The Defense Ministry will crank into high gear its research to develop a high-output military laser that can intercept mortar rounds and enemy drones flying at low altitudes. The ministry included development outlays of ¥8.7 billion for such research in the fiscal 2018 budget. It plans to open bidding soon for the building of a prototype land-based laser weapons system for research use and hopes to complete a technical evaluation by fiscal 2023, sources said. Many countries, including the United States and China, have begun to develop laser weapons. The U.S. military has already started operating such weapons installed on landing ships.

Following up on EV battery and EV charging #NewsBonanza posts, here's one on 11 autonomous vehicle & AI stories from the past couple of months that we thought should be covered but we never got to for individual stories. "Google is taking both its immense tech capabilities and social responsibility role very seriously. Namely, it has pledged to provide tangible support to organizations wanting to help address societal challenges using artificial intelligence through its just announced'AI Impact Challenge'. Whether an idea needs coaching, grant funding from a pool of $25 million available, or credit and consulting from cloud services, Google will be there to help." "The program aims to enable computers to communicate naturally, behave reasonably in new situations, and learn from new experiences." Smart Circuit, as it's called, uses vehicles from May Mobility and covers a 1.5-mile loop around the Scioto Mile during the hours 6:00–22:00.

As digital payments turn popular among Hong Kong consumers and more payment options are becoming available, EJ Insight invited David Lau, General Manager, Wirecard Hong Kong, Macau & Taiwan, to share his views on the opportunities, challenges and trends in this arena. Q: With a wide range of digital payment options from numerous players, is the Hong Kong market already too crowded? What sort of opportunities does Wirecard see in Hong Kong? A: Contrary to popular belief, the Hong Kong market is not that crowded yet. Despite the overwhelming reliance on the Octopus card, the bigger issue of digital payments has always been that the majority of digital payment systems and infrastructure are not robust enough, as of yet.

No, emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and automation are not taking away jobs. They are generating more jobs which are quite lucrative too. Emerging technologies poses a big threat to traditional business of the companies so they are forced to look for employees who are conversant with the new technological trends. As the tech business is being redrawn, it has generated demand for employees in key domains related to emerging technology. According to a report by Simplilearn, one of the leading global e-learning companies, a large number of jobs have been generated in 2018 in the emerging technologies.

A Chinese probe is expected to touch down on the dark side of the moon on Thursday, according to the CGTN state broadcaster, in a groundbreaking mission in space exploration. China's space agency, however, has not confirmed the landing date for the unmanned Chang'e 4 lunar lander and rover spacecraft, which was launched on December 8, 2018 and is named after the Chinese goddess of the moon. If the manoeuvre is successful, China will become the first country to land an object on the far side of Earth's nearest celestial neighbour. The probe is carrying a robot vehicle that is to explore both above and below the lunar surface after arriving at the South Pole-Aitken basin's Von Karman crater. It is also equipped with a panorama camera and measuring devices to conduct experiments. It will perform radio-astronomical studies that, because the far side always faces away from Earth, will be "free from interference from our planet's ionosphere, human-made radio frequencies and auroral radiation noise", according to space industry expert Leonard David.

Venue: Metta, Lan Kwai Fong (a Hong Kong member's only club for the entrepreneurial community to connect, share knowledge and bring ideas to life) If you have any questions, feel free to email sam.chua@digitalasiahub.org This event is supported by grants from The Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung.

The big deal at the moment is who will lead in development of artificial intelligence. A very savvy and very well considered article by Daniel Araya (PhD) in Forbes magazine clearly explains the many players and issues in the current artificial intelligence race. Araya points out that America's politically driven socioeconomics are significantly out of step with the realities of the inevitable future artificial intelligence driven economies and physical realities. America's heavily weighted military-industrial complex and other priorities, for example, create a planning diaspora which is almost the exact opposite of China's efficient and relentless planning model. Facebook's open-source'Big Sur' artificial intelligence/machine learning server Artificial intelligence is probably the single biggest new technology in history.

According to the common understanding (and Wikipedia), the technological singularity refers to a point in time when artificial superintelligence will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization. As a marketer first and futurist second, I have always had a slightly different definition of the singularity. I believe it is the time when companies and governments simply can no longer keep up with technological change. I think we have reached that point. Over the long span of human history, technological changes have sped up remarkable. China had an almost 2000 year monopoly on the product of silk before Japanese travelers stole a few worms and abducted a handful of crafty maidens.

The graph represents a network of 2,824 Twitter users whose tweets in the requested range contained "futureofwork ", or who were replied to or mentioned in those tweets. The network was obtained from the NodeXL Graph Server on Wednesday, 02 January 2019 at 13:53 UTC. The requested start date was Tuesday, 01 January 2019 at 01:01 UTC and the maximum number of days (going backward) was 14. The maximum number of tweets collected was 5,000. The tweets in the network were tweeted over the 1-day, 14-hour, 53-minute period from Sunday, 30 December 2018 at 10:06 UTC to Tuesday, 01 January 2019 at 01:00 UTC.

In this research work, we perform text line segmentation directly in compressed representation of an unconstrained handwritten document image. In this relation, we make use of text line terminal points which is the current state-of-the-art. The terminal points spotted along both margins (left and right) of a document image for every text line are considered as source and target respectively. The tunneling algorithm uses a single agent (or robot) to identify the coordinate positions in the compressed representation to perform text-line segmentation of the document. The agent starts at a source point and progressively tunnels a path routing in between two adjacent text lines and reaches the probable target. The agent's navigation path from source to the target bypassing obstacles, if any, results in segregating the two adjacent text lines. However, the target point would be known only when the agent reaches the destination; this is applicable for all source points and henceforth we could analyze the correspondence between source and target nodes. Artificial Intelligence in Expert systems, dynamic programming and greedy strategies are employed for every search space while tunneling. An exhaustive experimentation is carried out on various benchmark datasets including ICDAR13 and the performances are reported.