Items filtered by date: December 2014

Our popular annual tour is fully hosted by horse racing legend Des Coppins and escorted by Melbourne Cup specialist Kel Munro who always receives rave reviews from our customers. Melbourne is a fantastic destination, stay a little longer with our flexible package extensions. Being there, it’s everything!

Join us this Spring at fabulous Flemington Racecourse with Des Coppins who is celebrating his 27th Melbourne Cup! Experience an unparalleled celebration of world class thoroughbred racing, glamorous fashion and fabulous food in an exhilarating carnival atmosphere.

A consortium comprising AB InBev, Accenture, APL, Kuehne + Nagel and a European customs organisation has successfully tested a blockchain system that can eliminate the need for printed shipping documents and save the freight and logistics industry hundreds of millions of dollars annually, Accenture said.

The ethics of artificial intelligence will be critical to the success of AI going forward, a Microsoft leader and a keynote speaker at the AI Day event in Auckland next week says. Steve Guggenheimer, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s AI Business, says that given AI has the potential to reshape not just industries and governments, but society as a whole. “Working on the ethics of the use of AI, from the beginning, in key areas like transparency, accountability, privacy and bias will be crucial to the success of AI going forward. “There is a strong focus on the ethical implications of the AI systems that are being built and deployed.” The European Commission’s group on ethics in science and new technologies recently warned that existing efforts to develop solutions to the ethical, societal and legal challenges AI presents are a ‘patchwork of disparate initiatives’. It added that uncoordinated, unbalanced approaches in the regulation of AI risked ethics shopping, resulting in the relocation of AI development and use to regions with lower ethical standards. AI Day on March 28 is being organised by NewZealand.AI and the AI Forum NZ, which is part of the NZTech Alliance, bringing together 14 national tech communities, more than 500 organisations and more than 100,000 employees to help create a more prosperous New Zealand underpinned by technology. Guggenheimer says one important element around the adoption of AI is the focus on having AI help to amplify human capabilities and allow them to do more versus simply replacing people and functions. “As AI is adopted by various organisations we are starting to see a few trends occurring. We are starting to see a series of patterns emerge that cut across industries and geographies. These include: “1. Business agents – that represents your organisation in interactions with your customers, employees and other businesses. “2. AI assisting professionals – by helping them get the information that they need so they can focus on more value-added tasks. For example, a chief financial officer who gets AI generated forecasts so that they can focus on driving the business forward instead of number crunching. “3. Tracking people and objects in space – so we can improve the safety, security and productivity of spaces that we work in. Proactively advising a worker that a box they are going to lift is too heavy based on accidentally putting too many items in the box is an example. “4. Autonomous systems – that proactively improve resulting in increasingly stable systems. An interesting application of this pattern is self-healing networks that stop threats and re-route packets when a part of the network becomes slow. “The beauty of these patterns is they can be applied to commercial entities and public-sector institutions, across the globe and across economies. We are seeing examples in agriculture, manufacturing, government, healthcare and many other areas.

“There are many areas where AI capabilities are working to copy human abilities, but in general these are done at an individual cognitive level today. Today there are standardised tests used to look at areas like speech recognition, image recognition, translation, machine reading comprehension and more. “We’re proud of our history in research and have been fortunate to see many of these advances first hand. Computer vision for identifying objects, speech recognition, solving games like Ms. Pac-Man and most recently reading comprehension are all areas where AI has reached or exceeded human parity for a specific task. “The advancements are still continuing at a rapid pace and last week we announced we had the first machine translation system to reach human parity for Chinese to English translation.

| A Make lemonade release  ||  march 21, 2018   |||

Mar 20, 2018 - The USGA and The R&A have unveiled the new Rules of Golf, to be implemented January 1, 2019.  The USGA and The R&A finalized golf's new Rules this month after an extensive review that included a request for feedback from the global golf community on the proposed changes. Golfers can now access the official 2019 Rules of Golf by visiting RandA.org or usga.org/rules.

The Cook Islands’ Business Trade & Investment Board (BTIB) is leading a delegation of two exporting companies from the small South Pacific Island country to this weekend’s Pasifika Business Market at the Pasifika Festival.“We are very excited to bring over Kora Pearls and Te Tika to the Pasifika Business Market,” Mona Taio, BTIB Trade & Marketing Officer told Pacific Periscope.

“Cancellation of major projects, delays in new projects coming to market and uncertainty about future transport funding are forcing the contracting sector to release skilled staff just at the point at which the Government wants to increase the speed and scale of construction,” says Stephen Selwood CEO of Infrastructure New Zealand.

“It is natural for infrastructure priorities to change with new leadership, but the scale of change in recent months combined with high uncertainty over future transport funding is having a particularly heavy effect on a sector under pressure from rising input costs.

“The Government’s desire to utilise private capital to facilitate infrastructure delivery is commendable, as are commitments to increase Crown capital investment from $32b to $42b over the next four years, but it’s the lack of “shovel-ready” projects which is the problem.

“Near-term cancellation of projects which the sector had anticipated getting underway shortly include the consented East-West Link, the Tauranga Northern Corridor, the Petone to Granada Link road and SH1 Cambridge to Piarere.

“Delays to the CRL and north-western busway as well as uncertainty for critical growth projects like the Mill Rd corridor in Auckland and safety projects like Otaki to Levin north of Wellington is compounding the issue.

“All up, a conservative figure of the total investment pushed out of the next four to five-year period is over $2 billion. That’s in the order of $400 million per annum taken out of the contracting sector.

“The industry cannot absorb that level of cost without rationalising staff and equipment – the same staff and equipment which we know are urgently needed today to deliver infrastructure for housing.

“While it is not the Government’s job to keep the construction industry busy, a committed pipeline of work is fundamental to the productivity of the sector, thereby delivering value for tax-payers.

“It is vital that near-term gaps in the project pipeline are not allowed to undermine the long term health and capacity of the construction sector.

“Australian investment in transport is set to double in the next couple of years. The big Aussie contractors will absorb all the available skills we have spent a decade building up, risking a repeat of the 2000s from which we’re still recovering.

“There are projects with consents ready to go, including Mill Rd and Penlink. These projects have very positive economic benefits and unlock land for housing. We know they are going to be delivered, they must be signed off.

“These are urgent issues and if left unattended will materially impact our ability to deliver infrastructure and home construction programmes,” Selwood says.

| A Infrastructure New Zealand release  ||  march 20, 2018   |||

Mar 20, 2018  -    Air New Zealand Chairman Tony Carter has today written to the Minister of Finance Hon Grant Robertson to reinforce that the airline will always act independently of the Crown.