, intuitiveness and robustness to noise corruptions. However, it aggressively tries to learn a common low-dimensional subspace for multi-view data, while inattentively ignoring the local manifold structure in each view, which is critically important to the spectral clustering; worse still, the low-rank minimization is enforced to achieve the data correlation consensus among all views, failing to flexibly preserve the local manifold structure for each view. In this paper, 1) we propose a multi-graph laplacian regularized LRR with each graph laplacian corresponding to one view to characterize its local manifold structure. 2) Instead of directly enforcing the low-rank minimization among all views for correlation consensus, we separately impose low-rank constraint on each view, coupled with a mutual structural consensus constraint, where it is able to not only well preserve the local manifold structure but also serve as a constraint for that from other views, which iteratively makes the views more agreeable. Extensive experiments on real-world multi-view data sets demonstrate its superiority.

Prescriptive analysis is the best way to see how to make a sale or encourage a customer in the future. Recommendation systems are the another name for prescriptive analysis. Customer activity is used to recommend items and improve conversion in the digital store. The history of previous purchases and interests are used to recommend new products. To make the recommendation we employ both descriptive and predictive analysis several times.

Sometimes it feels like we're on a quest to amass more and more data, filling graphs and spreadsheets like there's no tomorrow. We know that it's increasingly possible to track people, and we're told that arranging and rearranging information might just help in the elusive hunt for killer insights. But, at Contagious, we're hearing far more people ask: 'What if data wasn't just used as a way to gain understanding of demographics or to more accurately target someone, but as a starting point for creativity?' Some of the major winners at this year's Cannes Lions festival, as well as a few other brands, have already put this approach into practice and are developing pieces of work that take data to the next level. We're seeing tangible projects that use ones and zeros as a creative spark to give people a way of grasping a complex idea in an emotional way, so that they can feel and experience as well as understand. From graphs to art One staggering way that data was brought to life recently was on behalf of Australia's Transport Accident Commission.

Whether you choose man or machine, it takes a lot of money to avoid mowing the lawn. I've spent the past six weeks reviewing the Robomow RS612, a robot lawnmower that can automatically cut your grass and rescue your summer afternoons. This model costs 1,600 (Robomow doesn't offer this model in Australia or the UK but that price works out to AU 2,079 and 1,226), and other Robomow models that can cover larger yards can cost as much as 2,100 (AU 2,729 and 1,610). A less-expensive option for bowing out of lawn care is to hire a professional, which can cost less than 1,000 a year. So why would you splurge on a robot lawnmower when a real-life person is so much cheaper?

For many startups from countries like Australia and New Zealand, the relatively small size of the local market pushes them to go global, and quickly. That mindset means learning how to manage offices in multiple countries, time zones and languages -- something that requires some quick adaption. SEE ALSO: Online gaming may boost school scores. Laura Cardinal, global general manager at the accounting software company Xero, handles a team of 150 product developers, engineers and product managers across Melbourne, Australia and Wellington, New Zealand. She said learning to work with teams in multiple locations was a significant learning curve.

Xbox and EA Sports are now offering Xbox One S FIFA 17 bundles packed with a bunch of special offers that will guarantee players with the ultimate football sports gaming experience. Plus, with the new bundles, players can actually get access to "FIFA 17" five days before the highly anticipated video game hits the market. Earlier today, Microsoft dropped a bombshell at Gamescom 2016 when it announced the new Xbox One S FIFA 17 bundles, which are going to be available starting Sept. 22, IGN has learned. On its official Twitter account, Xbox also shared the good news about the bundles, tweeting: "Own every moment on the pitch with the #XboxOneS #FIFA17 [E] 500GB Bundle." Xbox One S is Microsoft's upcoming gaming console, and what better way to purchase one than to buy a bundle that also includes a highly anticipated video game and other special offers?

The next industrial revolution Australian businesses will face won't be based on mechanisation, engineering or globalisation. Instead, it will be the rise of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) systems that will power the next great business push. AI is fast becoming a necessity in the business world and organisations are increasingly adopting AI to solve long-standing issues within their industry. Just last month, KPMG revealed they would be using AI to complete audits in Australia, which they anticipate will enable them to analyse bigger batches of data rather than relying on traditional sampling techniques. Taking tasks which usually require human intelligence and delegating them to machines has significant impact on business activities, including productivity, efficiency and even the way job roles are defined. But what really is AI?

With the rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), tens of billions of sensor devices are projected to connect in the next decade. These connected sensor devices will automate processes across a broad range of economic sectors, from industrial plants to healthcare management, delivering productivity gains and hopefully quality-of-life improvements.