Phone use while driving remains a problem in many parts of the world, in no small part due to the difficulty of enforcing laws. How do you catch someone in the act? Australian police might not have that problem. The New South Wales government has started using the first cameras that can automatically detect when drivers are using their phones. The system uses AI to review photos for telltale signs of phone use, with human reviewing the flagged images to prevent any false positives.

New South Wales courts could be flooded with tens of thousands of cases every year if the NSW government moves ahead with plans to roll out cameras that use artificial intelligence to detect drivers using their mobile phones, a parliamentary committee has warned. The state parliament is considering legislation that would allow mobile phone detection cameras to be placed around NSW to capture drivers using their mobile phones while behind the wheel. The government estimates that there were at least 158 casualties on NSW roads between 2012 and 2018 involving mobile phones. Under the plan, two cameras are used at each location, with one at an angle to capture people with phones to their ears, and a second placed to capture people using their phones in their laps. Every car passing through thelocation is snapped, and Transport for NSW says it then deploys artificial intelligence to determine which drivers were using their mobiles.

Facial recognition could be used to replace swipe cards on public transport, the New South Wales government has suggested, but the opposition and digital rights groups say it would pose a risk to privacy. The transport minister, Andrew Constance, said on Tuesday he wanted commuters "in the not too distant future" to be able to board trains using only their faces, with no need for Opal cards, barriers or turnstiles. "I'm about to outline some concepts which may seem pretty crazy and far-fetched," he told the Sydney Institute on Tuesday. "But look at it this way – who would have thought in 1970 that you'd be able to use a handheld device to have a video conversation with someone on the other side of the world? "I want people to not think about their travel.

Technological advancements in the medical field are vital to improving the way patients receive care. In many cases, there is a need for more resources to be directed towards patient care. But the current reality for many patients, especially children with chronic illnesses, is that medical professionals and families are often forced to carry a heavy load in caring for them. To address this need within the healthcare sector, there has been an uptick in the size of Australia's medtech startup community, with the NSW government expecting the industry to create 28,000 jobs and add AU$18 billion in gross domestic product to Australia by 2025. Among the medtech startups in Australia is ikkiworks, which developed a companion robot that helps soothe and monitor the vital signs of children with chronic illness while they are away from the hospital.

Good judgement and skills such as emotional intelligence, empathy, creativity and wisdom will become even more important to lawyering as the use of artificial intelligence increases, says UNSW Professor of Law Michael Legg. The director of the Law Society of NSW Future of Law and Innovation in the Profession (FLIP) stream at UNSW Law discussed what an AI-enhanced lawyer looks like at the Law Society's FLIP Conference in Sydney this month. "Whatever the nature of their practice, it has been said that the most important skill of lawyering is sound judgement," Professor Legg said. "Sound judgement is about more than answering legal questions – it encapsulates the relational and contextual elements of being a'problem-solving' lawyer. "None of the AI technologies currently available have the capacity to completely replace lawyers, as each still requires the exercise of human judgement as part of the process." The talk was part of a collaboration on research between UNSW Law and the NSW Law Society, which is responding to issues such as legal technology and new ways of working raised by the NSW Law Society's FLIP report in 2016. The report recognised that the legal profession is undergoing change at a pace never before experienced and in unforeseen ways, which has major ramifications for the legal profession, clients and society, particularly in relation to access to justice. FLIP Stream Research Fellow Dr Felicity Bell showed research by Israel-based contract review platform LawGeex, which compared the efforts of 20 "experienced" lawyers in reviewing five different non-disclosure agreements, with those of its software. The lawyers took, on average, 92 minutes to review all five contracts, while the software took a mere 26 seconds. "The software outperformed the lawyers in terms of accuracy, and vastly outperformed them in terms of speed," she said. "The lawyers took, on average, 92 minutes to review all five contracts, while the software took a mere 26 seconds.

State Archives and Records NSW will pilot machine learning technology to determine whether it can be used to automate some records classification and disposal activities. The records management authority said in a blog post that it plans to run pilots "to assess the technology's capabilities in sentencing unstructured data". Sentencing is a process used to identify and classify documents, usually for the purpose of determining which ones can be safely disposed of. The authority said it would be "seeking partnerships for an agency pilot and will also run an internal pilot using in-house data". The internal pilot will use machine learning "to apply GA28 to a corpus of digital records which have already been sentenced manually" - presumably to determine how accurate the algorithm is compared to a traditional methods.

The New South Wales government looks set to allow home owners to rent out spare rooms and entire homes using Airbnb and similar sites but has committed to giving strata corporations greater powers to deal with problems in apartment blocks. The state government on Wednesday released its long-awaited response to last year's parliamentary inquiry into short-term holiday letting, offering "qualified support" to changes that would see the industry regulated in NSW for the first time. It has offered early support for exemptions from planning and development restrictions that would allow the short-term letting of spare rooms and empty properties that do not exceed undefined "impact thresholds". The government will now release a paper canvassing options for regulating the booming sector, prompting a fresh round of consultation. The NSW government has, however, made a firm commitment to give strata corporations greater powers to deal with "adverse behaviour" from properties being used as party houses.