Researchers from The University of Western Australia and the University of California have developed a new machine-learning tool that will improve the management, restoration and irrigation of rangeland areas used for grazing. Associate professor Sally Thompson from the UWA School of Engineering and UWA Institute of Agriculture says the tool was suited to environments where the amount of rainfall exceeded the absorption capacity of the soil, resulting in the excess water flowing over the land. The new machine learning tool models surface water flows in dry environments with patchy vegetation cover. The findings have significant implications for agricultural and natural systems in Australia and worldwide. "The research could help environmental designers limit soil erosion in rangeland environments and agricultural systems, minimising degradation risks in drylands," says Sally. "It also has applications in urban settings, where waterproof surfaces, like pavement, generate runoff and flood risks."

PricewaterhouseCoopers, the large accounting and management consulting firm, released a startling report indicating that workers will be highly impacted by the fast-growing rise of artificial intelligence, robots and related technologies. Banking and financial services employees, factory workers and office staff will seemingly face the loss of their jobs--or need to find a way to reinvent themselves in this brave new world. The term "artificial intelligence" is loosely used to describe the ability of a machine to mimic human behavior. AI includes well-known applications, such as Siri, GPS, Spotify, self-driving vehicles and the larger-than-life robots made by Boston Robotics that perform incredible feats. Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering, speaks about Siri during an announcement of new products at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference Monday, June 4, 2018, in San Jose, Calif.

Maker of the popular PyTorch-Transformers model library, Hugging Face today said it's bringing its NLP library to the TensorFlow machine learning framework. The PyTorch version of the library has seen more than 500,000 Pip installs since the beginning of the year, Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told VentureBeat. The Transformers library for TensorFlow brings together the most advanced Transformers-based AI models, like Google's BERT and XLNet, Facebook's RoBERTa, and OpenAI's GPT and GPT-2. It also includes Hugging Face's DistilBERT. Each of the models exceeds human performance and ranks atop the GLUE benchmark leaderboard.

Work to bring driverless cars to Britain's streets has reached a milestone with the first demonstration of an autonomous fleet driving in a "complex urban environment" in London. Ford Mondeos fitted with autonomous technology from the UK tech firm Oxbotica operated on public roads around the former Olympic Park in Stratford this week. Driven programme, a partially government-funded consortium, said it had "exceeded their initial plan" and was a significant step in confirming autonomous vehicles could operate in real-life situations in a large European city. Oxbotica said first passenger trials of a separate venture, an autonomous ride-sharing taxi service planned with the cab firm Addison Lee in the capital, could now start in June 2020. The Driven team – a combination of local authority planners, insurers, cyber-security and data experts, as well as Oxbotica – have been conducting trials in Oxford to examine what they called the "ecosystem" around autonomous vehicles, such as potential problems with hackers, communications technology and the legal framework. For now, the cars are operated with a safety driver in the front seat ready to take control, and prompted by the technology to decide whether to intervene in difficult situations.

Australia is home to more than 10,000 beaches, ranging from a few dozen metres to hundreds of kilometres long. But increasingly, these beaches are slowly disappearing before our eyes. "Beaches across Australia are eroding, simply because waves come in pull sand away -- and big storm surges pull more sand away," IBM Systems Data Scientist Dr Adam Makarucha told the Gartner Application Architecture, Development, and Integration Summit in Sydney. While the likes of Gold Coast Council have invested AU$14 million into rehabilitation projects -- such as one for a 12km stretch of beach, equating to more than a million dollars per kilometre -- Makarucha said prevention is more viable than rehabilitation. Makarucha said the best way to prevent beach erosion is to look to a natural defence, such as seagrass.

Former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka, who has announced a new AI startup with USD 50 million fund, believes India has the potential to become a world leader in artificial intelligence but the key to this is integrating AI into the country's education system in a massive way. India is at "an inflection point" when it comes to AI or artificial intelligence, Sikka said. Over the next 20-25 years, AI is going to be "a very, very big disruptor" for the Indian society because what one is seeing now in terms of automation and job losses because of automation is just the beginning, said Sikka, who announced his startup Vianai Systems last week. "But on the other hand, if we are able to bring AI education, the ability to build AI systems to India at a very large scale, and I'm talking about like billion plus people, then India can really leap frog and become the world's leader in artificial intelligence, in AI skill and AI talent," Sikka told PTI in an exclusive interview. Doing that requires working on multiple dimensions in parallel, he said.

Have you heard the one about a robot who walks into a bar? "What can I get you?" asks the bartender. "I need something to loosen me up," says the robot. So the bartender serves him a screwdriver. I'll bet you wouldn't have guessed that a computer wrote it – @jokingcomputer. Here's another one told by a computer: So how does Artificial Intelligence (AI) do when it comes to that most human of storytelling activities-- telling jokes?

In the next 10 years, as robots and other tech bring about the "greatest transfer from labour to capital" the industry has witnessed, per a report by Wells Fargo analysts, U.S. banks will slash over 200,000 jobs. Veteran Wall Street Analyst Mike Mayo noted that cuts of such magnitude would comprise over 10 percent of total bank jobs, and pave the way for a "golden age of banking efficiency," the Financial Times reported. Mayo said, according to the outlet, "It's been a rocky 25-year marriage for banking and technology, but it's finally getting on course." Wells Fargo's team of analysts in financial services and technology examined technology's impact throughout the banking industry in the U.S. The 225-page report discussed how artificial intelligence could cut costs for mortgage processing by 10 percent to 20 percent. Cloud computing, on the other hand, could bring in significant savings, while Big Data would enable "more surgical marketing."

SAN ANTONIO--In the warzones of the future, medics touching down amid heavy battlefield casualties will know who to treat first, how to approach every injury, and even who is most likely to live or die -- all before looking at a single wounded soldier. That's the vision of Col. (and Dr.) Jerome Buller, who leads the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research. Buller says biometric data gleaned from soldier-borne sensors, combined with in-depth medical and training data and augmented reality lenses, will help medics in combat evaluate the battlefield and everyone in it from a safe distance. They will make their most important decisions before even seeing their patients. "Imagine that [the hypothetical future] medic is able to scan the battlefield and instead of seeing rubble, he's seeing red or green dots, or amber dots, and he knows where to apply resources or not," Buller said during the Defense One and NextGov Genius Machines event here on Wednesday.

DARPA wants to break a network speed bottleneck caused by network interface cards (NICs) that aren't cut out to support tomorrow's demands for artificial intelligence. To achieve its goal, the Department of Defense agency is launching the Fast Network Interface Cards (FastNICs) program. The FastNIC isn't a technology just yet, but DARPA's FastNICs program is seeking engineering talent to help achieve its ambition to boost the performance of the network stack on servers by 100 times. SEE: Sensor'd enterprise: IoT, ML, and big data (ZDNet special report) Download the report as a PDF (TechRepublic) As DARPA explains, networking performance has tracked the same path as computing performance explained by Moore's Law. But NICs, the hardware that connects the computer to an Ethernet network, have not kept pace and, with a few other factors like memory and software design, application throughput is too slow for the future of AI and distributed computing.