Citing data from the World Bank, Thales says 7 out of 10 individuals will live in cities by 2050—a rise in global urbanisation which will lead to a need for technology to improve public security.

Thus, Thales introduced the Evidence and Investigation Suite to deter crime in cities. The Suite, said Thales, “boosts and enhances the current capabilities of field operations by allowing investigators to access highly professional tools remotely on their mobile phones from anywhere."

“In the fight against crime, time is the enemy,” stresses Thales public security solutions director Luc Tombal. “That’s why the Suite was created by experts with extensive field knowledge for experts,” he claimed.

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Thales’ solution comprises compact devices that can capture biometric data such as facial and iris images, finger- and palmprints wherever they are needed; as well as secure data storage capacity and processing tools that support forensic teams during investigations.

The security forces can rely on Thales and its 30+ years of biometrics expertise when making critical decisions in the fight against crime.

“Thanks to the ultra-mobile multifunction application, each investigator can benefit from having a biometric forensic lab at the palm of their hand that strives to simplify and accelerate the procedure.”

“Time optimisation is crucial in investigations, and this unique approach allows access to vital information within minutes, expediting criminal case resolutions compared to the traditional days-long process,” concluded Tombal.

This first appeared in the subscription newsletter CommsWire on 22 August 2023.

Men are much more likely than women to be aware of ChatGPT, as well as to have used it. Nearly three in five (58%) males say they have heard of ChatGPT, compared to two in five (39%) females. Around a third of Australian men (34%) have also used ChatGPT, compared to a seventh of Australian women (14%).

Younger Australians are also more likely to have heard of and tried out ChatGPT, the survey said.

Among Australians who have tried out ChatGPT so far, more than two-thirds (69%) have used it for entertainment purposes, making this the most popular use-case for the platform – at least so far.

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Over three-quarters (77%) say they have used ChatGPT to amuse themselves. On the other hand, Gen X are less likely to have done so: less than three-fifths (57%) say the same.

Meanwhile, 57% of Australians who have interacted with ChatGPT have used it for educational purposes, and around half (51%) have used it for business/work purposes.

Millennials are again more likely than other generations to have done so: three-fifths (61%) say they have used ChatGPT professionally. Conversely, Gen Z are less likely to have done so: only a third (33%) say the same.

Thinking about the tasks they have used or intend to use ChatGPT for, over two-fifths (42%) of Australians who have interacted with ChatGPT have used it to complete work assignments (such as writing emails) and produce creative work (such as writing stories and social media posts) – making these the two most popular tasks on the platform so far – as well as the top two tasks that Australians aware of but have yet to try ChatGPT are keen on using the AI chatbot for.

Writing a resume (32%) is the next most common task, which around a third of users have tapped the AI chatbot for so far (or would use it for).

Interestingly, three in ten (30%) Australians who have interacted with ChatGPT so far have entrusted it to create passwords for their devices and online accounts, while a fifth (20%) of Australians who are aware of but have yet to try ChatGPT are keen to do the same.

Additionally, a fifth (21%) have already roped in the AI chatbot in their quest for love – by asking it to write a dating profile.

Finally, when asked about buying a product recommended by ChatGPT, about three-quarters of Millennials (77%) and Gen X (75%) say they would purchase a product based on recommendations from ChatGPT. In comparison, only three-fifths of Gen Z (59%) say they would do so.

However, among Australians who are aware of but have yet to interact with the AI chatbot so far, less than two in five (38%) of Millennials and Gen Z would make a purchase based on ChatGPT recommendations, while just under a fifth (19%) of Gen X say the same.

The National Ceramic Industries Australia (NCIA) reached out to technology and data partner OFS to see if it could measure its energy usage in real time joule by joule.

OFS already provided its performance management solution to NCIA, which uses sensors to monitor production performance in real time.

It added new sensors to track energy use against production.

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The deployment gave NCIA the data it needed to predict with accuracy the amount of energy required to produce every single product.

The insights positioned the company to get the best possible deals from its gas suppliers as it could match its production schedule with energy usage.

It leveraged the data to get the best possible deals from its gas suppliers as it could match its production schedule with energy usage.

This has led to average monthly savings of $40,000, or close to half a million dollars annually, OFS claimed.

According to NCIA factory manager Craig Oliver, the solution’s value has increased dramatically in the context of the recent dramatic surge in energy prices.

This is having a dismal effect on the sector, with some manufacturers reporting upwards of a 350% increase in gas prices.

“This data has been a lifeline in the context of the devastating energy crisis affecting everyone in Australia, particularly manufacturers,” said Oliver.

“Forecasting penalties and trying to manually count energy usage is incredibly expensive. OFS has automated that entire process and positioned us to mitigate the surges in energy prices and optimise how we buy our gas.”

OFS CEO James Magee said while times are tough for Australian manufacturers, virtually none of them are measuring energy in this way and are consequently missing out on huge relief from soaring prices.

“NCIA should serve as industry best practice to absolutely minimise the cost impact of energy on the sector—you can’t manage what you can’t measure,” he said.

“The energy trauma facing Australia’s manufacturing sector is immense, and it’s disheartening that it’s come at a time of such renewed confidence in, and hope for, the sector. But manufacturers are resilient, and I hope the current crisis will spur more to leverage digital transformation to optimise their operations,” Magee said.

Magee added that OFS technology could be further leveraged. “These same concepts can be used for electricity, gas, water, air, even renewables. So long as it can be metered, we can help make improvements.”

Inspired by the results NCIA has seen, OFS has further developed its software for manufacturers looking to measure and lower costs. “We’ve always been strong in saving manufacturers’ time and reducing waste,” said Magee. “Today, more than ever, this applies to energy too.”

NCIA manufactured its first tile in New South Wales’ Hunter Valley in 2004.

Now, it claims to be the first Australia’s largest producer of ceramic floor and wall tiles as well as one of the largest single-site users of natural gas.

The company claims that AI robots “beat humans at investing.”

Founders Peter Bakker, Glenn Vanbavinckhove, and Saskia Albers see the trend towards AI as perfect timing.

“While we are a fair way off mainstream adoption, consumers are considering autonomous vehicles (AVs) while already speaking to AI chatbots and devices like Alexa at home,” comments Unhedged CEO Peter Bakker.

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“People are craving products that help build their wealth and allow them to be competitive in markets typically reserved for insiders.”

“Algorithmic investing is out there, but not yet easily accessible to everyday investors who arguably would benefit the most from its knowledge and scalability. Democratisation in this area is inevitable,” says Unhedged chief operating officer Saskia Albers.

Today, algorithms execute 80 to 90% of equity trading volumes according to HFR and the World Bank. In 2018, “quant” funds managed only $932 billion - a mere 1.2% of the total value of stocks traded at US$77.6 trillion. Preqin notes that 23% of Hedge Funds in the equity space already use AI to generate trading strategies.

While funds are heading towards to AI, where does that leave the everyday consumers, the Unhedged team asks.

Quantitative investing has historically been incredibly expensive, with their PhD teams and supercomputers: investments that made most quant funds unreachable as they dealt with big chunks of capital. On top of that, most regulators have designated hedge funds as a "rich people's playground" and limit retail investors.

In the academia, Unhedged says, the pursuit of the AI holy grail is ongoing.

“We teach Algorithmic Trading to students. From the basic models and game theory, we add complexity with known risks and a few ’states’, the world quickly becomes non-linear,” says Melbourne University Dr Nitin Yadav.

Now, thanks to the warp speed that AI and machine learning have developed, alongside greater accessibility to computing power, retail investors are getting a look into automated investing.

“While other robots were stuck with their predetermined positions and rode the market, among other proprietary processes, our algorithms run defensive states to mitigate loss,” says Unhedged CTO and chief quant Glenn Vanbavinckhove.

“It used to be a space that was about absolute returns and high-frequency trading. Now, it’s accelerating towards quant strategies for long term investment,” concludes Unhedged advisor Dr Thomas Starke.

Last November, the company reported a 25x improvement.

The technology behind these demonstrations will be revealed at the APS March Meeting physics conference being held in Chicago on 14–18 March.

The underlying software tools are available to quantum computing researchers and developers in Q-Ctrl's products including Boulder Opal.

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Most quantum computers are so error prone that only short, simple algorithms can be run, so they are not very useful.

Q-Ctrl found ways that AI and automation could be used to reduce errors in quantum logic elements as well as those that only arise when executing complete algorithms.

The company has shown that it could achieve up to 9000x performance improvements as measured by benchmarks from the US Quantum Economic Development Consortium.

"[European quantum startup] BEIT has been pushing the limits on quantum algorithms but has faced the same barriers as everyone else in hardware performance," said BEIT CEO Paulina Mazurek.

"We were impressed by how Q-Ctrl has opened totally new frontiers in our research and is bringing quantum advantage closer, enabling results better than classically possible for one of the cornerstone quantum algorithms. In some cases this software fundamentally transformed hardware, allowing results deemed impossible by previous benchmarks."

BEIT was an early user of Q-Ctrl's technology.

Q-Ctrl's results were achieved using conventional cloud access to commercial quantum computers, with no special access to hardware required, proving these capabilities can be delivered to any quantum computer user with an internet connection.

"Our benchmarking experiments demonstrate that there's hidden performance inside today's quantum computers that can become available with the right error-correcting software tools - no changes to hardware are needed," said Q-Ctrl founder and CEO Professor Michael J. Biercuk.

"We're excited to offer this technology to researchers, end users, and manufacturers worldwide to accelerate the path to quantum advantage and bring real-world applications closer to fruition."

At 7am on 13 August, a 70-year-old abandoned portion of a mine in southeastern in United States collapsed and caused an airblast. No one was injured in the incident and everyone was evacuated before the collapse. The mining team needed to assess the condition of the vicinity and reached out to technology teams in the US to assist with the remote inspection but none were able to provide the capability or timeframe to get the mine back into production.

Using ten of their Explora XL robots, Australian Droid & Robot (ADR) reached 1.7km into the mine. The robots conducted a laser and video scan to assist with the mine’s reopening after it collapsed so that production could be restarted.

“We got the call on 22 October,” recalls Australian Droid & Robot co-founder and operations manager Dr Joe Cronin. “From the start, we knew the mine operator’s team were serious and understood what technology was required. We keep a small fleet of robots ready to go for emergencies, but this was going to require more robots and a bunch of different sensors and capability.”

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“We dropped everything and built more robots and then went into a thorough testing regime. To imitate the conditions and distances we would experience in the US, we had teams all over Brisbane in parks and on golf courses ensuring we had the range of communications required. At one stage, we had robots strung across more than one suburb, all controlled from a central location,” says Cronin.

ADR has been developing remote inspection robots using Rajant Kinetic Mesh industrial wireless networking radio technology to create long-distance, low latency networks in real-time. The robots were shipped to the US less than a month later. They were accompanied by head electronics engineer Andre Preller and senior robotics engineer Callum MacDermid.

After testing, the robots entered the mine, each robot relaying the communications signal to the next, creating a high bandwidth, daisy-chain, network.

A week later, the team acquired sufficient data to begin to restart operations.

Acknowledging this as a world-first, Dr Cronin was proud to see the team’s hard work recognised globally.

“All of our technology is designed with the philosophy of ‘safety by separation.’ It guides our work and solidifies our vision. It’s the goal of each of our products to help reduce risk and minimise the need for human intervention within hazardous working environments,” Dr Cronin says.

“We are the only company in the world who was able to safely and quickly mobilise to meet complete deep underground inspections.”

Dr Cronin also credits the support of its technology partners, Rajant and PBE Group, which served as the operation’s communications provider.

“Together, our efforts enabled the robots to transmit 80Mbps, which included high-definition video and Lidar to create a virtual 3D model of the mine, during the longest portions of the mission.”

Dr Cronin considers the achievement as akin to winning gold at the Olympics.

The site mining team and personnel from the Mine Safety and Health Administration are now back, inspecting infrastructure in preparation for the restart of production.

The operator’s project lead explained the company completed a worldwide search for a company to help out.

“ADR’s capability is second to none. The maturity of their technology and the professionalism of their team reflects a strong innovative and entrepreneurial approach to improving mine safety.”

Axis Communications collaborates with software company EYEFi to produce a solution to protect Melbourne Water from bushfires and lightning strikes.

Axis Communications has provided the project with thermal sensors and visual spectrum cameras to enable the geo-targeting of smoke plumes and lightning activity using EYEfi’s Sparc technology.

This allows the solution to accurately detect lightning strikes as well as pinpointing geographic location of a fire within 75 metres of the incident and over long distances.

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The solution allows firefighting personnel to maintain 24/7 surveillance on a determined area without the need for staff to constantly man watch towers, and provides continuous reports and updates in real-time.

EYEfi also plans to release a fully autonomous software update later in 2021 that will provide real-time AI capabilities, negating the need for firefighters to maintain live 24/7 surveillance positions and at times of high fire danger, instead will provide updates and reporting digitally.

The Axis Q8742-LE bi-spectral visual/thermal camera is said to provide high-resolution imagery in all lighting conditions from pitch black to bright sunlight.

With PTZ functionality, Melbourne Water users are able to hone-in on areas of interest, detecting and geo-targeting potential trouble spots before they get out of control.

Axis Communications regional director Oceania Wai King Wong describes the collaboration as a “smart deployment, and one which demonstrates the many and varied uses of technology in the wider community.”

“There is so much scope these days for connected video and audio to be integrated with features such as geo-mapping and analytics, and people are only limited by their imagination or knowledge of what is possible,” he says.

“A system like this for example can save lives and critical infrastructure, while making life easier and more efficient for those involved,” he adds.

The EYEFi Spatial Video Platform, equipped with Sparc technology, is capable of geo-pointing and reverse geo-pointing, allowing users to pinpoint a specific area and geo-coordinates on a virtual map, and have the Axis cameras provide clear images in real time.

The visual spectrum cameras and thermal sensors with lightning detection enable bushfire teams to locate a fire or thermal heat anomaly over a wide area without the need for other frames of reference or triangulation.

“EYEfi has been working closely with Axis for several years, utilising Axis cameras across our range of products in the market. The combination of Axis camera technology with EYEfi’s spatial video smarts and cloud software, provides our customers with entirely new situational awareness and intelligence gathering capabilities,” notes EYEfi CEO and head of research and development Simon Langdon.

Melbourne Water Corporation is the statutory authority responsible for the management of Victoria’s largest and most critical water catchment.

As such, the body has direct responsibility for bushfire planning, management, and the identification of bushfires in and around the water catchment area.

This is performed by staffing a network of bushfire towers, which have now been successfully trialled using the EYEFi Sparc solution and Axis cameras.

An autonomous harvest robot capable of identifying, picking, and depositing apples in a span of seven seconds at full capacity has been developed by Dr Chao Chen with his research team from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in Monash University.

We’re told, “following extensive trials in February and March at Fankhauser Apples in Drouin, Victoria, the robot was able to harvest more than 85% of all reachable apples in the canopy as identified by its vision system.”

Of all apples harvested, “less than 6% were damaged due to stem removal. Apples without stems can still be sold, but don’t necessarily fit the cosmetic guidelines of some retailers.”

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When the robot was set to half its maximum speed, the median harvest rate was 12.6 seconds per apple. In streamlined pick-and-drop scenarios, the cycle time reduced to roughly nine seconds.

At full speed, individual apple harvesting time can drop to seven seconds.

Dr Chen, Director of Laboratory of Motion Generation and Analysis (LMGA), says: “Our developed vision system can not only identify apples in a tree within its range in an orchard environment by means of deep learning, but also identify and categorise obstacles, such as leaves and branches, to calculate the optimum trajectory for apple extraction.”

While automatic harvest robots are promising for the agricultural industry, it pose challenges for fruit and vegetable growers.

Robotic harvesting of fruit and vegetables require vision system to detect and localise the produce. To increase the success rate and reduce the damage of produce during the harvesting process, information on the shape, and stem-branch joint location and orientation are also required.

To counter this problem, researchers created a state-of-the-art motion-planning algorithm featuring “fast-generation of collision-free trajectories to minimise processing and travel times between apples, reducing harvesting time and maximising the number of apples that can be harvested at a single location.”

Dr Chen claims the “robot’s vision system can identify more than 90% of all visible apples seen within the camera’s view from a distance of approximately 1.2m. The system can work in all types of lighting and weather conditions and takes less than 200 milliseconds to process the image of an apple.”

“We also implemented a ‘path-planning’ algorithm that was able to generate collision-free trajectories for more than 95% of all reachable apples in the canopy. It takes just eight seconds to plan the entire trajectory for the robot to grasp and deposit an apple”, Dr Chen says.

“The robot picks apples with a specially designed, pneumatically powered, soft gripper with four independently actuated fingers and suction system that grasps and extracts apples efficiently, while minimising damage to the fruit and the tree itself.

“In addition, the suction system draws the apple from the canopy into the gripper, reducing the need for the gripper to reach into the canopy and potentially damaging its surroundings. The gripper can extract more than 85% of all apples from the canopy that were planned for harvesting.”

Dr Chen says the system can address the challenges of solving the current labour shortage in Australia’s agricultural sector and the future food crisis as population grows and decreased arable land.”

He says technological advances could also help increase the productivity of fruit and attract younger people to working in farms with this technology.

The research team consists of Dr Wesley Au, Xing Wang, Hugh Zhou, and Dr Hanwen Kang, and led by Dr Chen. The project is funded by the Australian Research Council Industrial Transformation Research Hubs scheme.

At Sinefa, over 650 customers have deployed our Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) solutions in their offices, cloud VPCs, and data centers across 45 or so countries, and our conservative count is that at any given time period (in normal times) we were seeing 600K+ end users via DPI traffic analysis through our hardware and software probes. So, with a data-driven lens on how the pandemic emptied out offices, and thought it would be interesting to share what we have found.

Before the storm hits

Six months ago, branch offices were buzzing with activity. The data set we’re drawing from is traffic detected for Office 365 from an anonymized sample of real customer branch locations in the U.S., monitored via Sinefa probes that then send metadata to our cloud back-end.

You can see in Figure 1 and 2 that January and February are fairly consistent. We’re detecting 24 locations with live traffic, hosting nearly 2200 users. February begins to show some drop off, going from 81M to 66M transactions, a 20% decrease.

Figure 1: January, 2020

Figure 2: February, 2020

It begins

We start to see some more movement downward in March (Figure 3). 24 locations are still active, but the user base has dropped by 20% since January, with traffic levels and transactions dropping by roughly 60% from January to March.

The pandemic is hitting, and offices are starting to empty out.

Figure 3: March, 2020

The cliff

April is where we observe the dramatic change though, as demonstrated by Figure 4. Only 15 locations are detecting traffic, meaning that 9 locations are essentially empty. Traffic has dropped by 97% and transactions by 96%.

There is little change in May, as seen in Figure 5. Branch office activity has fallen off a cliff.

Figure 4: April, 2020

Figure 5: May, 2020

A small-scale return?

In the last 30 days, we’re seeing very early indicators of movement back into offices, as seen in Figure 6. 23 of 24 locations have traffic activity, though the population across those offices is still small, and traffic and transactions are barely above the March and April levels. This incremental change could be explained by core or essential personnel returning to offices.

Figure 6: Previous 30 days, as of late June, 2020

It’s a new normal, so think holistically about monitoring

Every indication across the industry tells us that a much higher level of remote work will stay in place for quite some time, and that branches will open slowly. We’ll be monitoring and sharing updates over time. In the meantime, you should be thinking about shifting monitoring investments to support remote workers with holistic insights into the service delivery chain between your users and their business-critical applications, including their endpoint devices, WIFI, local networks, Internet and SaaS or other apps. It’s also important, given the longer-term trends towards SD-WAN, to ensure that you have an integrated approach to endpoints, branches, data centers and cloud instances, so you have the same levels of visibility across internal and external/Internet/cloud factors no matter where users are sitting.

To explore what it means to have a holistic approach to DEM that gives you internal and external visibility from home or corporate offices, data centers and VPCs, Sinefa’s Founder and CTO Chris Siakos will be joined by VP of Marketing Alex Henthorn-Iwane to discuss.

            Title: Holistic Monitoring for Remote Worker and Branch Offices

            Date: Wednesday August 26, 2020

            Time: 10 am AEST

Register now.

 

The issues were caused by an upgrade that was carried out on Thursday and did not go according to plan.

So Commonwealth Bank... are fees going to be waved for all customers due to the massive failure today? #commonwealthbank @CommBank#commbank

— Daniel Parker (@Parker607) October 17, 2019

The CBA added that its staff had been working on the issue overnight and that it was trying to clear the backlog as soon as possible.

On Thursday, ATMs — apart from cardless cash and cardless deposits — EFTPOS merchant services, debit and credit cards were all working.

{loadposition sam08}Affected services included some debit card payments, CommBank app and NetBank payments, BPAY services including PAY-ID payments, cardless cash and cardless deposits, some in-branch services, some call centre services and processing of some CommBiz payments.

Commonwealth Bank tech team working wonders today #commonwealthbank #Commbank pic.twitter.com/Mnzpi0DH3G

— Guy Incognito (@AnderCorrey) October 17, 2019

The bank said all branches would open as normal on Friday, adding that there would be a delay experienced by those who contacted call centres.

"We have brought in additional staff to serve customers to assist with any outstanding issues," the statement said. "We are very sorry for the inconvenience this is causing our customers.

Imagine being a company that literally steals money from their customers, makes billions of dollars and yet can't provide a basic service to not one single customer #commonwealthbank

— Oz (@ausmojo) October 17, 2019

"We want to assure customers that their accounts are safe. The internal system issues related to an upgrade implemented on Thursday."