Good morning, welcome to August. Only five months left in the year, somehow. Time flies when Elon Musk is burning everything to the ground. Let’s get to it.
1. CSIRO maps our mini Silicon Valleys
CSIRO has mapped out the geography of Australia’s digital industries and while it said it’s not looking for our version of Silicon Valley, the emailed out news blast leads with the subject: NEW REPORT MAPS AUSTRALIA’S EMERGING ‘SILICON VALLEYS’. Anyway, the report brings together data from across the nation to map and describe the range of digital technology clusters currently developing. Clusters account for 63 per cent of tech jobs in Australia and we have four superclusters (mega groupings of multiple clusters): the Sydney arc, the Melbourne diamond, the Brisbane corridor, and the Canberra triangle. Australia also has 60 greater city clusters, which are single clusters in greater capital city areas. Read more over here.
2. Galaxy SmartTag spotted
Samsung held its Galaxy Unpacked event last week, bringing some folding phones, tablets, and watches, but there was something from the rumour mill that was missing: an AirTag competitor. While it was a no-show, 9to5Google reports it was just spotted at the Federal Communications Commission. As the report remembers, the original Galaxy SmartTag was released in 2021 and was offered in two models – a base version with only Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and a SmartTag+ that paired BLE with the more precise UWB location. All we can tell is that another is probably on the way.
3. ATO using ‘industrial scale’ AI
Over to the Australian Financial Review and it’s reporting that the Australian Taxation Office has used artificial intelligence on an ‘industrial scale’ to identify more than $530 million of unpaid tax bills and stop $2.5 billion from being fraudulently claimed. Per the report, ATO deputy commissioner Marek Rucinski said the agency’s deep learning models had helped his staff identify $295 million in superannuation guarantee underpayments, and natural language models had scoured leaked documents, such as the Panama Papers, to detect $242 million owed by tax evaders since 2018.
4. Human pleads guilty in first-ever self-driving pedestrian death
Rafaela Vasquez, the operator of a self-driving Uber vehicle that was the first-ever involved in a pedestrian fatality, has pleaded guilty to endangerment in the criminal case that followed the crash. The guilty plea, filed nearly five years after Vasquez’s fatal collision with a woman crossing a street with her bike, provides an answer in a longstanding debate over who was to blame for a supposedly autonomous vehicle harming a person. In this case, it’s the human. Read more about it here.
5. A printed circuit board that dissolves in water
Ending with Engadget today and it’s brought to our attention that German semiconductor maker Infineon Technologies AG announced the production of a printed circuit board (PCB) that dissolves in water. Sourced from UK startup Jiva Materials, the plant-based Soluboard could provide a new avenue for the tech industry to reduce e-waste. Per the report, we learn that Jiva’s biodegradable PCB is made from natural fibres and a halogen-free polymer with a much lower carbon footprint than traditional boards made with fibreglass composites.
BONUS ITEM: Aaaand it’s gone.
Have a fabulous day, friends.