Amid severe labor shortages, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to perform human tasks is sure to grow, and DJI, the world's biggest drone-maker, is ready to respond, the firm's Japan head said. Drones for industrial uses ranging from agriculture to infrastructure maintenance and security are becoming more popular, said Allen Wu, DJI's head of Japan operations. But he said he is doubtful about the potential for drone-based product delivery. "For quite some time, we've figured that our main market in Japan is industrial, so our team has been focusing on it more," Wu said in an interview Wednesday. Shenzhen-based SZ DJI Technology Co. dominates the global drone market and according to reports is estimated to have a market share of more than 70 percent.

White House plans to cut funding for science couldn't come at a worse time for the country's ambitions to lead the world in artificial intelligence. The most detailed analysis of Chinese AI research papers yet suggests that China is gaining on the US more quickly than previously thought. China's vibrant tech scene has come up with a number of recent breakthroughs, and the government has recently launched a major initiative to dominate the development of the technology within a matter of years (see "China's AI awakening"). Still, it isn't easy to measure progress in a broad and complex area of technology like artificial intelligence. Previous studies have shown that China already produces a larger number of research papers mentioning AI terms like "deep learning."

How much gaming is too much gaming? This is the question Japan's pre-eminent addiction expert, Dr. Susumu Higuchi, is trying to answer as he treats people whose lives have been destroyed by video game addiction. Online gaming addiction has become the fastest-growing form of addiction in the 21st century, and it's the most vulnerable people -- children -- who mainly fall prey to its psychoactive effects, Higuchi says. As head of the Kurihama Medical and Addiction Center in Kanagawa Prefecture, which started the country's first program for internet addition in 2011, Higuchi is rolling up his sleeves to tackle a scourge that has eaten into the vitals of our society. "This isn't just about Japan, it's happening all over the world," Higuchi said in a recent interview.

A group of investors led by SoftBank Group Corp. and Toyota Motor Corp. is in talks to invest $1 billion or more into Uber Technologies Inc.'s self-driving vehicle unit, which would value the unit at $5 billion to $10 billion, said two people familiar with the talks. The investment would provide a cash injection for Uber's self-driving program, which is costing the money-losing startup hundreds of millions of dollars without generating revenue. It could also help underscore Uber's value as the ride-hailing firm prepares for a stock market debut in which its value could top $100 billion. Uber and SoftBank declined to comment. A Toyota spokesman said the automaker "constantly reviews and considers various options for investment" but does not have anything to announce.

Shah Alam, Malaysia – The attorney general is pushing ahead with the trial of Vietnamese Doan Thi Huong in the murder of Kim Jong Nam despite the unexpected decision this week to free her co-accused. The prosecution told the Shah Alam court on Thursday the attorney general had considered "all reasons" but 30-year-old Huong's trial for killing the half-brother of North Korea's leader would proceed. The prosecutor did not elaborate. Indonesian Siti Aisyah was freed on Monday after the prosecution suddenly withdrew the charge against her. She is now back in Indonesia.

It is not a news that India has an acute shortage of teachers at elementary, secondary and even at the higher levels of schools. According to the statistics given by the Human Resource & Development (HRD)Ministry of India in 2016, there is a shortage of 1 million teachers across the country. In case of Universities and Colleges, there is a chronic shortage of faculty and the problem of finding qualified people to fill this gap has become even more complicated. In such a scenario, how can India, a country which has the second largest population in the world would cope-up with the challenges of providing quality education to all. Several education experts are saying that our system needs a revolutionary technological intervention. An intervention that would make it more inclusive and accessible.

There is no simple answer if you want to introspect the role ultra-modern technologies are going to play in the coming future of businesses. Albeit the vigorous usage of AI has already alerted many industries, the picture is much more perplex than it seems like. The profit-centric syndrome of the business world has opened up the doors for state-of-art technologies like AI and RPA to step in and penetrate various units. If you are a business owner, you do understand that you will do whatever yields the maximum profit for your company, right? That's what AI is doing.

Google just announced the 10 startups that have been shortlisted for the second calls of its Launchpad Accelerator program in India. All of the startups on the list have used artificial intelligence and machine learning to formulate their products. Google just announced the second wave of startups selected for their Launch Accelerator program in India. The program kicks off today with a one week mentorship programme boot camp organised by Google in Bengaluru which will be followed by more classes in April and May to address more specific issues -- lasting a total of three months. Aside from guidance, Google will also provide support for AI and ML, cloud computing, developing user interfaces, using the Android platform, online presence, product strategy and marketing.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is trending globally in commerce, science, health care, geopolitics, and more areas. Deep learning, a subset of machine learning, is the lever that launched the worldwide rush--an area of strategic interest for researchers, scientists, visionary CEOs, academics, geopolitical think tanks, pioneering entrepreneurs, astute venture capitalists, strategy consultants, and management executives from companies of all sizes. Yet in the midst of this AI renaissance, is a relatively fundamental unsolvable problem with machine learning that is not commonly known, nor frequently discussed outside of the small cadre of philosophers, and artificial intelligence experts. A global research team of researchers have recently demonstrated that machine learning has an unsolvable problem, and published their findings in Nature Machine Intelligence in January 2019. Researchers from Princeton University, the University of Waterloo, Technion-IIT, Tel Aviv University, and the Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, proved that AI learnability cannot be proved nor refuted when using the standard axioms of mathematics.

Self-organization can be broadly defined as the ability of a system to display ordered spatio-temporal patterns solely as the result of the interactions among the system components. Processes of this kind characterize both living and artificial systems, making self-organization a concept that is at the basis of several disciplines, from physics to biology to engineering. Placed at the frontiers between disciplines, Artificial Life (ALife) has heavily borrowed concepts and tools from the study of self-organization, providing mechanistic interpretations of life-like phenomena as well as useful constructivist approaches to artificial system design. Despite its broad usage within ALife, the concept of self-organization has been often excessively stretched or misinterpreted, calling for a clarification that could help with tracing the borders between what can and cannot be considered self-organization. In this review, we discuss the fundamental aspects of self-organization and list the main usages within three primary ALife domains, namely "soft" (mathematical/computational modeling), "hard" (physical robots), and "wet" (chemical/biological systems) ALife. Finally, we discuss the usefulness of self-organization within ALife studies, point to perspectives for future research, and list open questions.