Japan's bear-related casualties hit record on escalating attacks Bear bells are displayed for sale at a souvenir shop at Shirakawa-go, a popular tourist spot and one of Japan's UNESCO World Heritage sites, in the village of Shirakawa, Gifu Prefecture, on Nov. 15. A record 230 were killed or injured by bears in Japan since April, putting more pressure on the government to intervene as the animals push deeper into areas where people live. Thirteen have died and 217 were injured as a result of bear attacks in the eight months through end-November, according to data released Friday by the environment ministry. The total already exceeds the previous record of 219 for the fiscal year through March 2024. Roughly two-thirds of casualties occurred in the sparsely-populated northern Tohoku region.

A bear warning sign is displayed in Shirakawa-go, a popular tourist spot in Gifu Prefecture. A town in Miyagi Prefecture has retracted its social media post warning of a bear sighting after discovering an image submitted to it had been generated using artificial intelligence. A Japanese town has deleted a social media post warning of a bear sighting after discovering that a picture it had received showing the fearsome creature was generated using artificial intelligence. Similar fake images have been circulating online as fear of bears runs high in the country, where the animals have killed a record 13 people this year. "The town prioritized informing residents to avoid danger, but we apologize for causing any anxiety or confusion," the town of Onagawa, Miyagi Prefecture, said on its official X social media account on Wednesday.

Tokyo police have arrested three teenage boys on suspicion of fraudulently subscribing to Rakuten Mobile's phone service via a self-made program using artificial intelligence. The Metropolitan Police Department's cybercrime unit believes that the boys obtained at least about 2,500 mobile phone subscriptions in about six months from December 2023 and sold them for a total of about 7.5 million in crypto assets. The arrests were made for allegedly obtaining 105 mobile phone subscriptions between May and August last year by logging into the Rakuten Mobile system with other people's IDs and passwords. The boys -- a 14-year-old third-year junior high school student in Tokyo, a 16-year-old first-year high school student in Gifu Prefecture and a 15-year-old third-year junior high school student in Shiga Prefecture -- have admitted to the allegations, according to police sources. One of the three was quoted as saying that he wanted to attract attention on social media by devising and carrying out a sophisticated criminal scheme.

Ibiden, the dominant supplier of chip package substrates used in Nvidia's cutting-edge semiconductors, may need to dial up the pace of production capacity increases to keep up with demand, according to its chief executive officer. Sales of the 112-year-old company's AI-use substrates are robust with customers buying up all that Ibiden can sell, CEO Koji Kawashima said in an interview, adding that that demand is likely to last at least through next year. Ibiden is building a new substrate factory in Gifu Prefecture, expected to go online at 25% production capacity around the last quarter of 2025 before reaching 50% by March 2026. But that may not be enough, Kawashima said. The company is in talks about when to get the remaining 50% capacity online.

Although many deep learning (DL) algorithms have been proposed for the IMU-based HAR domain, traditional machine learning that utilizes handcrafted time series features (TSFs) still often performs well. It is not rare that combinations among DL and TSFs show better accuracy than DL-only approaches. However, there is a problem with time series features in IMU-based HAR. The amount of derived features can vary greatly depending on the method used to select the 3D basis. Fortunately, DL's strengths include capturing the features of input data and adaptively deriving parameters. Thus, as a new DNN model for IMU-based human activity recognition (HAR), this paper proposes rTsfNet, a DNN model with Multi-head 3D Rotation and Time Series Feature Extraction. rTsfNet automatically selects 3D bases from which features should be derived by extracting 3D rotation parameters within the DNN. Then, time series features (TSFs), based on many researchers' wisdom, are derived to achieve HAR using MLP. Although rTsfNet is a model that does not use CNN, it achieved higher accuracy than existing models under well-managed benchmark conditions and multiple datasets: UCI HAR, PAMAP2, Daphnet, and OPPORTUNITY, all of which target different activities.

GIFU - At its city hall on Tuesday, a local government in central Japan demonstrated an experiment showing robots that can independently guide people to the right information window or teach them how to fill out government forms. Ogaki city in Gifu Prefecture is the first local government in Japan that is attempting to use robots that will autonomously guide people, according to the city, which is looking to integrate them into its services in 2020. "I would like to use robots to increase our services to our residents, and make our municipal office a gathering place where we can have fun," said Ogaki Mayor Bin Ogawa. At the event, an autonomous robot shaped like a tube guided the mayor from the information counter to the elevator. Ogawa wants the project to be implemented in 2020 when a new government office is set to open.

GIFU – Six people, including children, were injured Saturday when a 4-kg drone that was distributing candy at an event in Ogaki, Gifu Prefecture, suddenly crashed into the crowd, the police said. Those hit by the drone ranged in age from 5 to 48, but most of the injuries were minor, such as scratches to foreheads and shoulders, the police said. The drone, about 85 cm in diameter and 55 cm high, was scattering sweets while hovering over a park in Ogaki as part of an event to showcase robotic technologies, the police said. The event was organized by a local tourism association. About 600 people, including about 100 children attending with their families, were on site at the time of the accident, the organizer said.

From a sutra-chanting humanoid robot to automated cemeteries, technological innovation is changing how Japanese deal with funerary rituals. As traditional family ties erode, people are opting for more affordable and convenient alternatives to conventional ceremonies and burial services. Here's a peek into how mourning the dead is going high-tech in Japan: What is driving the trend? Various factors are behind the ongoing transformation of the funeral business, but demographics lie at its core. Japan's low birthrate has diminished the size of family units while the aging population has given rise to elderly single-person households.

Numerous municipalities nationwide are struggling to aid foreign students who are learning at local public schools but cannot understand the Japanese language fully or at all, a Kyodo News survey showed Saturday. In a questionnaire survey on issues facing foreign children living in Japan, 46 percent of the 1,612 municipalities that responded said that learning the Japanese language and other subjects, which are taught in Japanese, remain a challenge for foreign students. The survey, conducted from May to July, also highlighted another stumbling block in aiding foreign students: many are dispersed in small numbers -- sometimes one or two -- in public schools nationwide. In the survey, the city of Utsunomiya, Tochigi Prefecture, said foreign students who speak 14 languages, including Vietnamese and Thai, are scattered across 39 of its 93 public elementary schools and junior high schools. In the southwestern city of Kagoshima, some of the foreign students cannot maintain the pace of classes with their Japanese peers and struggle in understanding tests, the questionnaire showed.