Starting March 22, 2018, when you now subscribe to AutoCAD® you get access to AutoCAD vertical products and libraries - referred to as specialised toolsets.

Starbucks is committing $10m to develop a fully recyclable and compostable coffee cup.  The coffee giant said its NextGen Cup Challenge initiative, in partnership with Closed Loop Partners’ Center for the Circular Economy, will provide grants to inventors who are working towards a new cup technology.

“A supermarket with empty shelves is completely pointless. Ensuring our millions of customers can get what they want, whenever they need it is absolutely critical,” says Chris Quin, CEO Foodstuffs North Island. “Equally important is the ability to transport products safely and efficiently – reducing time spent on the road and the impact on our environment."

Worldwide, the value of the horticultural industry will increase with better pollination systems, robust quality control, better traceability systems, more cost-competitive practice and solutions for the difficulty of finding seasonal orchard crews.

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   |||

The first real-world tests of 5G mobile technology in New Zealand have begun on the streets of Wellington. However, there are still a number of hurdles, both technological and bureaucratic, to overcome before consumer access becomes a reality.

Women make up just over half of New Zealand's population, yet currently they comprise just 17 per cent of the nation's construction industry.  Recently Jenny Parker, the President of the National Association of Women in Construction in New Zealand (NAWIC), visited the Ara Institute of Canterbury's Woolston campus to speak to women trades students and discuss this imbalance of women in trades.

Engineering New Zealand today welcomes Dean Kimpton as the new President, three new Board members – Colin Crampton, Tim Fisher and Sina Cotter-Tait – and one re-elected Board member, Geoffrey Farquhar.

Mr Kimpton is Auckland Council’s Chief Operating Officer and a passionate advocate for engineers, who he says have a critical role to play on issues that matter to New Zealand.

“I am thrilled to take up the role as President of Engineering New Zealand, an organisation that not only supports engineers but sees them as part of the bedrock of our nation’s development. Engineers are vital to the work being done to manage the country’s growing pains and issues such as seismic resilience, climate change and urbanisation.”

Mr Kimpton is also Chair of QuakeCoRE, a Board member of Infrastructure New Zealand and a member of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s Building Advisory Panel. He was previously Managing Director of engineering consultancy AECOM NZ.

He takes over the presidency from Craig Price, who oversaw a period of immense change for the organisation, as it rebranded itself from IPENZ to Engineering New Zealand. Mr Price played an integral role in the design of the new membership structure to be more relevant and inclusive for all engineers.

“As we continue to explore new ways to grow and support engineers across the country, I’m confident in Dean’s ability to navigate the challenges facing our industry and take the organisation to the next level,” said Mr Price.

Also announced today was the new Vice President, Colin Crampton, who was appointed unopposed. Tim Fisher, former Auckland Branch Chair, and Geoffrey Farquhar, who returns for his third term, were voted in by members from a record-breaking 27 nominees. The Board has also appointed Sina Cotter-Tait onto the Board for a two-year term. She was the third-highest polling candidate.

“With Elena Trout retiring this year, we believe it is important to maintain diversity of thought on the Board. Sina’s experience in engineering, governance and SMEs as well as her gender and cultural heritage will be immensely valuable to the Board as we continue to strengthen Engineering New Zealand’s voice and influence,” said Mr Price.

Engineering New Zealand has grown by more than 1,000 members in the past year, and now has 21,000 members across all fields of engineering.

| An EngineeringNZ release   ||  March 16, 2018   |||

Construction of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture's Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia, which is expected to become the world's tallest building, is back on track after delays. According to local paper Times of Oman, the project had experienced delays, but construction is now progressing.