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).

Banks of the future will stop selling customers products they don't need and will focus on doing one product well, according to Starling Banks' Anne Boden. Speaking at WIRED Money 2016, Boden said: "Nowadays, we have the big banks with lots of products with lots of customer groups and lots of different channels trying to own the whole experience. "I don't believe a startup bank can beat big banks. You need to focus and do one thing really well; 20 times better than everyone else to give people a reason to bank with you." Starling is a challenger bank building data-driven current accounts controlled from smartphones. It was created in January 2014 and is due to launch within the next three months. In January this year, it received 70 million ( 48 million) in investment. Prior to founding Starling, Boden was CEO of Allied Irish Banks and head of Emea, global transaction banking across 34 countries for RBS and ABN AMRO. She has more than 30 years' experience in banking, having begun her career at Lloyds Bank, before moving on to Standard Chartered Bank and then UBS in Zurich. "I took a year out recently to discuss what is happening in the banking industry," added Boden. "I spent time talking to people involved in Fintech and a lot of the things I took for granted, and that I thought were a given, weren't true at all.

Australia, we hear, is a big place. All that space is nice to have if you're raising cattle, except for the fact that you've got to keep track of them all somehow. For ranchers, this is a lot of work, and for cattle, it means that they don't get checked on very regularly. This would be a good opportunity for robots to step in and offer some assistance, but the problem is most robots would be crazy to try getting themselves around the kind of terrain that Australia is made of. In order to tackle the hills, dales, fields, cliffs, rivers, swamps, crocodiles, platypuses, echidnas, koalas, quolls, emus, kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, and dingoes (to name just a few common obstacles in Australia), researchers from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney led by Dr. Salah Sukkarieh have designed and tested an all-terrain robot called SwagBot that's designed to be able to drive over almost anything while helping humans manage their ranchland.

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).

Eye in the Sky Superbly acted, this nail-biter starring Helen Mirren, the late Alan Rickman and Aaron Paul is a fully involving war drama about the new rules of engagement. Hunt for the Wilderpeople This wonderful New Zealand film has a gently absurdist quality, a simultaneously sweet and subversive sensibility all its own, mixing warmth, adventure and comedy in ways that consistently surprise. The Innocents Anne Fontaine's post-World War II drama involving a Polish convent and a French female doctor proves yet again that though moral and spiritual questions may not sound spellbinding, they often provide the most absorbing movie experiences. The Jungle Book By turns sweetly amusing and scarily unnerving, crammed with story, song and computer-generated visual splendors, this revisiting of the old Rudyard Kipling tales aims to be a model of modern crowd-pleasing entertainment. Life, Animated A remarkable documentary about how Disney animated features changed the life of a young autistic boy in a deep and profound way.

Humans have been farming for thousands of years since the first crops were planted and animals began being domesticated during the Mesolithic era. But technology could soon be squeezing us out of our traditional roles as farmers, as robots take to the fields. A robot that is capable of herding cattle and pulling trailers through the mud has gone on trial at a farm in Australia while another capable of pick broccoli six times faster than humans is being tested in Britain. SwagBot, an Australian farming machine, can herd cattle and pull trailers through mud, is being developed at the University of Sydney. At the same time, the University of Lincoln is building and testing a robot that can pick broccoli six times faster than humans. It can identify broccoli in fields with up to 95 per cent accuracy, the researchers say.

With a pocketful of savings, Melbourne entrepreenur Michelle Mannering and three fellow founders are busy building a platform utilising artificial intelligence to make the world a smarter and better place. As a hacker-in-residence at Carlton Connect and a participant in the Melbourne Accelerator Program, Mannering and her team are one of the first residents in Melbourne's new "melting pot" for innovation. "My co-founders and I all met at a bunch of different hackathons," Mannering tells StartupSmart. Just a year after meeting, the team has launched Black AI, a startup offering a platform that is developing machine learning computer vision. "Basically, we just teach computers how to understand and interpret the world," Mannering says.