The mantis shrimp packs a mean punch, smashing its victims' shells with the force of a .22 But that's not because it has particularly powerful muscles – instead of big biceps, it has arms that are naturally spring-loaded, allowing it to swing its fistlike clubs to speeds up to 23 metres per second. We know that the key part of a mantis shrimp's punch is a saddle-shaped structure on the arm just above the shrimp's club. This shape works a bit like a bow and arrow, says Ali Miserez at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore: the muscles pull on the saddle to bend it like an archer's bow, and when it is released that energy transfers into the club. Miserez and his colleagues used a series of tiny pokes and prods, as well as a computer model, to examine exactly how the shrimp's saddle holds all that energy without snapping.

Predictive financial analytics startup FundGuard emerged from stealth this week with a $4 million round of funding led by Blumberg Capital and LionBird. The company, which has offices in New York and Tel Aviv, Israel, describes itself as "a next-generation cloud-based platform to manage investment funds across mutual funds, hedge funds, insurance, and pension assets." It also claims to be the "world's first artificial intelligence powered cloud platform to bring investment funds technology out of the'digital ice age.'" FundGuard said it plans to use the money to speed up development of its platform and product. It also will use the financing to hire in both the U.S. and Israel across its R&D and sales departments.

A report says more than 50,000 positions in the fields of data science and machine learning (ML) are vacant in India due to the lack of a skilled workforce. A state of the industry report by ed-tech platform Great Learning found that despite the number of job postings reaching an all-time high, there are no skilled professionals around. "The job market in this space is heavily tilted towards jobseekers, with twice the number of jobs than available talent," said the report based on a study of 28,000 participants across 3,000 organisations in the country. Great Learning co-founder Hari Krishnan Nair said: "With more and more jobs increasingly becoming data-driven, the need of the hour is for professionals to upskill themselves to stay relevant. Over the past one year, we've seen heightened demand for data science professionals from companies across IT, banking, financial services and insurance, and telecoms."

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) recently developed an intelligent fabric defect detection system, called "WiseEye," which leverages advanced technologies including artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning in the process of quality control (QC) in textile industry. It helps to save manpower and to enhance the automation management in the textile manufacturing. Supported by AI-based machine-vision technology, "WiseEye" can be installed in a weaving machine to help fabric manufacturers to detect defects instantly in the production process. Through the automatic inspection system, the production line manager can detect the defects, thus helping them to identify the cause of the problems and fix them immediately. "WiseEye" is developed by the Textile and Apparel Artificial Intelligence (TAAI) Research Team, which is spearheaded by Professor Calvin Wong, Cheng Yik Hung Professor in Fashion of Institute of Textiles and Clothing, PolyU.

In a world increasingly fragmented by U.S. President Donald Trump's "America First" agenda, Japan should take on the role as the world's new "stabilizer" by committing to the landmark Paris accord on climate change and keeping a multilateral trade regime from falling apart in the absence of the United States, according to experts who gathered at a Tokyo conference earlier this week. The annual G1 Global Conference, held at Globis University in Tokyo, examined Japan's shifting roles on the global stage on the heels of an intensifying trade war between the U.S. and China that its panelists said has thrown the international order into disarray. The conference held Sunday invited experts on fields including security, energy and technology -- as well as social entrepreneurs and business executives -- to discuss a "fractured world" caused by the rise of protectionism, the shift in Asian geopolitics and potential threats stemming from the advent of artificial intelligence. With the election of Trump in 2016, "many tensions in the U.S. that had existed beforehand became much more evident," former U.S. Democratic member of congress Jane Harman told the all-English conference, titled "Connecting a Fractured World." The Japan Times was a media partner for the event.

Sales of industrial robots in China, the world's biggest market, will grow this year at only about a third the pace seen last year as an escalating Sino-U.S. trade war hits spending on equipment, a global robot group said on Thursday. In its annual report, the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) forecast Chinese demand for robots will grow 15-20 percent this year after surging 59 percent to 137,920 units last year. With China accounting for 36 percent of the global robot market and with its sales volume exceeding the total of Europe and the Americas combined, slowing demand growth in the Asian nation is also impacting global demand. IFR, which brings together nearly 60 global robot suppliers and integrators, predicts worldwide industrial robot sales this year will grow 10 percent compared to last year's 30 percent. Because of the trade war, many global manufacturers "are now in a wait-and-see mode, wondering whether to shift production (away from China) to, let's say, Vietnam or the United States," IFR President Junji Tsuda said in an interview.

For Ferrero, OpenAg created what it calls a hazelnut computer--an indoor farm, made from structural steel and Styrofoam panels, that resembles a giant walk-in freezer. Inside, 16 hazelnut trees are maturing. LED lights simulate the sun, and every variable--air temperature, humidity, pH and carbon dioxide levels, water circulation--is controlled and optimized by artificial intelligence. Once OpenAg's algorithm determines the ideal hazelnut-growing recipe, Ferrero will compare it with climate and soil data from around the world as the company searches for a new place to farm. "We call it climate prospecting," says Caleb Harper, age 36, the founder and director of OpenAg.

The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and Intel Corporation inaugurated the Center for Artificial Intelligence on October 8. The new center will support research projects of Technion faculty members engaged in computational learning and artificial intelligence together with Intel researchers. Natural language processing, deep learning and hardware optimization for different learning algorithms are among the areas of interest for applications in fields including healthcare, autonomous vehicles, smart environments and home and industrial robots. "The Technion is the leading university in Israel in the field of artificial intelligence and is one of the top 10 universities in the world in the field," said the center's director, Prof. Shie Mannor from the Technion's Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering. "The Technion has about 20 faculty members whose main field of research is computational learning and another 40 [researchers] are working in related fields."

Ahead of the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference 2018 (PP-18) – the top policy-making body of the International Telecommunication Union, taking place from 29 October to 16 November in Dubai – ITU News is highlighting some important and emerging areas of ITU's work. The following is an ITU Plenipotentiary Backgrounder, the original can be found on the PP-18 website here. Software has become significantly smarter in recent years. The current expansion of AI is the result of advances in a field known as machine learning. Machine learning involves using algorithms that allow computers to learn on their own by looking through data and performing tasks based on examples, rather than by relying on explicit programming by a human.[1] A machine-learning technique called deep learning, inspired by biological neural networks, finds and remembers patterns in large volumes of data.

Have the Chinese been able to weaponize A.I. yet? Everyone is weaponizing A.I. Some countries are building autonomous weapons systems based on A.I., while others are focused on disinformation or propaganda or bots. It takes different forms in different countries. In Israel, for instance, we have one of the largest laboratories for A.I. surveillances in the world -- it's called the Occupied Territories. In fact, one of the reasons Israel is such a leader in A.I. surveillance is because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Part of why the occupation is so successful is because of A.I. surveillance technology and big data algorithms.