With an aging population and a growing shortage of drivers, Japan is a country where autonomous transportation services would seem to have a bright future. Demand is particularly high for self-driving trucks in regions with few alternatives to hauling freight by road, such as Hokkaido. Among truck manufacturers, UD Trucks Corp., a Japanese unit of Sweden's AB Volvo, has teamed up with an agricultural cooperative in the northern prefecture that is increasingly concerned about the declining number of delivery truck drivers. The company has been testing its autonomous heavy-duty trucks on a 1.5-km-long (about 1 mile) designated route in and around a sugar factory in Shari, eastern Hokkaido. The truck is capable of Level 4 self-driving, meaning it performs all driving tasks without human intervention within a limited area, even in emergencies.

This week, leading AI lab OpenAI released their latest project: an AI that can play hide-and-seek. It's the latest example of how, with current machine learning techniques, a very simple setup can produce shockingly sophisticated results. The AI agents play a very simple version of the game, where the "seekers" get points whenever the "hiders" are in their field of view. The "hiders" get a little time at the start to set up a hiding place and get points when they've successfully hidden themselves; both sides can move objects around the playing field (like blocks, walls, and ramps) for an advantage. The results from this simple setup were quite impressive.

Chatbots have emerged as a great option for providing a 24/7 self-service solution to address a host of customer support requirements. They enable customers to get their questions answered in real-time and they free up support staff from having to field high volumes of repetitive inquiries. And with advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, chatbots are becoming extremely effective at providing a cognitive and conversational experience that your customers will love. As chatbot adoption has increased, various types have entered the market to address different requirements. For example, chatbots built for specific B2C or B2B support use cases, called transactional bots, are very different from those built for more wide-ranging applications, referred to as knowledge bots.

The Cabinet on Friday approved rules for operating partially self-driving vehicles, paving the way for the use of autonomous vehicles on public roads. Autonomous driving technology is classified into five levels, ranging from Level 1, which allows either steering, acceleration or braking to be automated, to fully automated Level 5. The government plans to enforce an ordinance defining violations and setting penalties by May next year as it envisions the use of Level 3 vehicles, which allow conditionally automated driving, on expressways in 2020. The newly decided penalties apply to the inappropriate use of Level 3 autonomous driving technologies, which require users to switch to manual operations when preset conditions regarding road type, driving speed, weather, time of day and other factors are no longer met. Violators of the ordinance will face fines of up to ¥12,000 ($110) depending on vehicle size.

The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind.

Facebook's Portal smart home device is finally launching in the UK – but a human contractor might end up listening to your voice commands. The device, whose AI-equipped camera will follow users around the room in order to keep them in the frame during video calls, will be available to British consumers for the first time from Oct 15. Users will be able to make voice calls using Facebook Messenger and encrypted voice calls using WhatsApp, as well as watch Facebook's TV service in tandem with their friends. But Facebook admits up front that clips of the instructions given to Portal's voice assistant might be passed to human contractors to check whether they have been correctly interpreted by its speech recognition software – unless users explicitly opt out. Andrew Bosworth, Facebook's vice president of augmented and virtual reality, said that Portal would never record the content of anyone's video calls, and that its "smart camera" software remains entirely on the device without any data being sent back to Facebook.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the foundation for simulating human intelligence methods by creating and applying algorithms. The technological advancements in this field have led to the adoption of this technology in various industries including healthcare, education, finance, and marketing and it has proven itself to be the most effective technology in modern times. This technology is now being used to prevent cyber-attacks in major organizations. As cybercrimes are increasing in number and complexity, AI is aiding in identifying these attacks and attacking them. AI technologies like Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing allow security analysts to counter such threats immediately.

India has commenced the project to map the country digitally with a resolution of 10cm via drones and disruptive technologies including AI and big data. The massive task was taken up by the Survey of India a few months ago. The Survey of India is a part of the Department of Science and Technology and has planned to complete the project in two years as stated by Prof. Ashutosh Sharma, Department's Secretary. He also revealed that the Survey of India has been equipped with the latest technologies like drones, AI, big data analytics, image processing, and continuously operating reference system. After the completion of the project, the data will be made available to citizens and Gram Panchayats/local bodies.

Rayfield Byrd knows when it's time to wake up every morning. The 68-year-old Oakland, Cal., resident hears a voice from the living room offering a cheery good morning. A little after 8 a.m. each day, a small yellow robot named Mabu asks Byrd how he's doing. Byrd has Type 2 diabetes and congestive heart failure, and about three years ago, he had surgery to implant a microvalve in his heart to keep his blood flowing properly. To stay healthy, he takes four medications a day and needs to exercise regularly.

Time series classification (TSC) is the area of machine learning interested in learning how to assign labels to time series. The last few decades of work in this area have led to significant progress in the accuracy of classifiers, with the state of the art now represented by the HIVE-COTE algorithm. While extremely accurate, HIVE-COTE is infeasible to use in many applications because of its very high training time complexity in O(N 2*T 4) for a dataset with N time series of length T. For example, it takes HIVE-COTE more than 72,000s to learn from a small dataset with N 700 time series of short length T 46. Deep learning, on the other hand, has now received enormous attention because of its high scalability and state-of-the-art accuracy in computer vision and natural language processing tasks. Deep learning for TSC has only very recently started to be explored, with the first few architectures developed over the last 3 years only.