Artificial Intelligence: Solving problems, growing the economy and improving our quality of life outlines the importance of action for Australia to capture the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI), estimated to be worth AU$22.17 Published by the Australian Government in November 2019, and codeveloped by CSIRO's Data61 and the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, the report identifies strategies to help develop a national AI capability to boost the productivity of Australian industry, create jobs and economic growth, and improve the quality of life for current and future generations. The roadmap identifies three high potential areas of AI specialisation for Australia based on the opportunity to solve significant problems at home, export the solutions to the world and build on Australia's existing strengths. This report is intended to help guide future investment in AI and machine learning, and accompanies Artificial Intelligence: Australia's Ethics Framework, a discussion paper prepared by CSIRO's Data61 and published by the Australian Government in April 2019.

Ecopia is creating the first HD Map of Waterloo Region. Today, drivers use maps for way-finding and to generally orientate themselves with their surroundings, but as the task of driving shifts from the in-car driver to in-vehicle automation, the role of digital maps shifts significantly. These next generation maps for machines come in the form of a highly accurate and realistic representation of the road, generally referred to as high-definition (HD) maps. The base layers of the Waterloo Region HDMap, created by Ecopia's Global Feature Extraction services, offers a highly accurate and highly attributed representation of the road, including attributes such as lane model, traffic signs, road furniture and lane geometry, as autonomous vehicles need very different maps from those that are currently used in today's navigation systems. HDMaps of Waterloo Region will be available to SMEs and academia on a platform hosted and developed by Ecopia.

Digital transformation is not new, and most companies have been on a digital journey since the 1990s. The digital transformation came in many forms -- Web, Web 2.0, SaaS, cloud, mobile, business intelligence, and big data for starters. Digital touches every operational aspect of a business in a similar way that the CFO role does. Eating this new digital elephant is a massive undertaking for any business. In the next two years, the CFO may well be the driver of this evolution of digital -- analytics, automation, and artificial intelligence (AI).

Paul Curtis ( @pfcurtis_NY), Weaveworks Solutions Architect based in New York City, recently presented an online talk on how GitOps and progressive delivery can be effectively used to manage machine learning models in Kubernetes. Many already know containers and Kubernetes, but not a lot are aware of service meshes. A service mesh is a layer in your Kubernetes cluster that is a combination of an ingress controller and routing daemon. It also allows you to route network traffic and control how pods and namespaces are interconnected. Service meshes can do load balancing, traffic switching and they also have a dynamic and programmable control plane.

After breakfast one morning in August, the mathematician Terence Tao opened an email from three physicists he didn't know. The trio explained that they'd stumbled across a simple formula that, if true, established an unexpected relationship between some of the most basic and important objects in linear algebra. The formula "looked too good to be true," said Tao, who is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, a Fields medalist, and one of the world's leading mathematicians. "Something this short and simple -- it should have been in textbooks already," he said. "So my first thought was, no, this can't be true."

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 14, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Zendrive, a mission-driven company using data and analytics to make roads safer and insurance fairer, today announced John Kramer as Director of Insurance Sales. He brings with him nearly 20 years of insurance experience in underwriting, usage-based insurance, product management, and connected car technology. "Zendrive is an established leader in driving analytics and research, with the world's largest driving data set of over 180 billion miles," said John Kramer. "The company is thinking critically about how to apply its unique, predictive telematics factors and innovative technology solutions to the insurance industry. I'm proud to join such a passionate team powering a modern, data-driven future alongside our insurance provider partners."

When it comes to the relationship between business development and technological innovation, we can generally separate two schools of thought. There are those who believe that technological progress is what propels businesses forward. And on the other hand, there are those who are certain that business investments are what makes innovations like contemporary geospatial AI possible. As with most opposing opinions – the truth is somewhere in between. Or, rather, the relations between cutting-edge tech and emerging business sectors are a never-ending circle; with business financing the research and development that enables the appearance of new tech, which in turn leads to new business opportunities and sectors.

Facial recognition technology is used across China for everything from identifying criminals to measuring students' attention in class. Now, it has debuted a system in its subway that lets you use your face as a ticket. A report from South China Morning Post suggests the subway system in the southern city of Shenzhen has started using facial recognition technology to let folks over 60 years of age register themselves for free subway rides. Other cities such as Jinan, Shanghai, Qingdao, Nanjing, and Nanning are currently experimenting with this system. The technology in Shenzen has been deployed to 18 stations with 28 automatic gate machines and 60 self-service ticket processors.

NEW YORK--China is eroding America's military superiority and conventional deterrence through the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in its military strategies, operations, and capabilities, an independent U.S. federal commission warned, adding that the United States needs to step up investment in the technology and apply it to national security missions. China's communist regime has established research and development institutes to advance its military applications of AI. Those institutes are equivalent to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)--a U.S. agency under the Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for military use. Military applications of AI technologies are being developed by Chinese researchers in the areas of "swarming, decision support, and information operations," while the country's defense industry is pursuing the development of "increasingly autonomous weapons systems," an interim report released by The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence said on Nov. 4. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) declared it would be the world leader in AI by 2030, part of its broader strategy to challenge America's military and economic position in Asia, as Beijing also pursues a process of "intelligentization" as a new imperative of its military modernization.

Dan Jacobson, a research and development staff member in the Biosciences Division at the US Department of Energy's (DOE's) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), has a few ideas. For the past 5 years, Jacobson and his team have studied plants to understand the genetic variables and patterns that make them adaptable to changing environments and climates. As a computational biologist, Jacobson uses some of the world's most powerful supercomputers for his work--including the recently decommissioned Cray XK7 Titan and the world's most powerful and smartest supercomputer for open science, the IBM AC922 Summit supercomputer, both located at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility at ORNL. Last year, Jacobson and his team won an Association for Computing Machinery Gordon Bell Prize after using a special computing technique known as "mixed precision" on Summit to become the first group to reach exascale speed--approximately a quintillion calculations per second. Jacobson's team is currently working on numerous projects that form an integrated roadmap for the future of AI in plant breeding and bioenergy.