It is now more or less impossible to put a precise figure on the number of video games released each year. According to data published by the digital store Steam, almost 19,000 titles were released in 2024 – and that's just on one platform. Hundreds more arrived on consoles and smartphones. In some ways this is the positive sign of a vibrant industry, but how on earth does a new project get noticed? When Triple A titles with multimillion dollar marketing budgets are finding it hard to gain attention (disappointing sales have been reported for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the Final Fantasy VII remakes and EA Sports FC), what chance is there for a small team to break out?

A prestigious portrait competition has defended allowing entrants to submit artwork generated by artificial intelligence, arguing art is not stagnant and should reflect societal change. The Brisbane Portrait Prize – with a top prize worth 50,0000 – has been described as Queensland's answer to the Archibalds with selected entries displayed at the Brisbane Powerhouse later in the year. In the terms and conditions of entry, the Brisbane Portrait Prize notes this year that it will accept entries "completed in whole or in part by generative artificial intelligence" so long as the artwork is original and "entirely completed and owned outright" by the entrant. A spokesperson for the prize told Guardian Australia that allowing AI entries acknowledged the definition of art was not stagnant and would always grow. "BPP prides itself on being a contemporary prize and we are always interested in what'contemporary' portraiture is while fostering both the ongoing evolution of art and engaging in the surrounding conversation," they said.

In 2023, artificial intelligence (AI) truly entered our daily lives. The latest data shows four in five teenagers in the United Kingdom are using generative AI tools. About two-thirds of Australian employees report using generative AI for work. At first, many people used these tools because they were curious about generative AI or wanted to be entertained. Now, people ask generative AI for help with studies, for advice, or use it to find or synthesise information. Other uses include getting help coding and making images, videos, or audio.

New York attorney and writer Alexander Zubatov weighs in on how A.I. is rapidly changing society and says he's concerned about A.I. being used as a weapon against descent on'The Ingraham Angle.' News Corp CEO Robert Thomson blasted the left-wing bias and inaccuracies spewed out by AI generated content -- calling it "rubbish in, rubbish out" -- even as he warned the technology threatens to kill thousands more jobs across the news industry. Left-leaning media giants that dominate the news business have churned out stories for years that are not only riddled with errors, but also written with a left-wing slant. "People have to understand that AI is essentially retrospective," the media executive said during an appearance at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference in San Francisco on Thursday. WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)? AI (Artificial Intelligence) letters and robot hand are placed on computer motherboard in this illustration taken on June 23, 2023.

At the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), CIO Alastair Thomson says machine learning (ML) played a major role in COVID-related research. The National COVID Cohort Collaborative (NC3) clearly demonstrates the value of securely bringing together data in one place, where it can be analyzed by thousands of researchers. Through collaboration with various healthcare and cloud service providers, the NC3 and ML helped NIH identify potential participants for the RECOVER initiative. "The utility of this really became clear when NIH launched the RECOVER initiative, which is dealing with post-acute COVID syndrome, or long COVID," Thomson said at the annual AFCEA's Health IT Summit last week. "They were able to use machine learning with that data to identify the key characteristics, what we call a phenotype, for long COVID."

With the research showing growth and transformation are the top priorities for their organisations, this puts technology leaders and the exploitation of data capabilities at the heart of digital business agendas. The research also found that data analytics was the area where technology leaders expected their investments to grow the fastest, and is only behind cybersecurity for where the most technology investment is going in the coming year. Members of the Technology Leaders Agenda 2021 advisory panel of CIOs and CTOs said that after years of hype around AI, innovations in the data ecosystem had finally reached enterprise maturity. As such, it was no surprise that AI and automation initiatives are increasingly being implemented. "AI and automation are now solidly delivering the use cases and value promised three years ago," says Nadine Thomson, global CTO at MediaCom.

Accountants can build the kinds of skills needed to stay relevant in a rapidly automating world that's increasingly taking advantage of technologies such as robotic process automation and artificial intelligence to handle routine financial tasks, according to Institute of Management Accountants president and CEO Jeff Thomson. "It is a bit of a race where technology capability is really moving at warp speed, but it's not clear that the profession's ability to upskill and transform itself is moving at warp speed," Thomson told Accounting Today. "Therefore it's a race for relevance, creating the story, and telling the story of our profession because we want to attract technologists into our profession." He believes the accounting profession will need to do a better job of competing for students and finding ways to attract them to the profession, given its reputation for routine work that is increasingly being automated away. "We get to work with the latest technologies, but not if we don't make that part of our profession," said Thomson.

Businesses should start small and fail fast with machine learning (ML) projects to get the best ROI. Some of the most common use cases for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) include fraud detection, sales optimization, marketing, and document analysis. But the benefits of implementing ML goes even further. This ebook, based on the latest ZDNet / TechRepublic special feature, helps small and medium-sized businesses build a technology stack that promotes innovation and enables growth. Steve Tycast, director of data and analytics at AIM Consulting, said ML efforts focused on operational analytics can reduce costs, drive efficiencies, and increase speed to market.

Dialogue State Tracking (DST) is a core component of virtual assistants such as Alexa or Siri. To accomplish various tasks, these assistants need to support an increasing number of services and APIs. The Schema-Guided State Tracking track of the 8th Dialogue System Technology Challenge highlighted the DST problem for unseen services. The organizers introduced the Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) dataset with multi-domain conversations and released a zero-shot dialogue state tracking model. In this work, we propose a GOaL-Oriented Multi-task BERT-based dialogue state tracker (GOLOMB) inspired by architectures for reading comprehension question answering systems. The model "queries" dialogue history with descriptions of slots and services as well as possible values of slots. This allows to transfer slot values in multi-domain dialogues and have a capability to scale to unseen slot types. Our model achieves a joint goal accuracy of 53.97% on the SGD dataset, outperforming the baseline model.

After a long period of debate as to whether the hype is justified, the time of insurtech is at hand, with innovators in this sector helping to reinvigorate insurance with tech-driven business models that completely transform the customer experience. That's the central message to emerge from the InsurTech Rising International conference in Paris in October, according to Alex Thomson, co-founder at Naked insurance. "Insurance has a reputation for being a conservative industry that resists change, but the overarching theme at InsurTechRising International was that we're starting to make material progress in using technology to rejuvenate the industry, but the best is yet to come," says Thomson, who was invited to take part in a panel discussion about bridging the gap between corporates and startups in the insurance industry. "We're seeing a lot of innovative thinking coming to the fore in insurance, along with investments aimed at transforming the customer experience. At last, insurance is entering the digital age."