Monday 18th July 2016, Whitley: Sir Ben Ainslie has hailed Land Rover's artificial intelligence (AI) as a'game changer' ahead of the British America's Cup team's home event in Portsmouth (22-24 July). Land Rover, Title and Exclusive Innovation Partner to Land Rover BAR, is applying its big data processing power and machine learning expertise to help co-engineer the fastest boat in America's Cup history and bring the world's oldest sporting trophy to the UK for the first time. Land Rover engineers, embedded into the team for over a year, are using artificial intelligence to explore and find patterns in sailing performance data to help'make the boat go faster'. When testing, the sailing team receives over 16 GB of uncompressed data per day from sensors on the boat - the equivalent of filling an iPhone's memory. The ability to process and make sense of this volume of data is unprecedented in sailing.

From Pandora to Spotify to Uber to ebay, new companies are disrupting the old with a key platform to enable change: a shift out of the world of enterprise data warehousing and towards a new platform based on machine learning, big & fast data and open source technologies. These changes are allowing new companies to get closer to the insights of their customers, to adapt their business to minute changes and to react and make decisions in real time. This engaging talk will bring some ideas that can help organizations shape their big data journey and adapt to the coming machine learning age.

By learning how to pitch his bot idea while driving a robot, Button.ai Organized by VentureBeat, the international botathon took place July 9-10 in New York, Melbourne, Tel Aviv, and San Francisco. A fifth finalist category was made for people participating online elsewhere in the world. Finals for popular vote and judges' categories were held Tuesday in San Francisco at MobileBeat, a two-day gathering of chatbot and AI leaders, held July 12-13 at The Village. Skoolbot won the portion of the competition decided by judges Phil Libin, an investor in bots from General Catalyst; SmarterChild creator Robert Hoffer; and Alfred Lin, an investor at Sequoia Capital.

Dr George Beaton is a partner in beaton and a senior fellow in Melbourne Law School, Australia. His published works include NewLaw New Rules – A Conversation About the Future of the Legal Services Industry (2013) and Remaking Law Firms: Why & How (2016). You have been a pioneer in research into NewLaw, what place does technology have in NewLaw? Is it central to its development? Just 18 months ago when I wrote Fresh thinking on the evolving BigLaw–NewLaw taxonomy little mention was made of the role of technology in NewLaw or BigLaw business model firms.

In central London this spring, eight of the world's greatest minds performed on a dimly lit stage in a wood-panelled theatre. An audience of hundreds watched in hushed reverence. This was the closing stretch of the 14-round Candidates' Tournament, to decide who would take on the current chess world champion, Viswanathan Anand, later this year. Each round took a day: one game could last seven or eight hours. Sometimes both players would be hunched over their board together, elbows on table, splayed fingers propping up heads as though to support their craniums against tremendous internal pressure. At times, one player would lean forward while his rival slumped back in an executive leather chair like a bored office worker, staring into space. Then the opponent would make his move, stop his clock, and stand up, wandering around to cast an expert glance over the positions in the other games before stalking upstage to pour himself more coffee.

In just over a week, the smartphone game "Pokemon Go" has become a giant hit, turning millions of people around the world into monster hunters. Given the game's promising start, investors are taking another look at Nintendo Co., whose value has shot up by about 1.5 trillion since "Pokemon Go" was released on July 6 in the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Nintendo had been struggling in recent years as people shifted to playing games on smartphones rather than home or hand-held consoles, and the Kyoto-based game innovator was reluctant to enter the field. But last year, Nintendo finally announced it would jump into the smartphone fray. In that sense, some may wonder whether the early success of "Pokemon Go" is a prelude to Nintendo's return to the top of the video game heap.

Connected baggage, robots, virtual reality, big data, and drones will be part of your travels soon. Just how will they, along with other technology trends, create a better experience for travelers? Robotics combined with artificial intelligence You can already experiment with robots that deliver room service, guide passengers to departure gates, or provide translation assistance. But would they be able to understand informal language such as slang, idioms, local dialects or irony? Combining their capabilities with Artificial Intelligence (AI) so they are able to recognize emotions, group behaviors, and proactively respond to unexpected situations, give them the potential to provide the next generation of customer service.

Enter SwagBot, a robot developed by the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney. Created for the sole purpose of herding cattle, it can scuttle its way even across not-so-ideal terrain like farmland and even pull trailers across said terrain. It's the hope that SwagBot will eventually be able to manage the livestock across Australia's various regions. The robot is as efficient as it is rugged, proving it can get around ditches, swamps and a host of other obstacles that mean to keep it from doing its job. The next phase is to help SwagBot recognize whether an animal is sick or ailing.

Machine learning is infiltrating many industries. Marketers are using complex data algorithms to target customers based on their behaviours, while urban planning firms are creating better transport systems, and health organisations are detecting diseases earlier. Last year, Amazon professor of machine learning at the University of Washington, Carlos Guestrin, said that in the next five years, every successful breakthrough app will use these methods at its core. But in the highly complex field of cancer, it's a more laborious and challenging task, according to professor Mathukumalli Vidayasagar, a US-based control theorist who has been working with machine learning methods since the 1990s. Vidayasagar is a Fellow of the Royal Society at the University of Texas and keynote speaker at the University of Melbourne's'Thinking Machines in the Physical World' conference yesterday.

Chat bots have ballooned in popularity in recent months, and now we're seeing some interesting examples of how that technology, where computers interact and respond to human requests, is being used to solve other problems. Today, Zendesk is taking the wraps off "Automatic Answers", a service for businesses to reply to emails from customers without ever having a human employee get involved. Automatic Answers is not your average, run-of-the mill email autoresponder. The service was built using a machine learning platform that Zendesk's in-house teams of data scientists and engineers, which are based out of Melbourne, Australia, have been developing on for a while now. That machine learning platform was first announced last year and it also powers a service Zendesk announced last October, Satisfaction Prediction, which is able to monitor customer-company interactions to -- as its name implies -- determine whether the customer is getting what she or he needs. The machine learning/AI element means that the responses in Automatic Answers are not only reading and responding specifically to what you the customer is asking, but it is technically getting smarter with each response (and presumably using a bit of Satisfaction Prediction to figure out if it's getting it right).