Yo Kitamura won the fifth prize in the cello division of the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels on Sunday. Brussels - Yo Kitamura of Japan won the fifth prize in the cello division of the prestigious Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels on Sunday. In the final selection process joined by 12 cellists, Kitamura, 22, who is from Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, played Russian composer Sergey Prokofiev's Symphony-Concerto and other works with the Belgian National Orchestra on Tuesday. "I couldn't make it to the top three, but I think it is a meaningful experience because I was able to grow so much," Kitamura told reporters. "I want to face my big dream of making the world peaceful with music." The winner of the cello division is Ettore Pagano, 23, from Italy.

Android robots shown at the Osaka Expo in a pavilion produced by University of Osaka professor Hiroshi Ishiguro will be relocated to Kyoto Prefecture. OSAKA - Seven android robots shown at the 2025 World Exposition in Osaka in a pavilion produced by University of Osaka professor Hiroshi Ishiguro will be relocated to Kyoto Prefecture after the end of the event on Monday. In addition, the Dutch pavilion will be moved to Awaji Island, Hyogo Prefecture. People involved in the use of expo assets after the event hope that they will be loved as tourist attractions in their new places. The prefectural government of Kyoto was chosen as the new owner of the androids in an open tender held by the expo organizer, the Japan Association for the 2025 World Exposition, in September. The robots will be shown to the public at a research facility in the Keihanna Science City research district straddling the Kyoto municipalities of Seika and Kizugawa.

Japanese regional banking group Senshu Ikeda Holdings' entry into the reservation-based transit bus business is aimed at stimulating the regional economy, President and CEO Atsushi Ukawa said in a recent interview. "Even regional banks in urban areas must think about serving the local community," Ukawa said of the first reservation bus operations by a regional bank in Japan. He said that the Osaka-based company will work with local governments to expand the operation area to complement public transport. Senshu Ikeda operates an "on-demand bus," which uses artificial intelligence to run according to users' desired dates, times and locations. It partnered with companies, including auto parts maker Aisin, to launch the bus operations on a trial basis in four municipalities in Osaka Prefecture in January 2023.

The senior care industry is shifting toward the use of artificial intelligence and data analysis to help elderly people gain more independence. The trend reached a new level with last year's introduction of a nationwide data collection system, which aggregates information on physical abilities and reports on the status of patients' care -- a move pushed and financially supported by the government. With the implementation of the new system, concerns have been raised that nursing care providers may not keep up with the changes. To address this problem, consultancy groups have held a number of lectures and seminars for them. However, there are still concerns that the new data-based system may mean the diverse needs of individual patients end up being disregarded.

Evacuation shelters, which are urgently required during natural disasters, are designed to minimize the burden of evacuation on human survivors. However, the larger the scale of the disaster, the more costly it becomes to operate shelters. When the number of evacuees decreases, the operation costs can be reduced by moving the remaining evacuees to other shelters and closing shelters as quickly as possible. On the other hand, relocation between shelters imposes a huge emotional burden on evacuees. In this study, we formulate the "Evacuation Shelter Scheduling Problem," which allocates evacuees to shelters in such a way to minimize the movement costs of the evacuees and the operation costs of the shelters. Since it is difficult to solve this quadratic programming problem directly, we show its transformation into a 0-1 integer programming problem. In addition, such a formulation struggles to calculate the burden of relocating them from historical data because no payments are actually made. To solve this issue, we propose a method that estimates movement costs based on the numbers of evacuees and shelters during an actual disaster. Simulation experiments with records from the Kobe earthquake (Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake) showed that our proposed method reduced operation costs by 33.7 million dollars: 32%.

Kumamoto – Startup companies are acquiring a growing presence in the field of disaster prevention and reduction, leveraging their strength in technology and their ability to quickly develop goods and services responding to actual needs in afflicted areas. Wota Corp. released a portable recycled water treatment device in 2019. Called Wota Box, it is capable of making 98% of the water that is discharged after showers, handwashing and laundry reusable. With the quality of water managed by artificial intelligence technology, Wota Box makes potable water available when the supply of water is cut off. More than 20 local governments have introduced the device for use at times of disaster.

Kobe – A theme park on an island in western Japan will open an attraction featuring popular role-playing video game series Dragon Quest next spring, its operator said Thursday. The attraction at the Nijigen no Mori theme park on Awaji Island in Hyogo Prefecture will let visitors enjoy going on an adventure in the reproduced world of Dragon Quest. Nijigen Nomori Co., the park's operator, said the attraction will be built in an area of some 8,000 square meters, using rich nature and digital imaging. Fees and other details will be announced later, according to Nijigen Nomori, a unit of staffing company Pasona Group Inc. The attraction was designed by Square Enix Co., which produces the Dragon Quest series.

Nearly 30 local governments across Japan are planning to or interested in introducing an artificial intelligence system designed to assess the seriousness of school bullying cases in hopes of better responding to them, a source close to the matter said Thursday. Otsu city government, which came under fire for the way it handled a high-profile bullying case in 2011, has teamed up with information technology services provider Hitachi Systems Ltd, to develop the AI system, which predicts how serious a case of bullying has the potential to become based on an analysis of past cases. School bullying has long been a concern in Japan, with the education ministry data showing that elementary, junior and senior high as well as special-needs schools nationwide reported 612,496 cases in the year through March, up 68,563 from a year earlier. When a new case of bullying is reported, information on the incident, such as time, place and perpetrator, is fed into the system, which then searches its database to come up with an estimate of how serious the case is, expressed as a percentage. In all, about 50 pieces of data are used for analysis.

Nearly 30 local governments are planning to or are interested in introducing an artificial intelligence system designed to assess the seriousness of school bullying cases in hopes of better responding to them, a source close to the matter said Thursday. Otsu Municipal Government, which came under fire for the way it handled a high-profile bullying case in 2011, has teamed up with information technology services provider Hitachi Systems Ltd., to develop the AI system, which predicts how a case of bullying has the potential to become serious based on an analysis of past cases. School bullying has long been a concern in Japan, with education ministry data showing that elementary, junior and high schools as well as special-needs schools nationwide reported 612,496 cases in the year through March, up 68,563 from a year earlier. When a new case of bullying is reported, information on the incident, such as time, place and perpetrator, is fed into the system, which then searches its database to come up with an estimate of how serious the case is, expressed as a percentage. In all, about 50 pieces of data are used for analysis.

Tokyo's Metropolitan Police Department has arrested two men on defamation and other charges over distributing on the internet pornography videos they doctored so that the faces of actresses in the original videos were swapped with those of female celebrities, it was learned Friday. Takumi Hayashida, a 21-year-old university student in Kumamoto, and Takanobu Otsuki, a 47-year-old system engineer in Sanda, Hyogo Prefecture, admitted to the charges, police sources said. The suspects used an artificial intelligence technology called deep learning to produce so-called deepfake pornography videos. The case is the first involving deepfake pornography videos handled by police in Japan. Otsuki told the police that he wanted to be praised by others, the sources said.