Narita will be the first airport in the nation to adopt a system that does not require passengers to pause for identification when boarding, according to Narita International Airport Corp. The operator hopes that the system will improve convenience for passengers ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics and Paralympics. Passengers will first have photos taken of their faces at self check-in kiosks where they enter passport and boarding pass information. High-performance cameras set up at the baggage drop-off counters, safety inspection areas and boarding gates will track the passengers and check their identity against the registered photos as they make their way through the boarding process. While passports and boarding tickets will not be manually checked at such locations, passengers will still have to go through existing procedures at immigration control.

Israel is a country full of history, which is why they have more museums per capita than any other country. They also have the oldest continuously used cemetery in the world and the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. Hearing that, you'd think that not a whole lot has changed over the years, but one thing that has constantly been evolving is their ability to innovate and be productive. Next to the U.S. and Canada, Israel has the largest number of publicly traded companies, which shows that they can also build successful businesses. Our recent article on "The Top-10 Biggest Startups in Israel by Funding" proved to be quite popular so we decided to do another article on the top 10 Israeli artificial intelligence (AI) startups.

Researchers, companies and countries around the world are racing to explore – and exploit – the possibilities of artificial intelligence technology. China is working on an extremely aggressive multi-billion-dollar plan for government investment into AI research and applications. The U.S. government has been slower to act. The Obama administration issued a report on AI near the end of its term. Since then, little has happened – until a Feb. 11 executive order from President Donald Trump encouraging the country to do more with AI. The executive order has several parts, including directing federal agencies to invest in AI and train workers "in AI-relevant skills," making federal data and computing resources available to AI researchers and telling the National Institute of Standards and Technology to create standards for AI systems that are reliable and work well together.

Although Computer Vision (CV) has only exploded recently (the breakthrough moment happened in 2012 when AlexNet won ImageNet), it certainly isn't a new scientific field. Computer scientists around the world have been trying to find ways to make machines extract meaning from visual data for about 60 years now, and the history of Computer Vision, which most people don't know much about, is deeply fascinating. In this article, I'll try to shed some light on how modern CV systems, powered primarily by convolutional neural networks, came to be. I'll start with a work that came out in the late 1950s and has nothing to do with software engineering. One of the most influential papers in Computer Vision was published by two neurophysiologists -- David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel -- in 1959.

Apple is cutting hundreds of workers from its self-driving car projects, according to a report from the San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday. The news comes at an inflection point for the Silicon Valley company. However, the autonomous car reshuffle is a chance for Apple to become a real player in artificial intelligence. That is good news for the company. And it's huge news for shareholders who have been worried about its otherwise depressing lack of innovation.

Diana Greene, former CEO of Google Cloud and co-founder of VMWare, joins CNBC's Becky Quick at the MIT Schwarzman College Of Computing Launch event to discuss the future of artificial intelligence. Some of the topics the discussion touches on include how A.I. will affect the cloud computing space, the A.I. race with China, concerns over data privacy and what the government's role is in funding technological advancements.

Researchers, companies and countries around the world are racing to explore -- and exploit -- the possibilities of artificial intelligence technology. China is working on an extremely aggressive multi-billion-dollar plan for government investment into AI research and applications. The U.S. government has been slower to act. The Obama administration issued a report on AI near the end of its term. Since then, little has happened -- until a Feb. 11 executive order from President Donald Trump encouraging the country to do more with AI.

Asia is past the halfway mark. More than half of the survey sample have already deployed AI technologies within their businesses. Of the 13 markets covered by the survey, the highest level of AI penetration is in North Asia--Japan and South Korea. Indonesia and Vietnam are at the most nascent stage, with just a quarter of companies using AI. Less than a third of the "AI adopters" have a centralized strategy for AI.

To talk about artificial intelligence today usually involves talking about automation, lost jobs, and whether your Uber or Lyft will be a self-driving vehicle in 5 years time. Taking a step back from the apps in our phones, however, and what begins to emerge is a larger fight between the US and China, AI superpowers whose contest will likely decide the course of human civilization. In January 2019, the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), whose role is to help spread ideas and innovation around the world, released a report that highlighted the rapid advance of AI patent applications across the world. According to the report, the United States and China's AI-related patent applications outstripped every other nation's by far. "The U.S. and China obviously have stolen a lead. They're out in front in this area, in terms of numbers of applications, and in scientific publications," said Francis Gurry, WIPO Director-General, at a news conference last month announcing the report.

The project makes FedEx the latest in a growing stream of companies to test automated, unmanned machines to make deliveries. Inc. and United Parcel Service Inc. have demonstrated drones to deliver packages in certain areas, and Amazon has displayed a rolling robot it calls Scout in trials on city streets. Grocery chain Kroger Co. recently showed off an unmanned vehicle that can deliver groceries in certain markets, and several robotics startups are testing autonomous delivery robots that use sensors and cameras to navigate sidewalks for short trips, including lunch deliveries to crowded Beijing office buildings. But on-demand delivery companies such as Deliv Inc. and DoorDash Inc. that make point-to-point trips carrying food or e-commerce purchases typically rely on armies of couriers who travel by car, scooter or bicycle. "We think this particular opportunity is going to be the most cost effective in the marketplace," FedEx Chief Marketing Officer Brie Carere said in an interview Wednesday.