It began about a decade ago at Syracuse University, with a set of equations scrawled on a blackboard. Marc Howard, a cognitive neuroscientist now at Boston University, and Karthik Shankar, who was then one of his postdoctoral students, wanted to figure out a mathematical model of time processing: a neurologically computable function for representing the past, like a mental canvas onto which the brain could paint memories and perceptions. "Think about how the retina acts as a display that provides all kinds of visual information," Howard said. "That's what time is, for memory. And we want our theory to explain how that display works."

The government plans to use a facial recognition system at a ceremony later this month to mark the 30th anniversary of Emperor Akihito's accession to the throne, officials said. The use of facial recognition technology, a first for a government-sponsored event in Japan, is designed to reduce the time required for participant identification and help prevent terrorism. Using face images of participants registered in advance, the system completes the recognition authentication process in some 10 seconds per person with an accuracy rate of more than 99 percent, the officials said. More than 1,000 people are expected to attend the ceremony set to take place at Tokyo's National Theatre on Feb. 24. Of the total, the facial recognition system will be used for hundreds of people, including government officials and journalists.

Elementary and middle school students confidently tap at computers in the office of Chinese game and e-commerce giant NetEase in Hangzhou, southwest of Shanghai. The children are in a five-day training camp where they learn about artificial intelligence. The company began holding the 5,000 yuan ($740) study sessions during school holidays a few years ago. This one was fully booked soon after the company started taking applications. It's part of a broader push in China to develop a cadre of AI engineers that can challenge U.S. dominance in high technology.

At the conceptual level the idea of killer robots is no longer a remote possibility. Already drones and other military machines can be piloted remotely, and some are equipped with missiles. Given the pace of development in relation of autonomous technology for vehicles, and the advances with artificial intelligence in general, the idea of a machine that can directs itself in battle is plausible and, some might argue, inevitable. Inevitable, that is, unless concerted action is taken by governments to ban the development of these types of devices. This would be something similar to the treaty that is in place prohibiting the use of chemical weapons (the 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction).

An online database containing names, ID card numbers, birth dates and location data was left unprotected for months by Shenzhen-based facial-recognition technology company SenseNets Technology Ltd, according to Victor Gevers, co-founder of non-profit organization GDI.Foundation, who first noted the vulnerability in a series of social media posts last week.

When it comes to bias, an ML model will always operate the way you've trained it, said Olivier Klein, Head of Emerging Technologies, Asia-Pacific at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is retail giant Amazon's Cloud arm. "If you train a model with a bias, you would end up with a biased model. You continuously need to train and re-train your ML model and the most important thing is that you need some form of feedback from the end-consumers," Klein told IANS. "ML is absolutely not about replacing humans but enhancing the experiences," he added.

In 2015, all 193 member countries of the United Nations ratified the 2030 "Sustainable Development Goals" (SDG): a call to action to "end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity." The 17 goals – shown in the chart below – are measured against 169 targets, set on a purposefully aggressive timeline. The first of these targets, for example, is: "by 2030, [to] eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere, currently measured as people living on less than $1.25 a day". The UN emphasizes that Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) will be critical in the pursuit of these ambitious targets. Rapid advances in technologies which have only really emerged in the past decade – such as the internet of things (IoT), blockchain, and advanced network connectivity – have exciting SDG applications.

Noise, Alex Waibel tells me, is one of the major challenges that artificial speech translation has to meet. A device may be able to recognise speech in a laboratory, or a meeting room, but will struggle to cope with the kind of background noise I can hear surrounding Professor Waibel as he speaks to me from Kyoto station. I'm struggling to follow him in English, on a scratchy line that reminds me we are nearly 10,000km apart – and that distance is still an obstacle to communication even if you're speaking the same language. We haven't reached the future yet. If we had, Waibel would have been able to speak in his native German and I would have been able to hear his words in English.

China has seen incredible economic and social changes over the past few decades. But could the impact of artificial intelligence take the country by surprise? I recently spent a few weeks in the country, talking to researchers and entrepreneurs developing cutting-edge AI technologies and products. What stuck with me--beyond the growing ambition of China's researchers and the overall vibrancy of its tech scene--is how much people are starting to talk about the potential for AI to eliminate jobs across the country. Just a few years ago this seemed like much less of a concern.

NEW DELHI: If the buzz around Artificial Intelligence (AI) has left you nervous that it would soon take away your job and the technology works better than your brain, you are probably mistaken. First, there is nothing artificial about intelligence and unlike industrial automation that is actually taking away jobs globally, AI is only going to supplement human intelligence across the spectrum -- from banking to media. According to Gartner, in its current state, AI consists of software tools aimed at solving problems. While some forms of AI might give the impression of being clever, it would be unrealistic to think that current AI is similar or equivalent to human intelligence. "Some forms of Machine Learning (ML) -- a category of AI -- may have been inspired by the human brain, but they are not equivalent," says Alexander Linden, Research Vice President at Gartner.