A subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp. and a Japan unit of China's internet search giant Baidu Inc. said Wednesday they have tied up to tap into the Japanese self-driving bus market. Under the agreement, 10 electric minibuses, called Apolong, developed by Baidu and China's Xiamen King Long United Automotive Industry Co., will be shipped to Japan by early next year. The Softbank subsidiary, SB Drive Corp., said they aim to introduce the buses on Japanese public roads and plan to carry out technology demonstration experiments in the current fiscal year ending next March. SB Drive, set up in April 2016, has already been testing self-driving buses in Japan. The Japanese company last year conducted government-sponsored tests in Okinawa.

Chinese internet giant Baidu's co-founder Robin Li has revealed new technologies such as an unmanned bus, upgraded digital assistant, and smart chip at the firm's second artificial intelligence conference. Li introduced Apolong bus, developed with King Long United Automotive Industry, at its Baidu Create 2018 event today. The vehicle can operate without driver's participation after entering the desired destination, and this is why it has no steering wheel nor driver's seat. "We can think of autonomous driving as a four-wheeled robot," Li said, adding that it can help in daily activities such as logistics and cleaning, but in the future, also in security work, disaster relief, and agriculture. Baidu also released other AI-related products such as a digital assistant DuerOs 3.0, and smart chip called Kunlun, which it suggested to be China's first cloud-to-edge AI chip.

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The industrial world has been in the throes of digitization for well over a decade. Primarily through enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution systems (MES), critical planning, scheduling, warehousing, inventory management, and logistics processes have been automated and simplified. But these gains have been restricted to technology silos, supporting separate functions of the factory rather than improving the performance of the plant -- and its extended supply chain -- in a broader way. Those days may finally be in the past, as manufacturers now have a golden opportunity to take advantage of digitization's promised outsized benefits. The advent of complex smart sensors, artificial intelligence, big data pools, and robotics, combined with the vast connections of the cloud, is heralding a new era for manufacturers, marked by totally integrated factories that can rapidly tailor products to individual customer needs and respond instantly to shifting demands and trends.

Technology has accelerated human progress to unprecedented levels. Three centuries ago, the first industrial revolution altered society with the introduction of machines that have since become factory fixtures and key instruments in the manufacturing process. Today, technology is once again bringing humanity to the precipice of a new era, typified by the rapid digitalization of core operations across sectors. Now, more than ever, technology is taking center stage and transforming work in the new digital economy. While technologies were mostly relegated to support functions in the recent past, the age of the digital economy redesignates the role of modern technology as a business enabler, with progressive technologies such as blockchain, the Internet-of-Things, Big Data, Virtual Reality, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) quickly altering work paradigms in modern enterprises across a multitude of industries. The rising number of progressive technology use cases each day translates to a pressing need to reassess companies' fundamentals.

Baidu today unveiled a new chip for AI, joining the ranks of Google, Nvidia, Intel, and many other tech companies making processors especially for artificial intelligence. Kunlun is made to handle AI models for edge computing on devices and in the cloud via datacenters. The Kunlun 818-300 model will be used for training AI, and the 818-100 for inference. Baidu began working with field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips especially designed for deep learning in 2011, the company said. Kunlun is about 30 times faster than the first FPGA chip from Baidu and is able to achieve 260 tera-operations per second (TOPS) and 512 GB/second memory bandwidth, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.

Chiba Institute of Technology unveiled Wednesday a transformable machine that can play dual roles -- as both a robot, fused with artificial intelligence technologies, and a vehicle to enhance personal mobility. The three-wheeled robot called CanguRo -- meaning kangaroo in Italian -- resembles the animal, but with a mechanical twist. For example, it can follow users around using autonomous-driving technology to help carry shopping bags, said Takayuki Furuta, general manager of the Future Robotics Technology Center run by the university. When switched to vehicle mode, the robot transforms itself to an electric three-wheeler by unfolding a seat and moving the positions of its wheels. Controlling the three-wheeler is similar to driving a motorcycle, as it is equipped with a throttle to control forward and backward movement.

A research team at Korea's Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) succeeded in analyzing big data up to 1,000 times faster than existing technology by using GPU-based'GMiner' technology. The finding of big data pattern analysis is expected to be utilized in various industries including the finance and IT sectors. An international team of researchers, led by Professor Min-Soo Kim from Department of Information and Communication Engineering developed'GMiner' technology that can analyze big data patterns at high speed. GMiner technology exhibits performance up to 1,000 times faster than the world's current best pattern mining technology. Pattern mining technology identifies all important patterns that appear repeatedly in the big data of various fields such as buying goods at mega-marts, banking transactions, network packets, and social networks.

An AI system has wiped the floor with some of China's top doctors when it comes to diagnosing brain tumors and predicting hematoma expansion. As reported by Xinhua, the system defeated a team comprised of 15 of China's top doctors by a margin of two to one. The AI, BioMind, was developed by the Artificial Intelligence Research Centre for Neurological Disorders at Beijing Tiantan Hospital, and is another example of the long line of the technology analyzing images. When diagnosing brain tumors, BioMind was correct 87 percent of the time, compared to 66 percent by the medical professionals. The AI also only took 15 minutes to diagnose the 225 cases, while doctors took 30.

On March 29, 2018, a Toyota Land Cruiser carrying five members of the Al Manthari family was travelling through the Yemeni province of Al Bayda, inland from the Gulf of Aden. The family were heading to the city of al-Sawma'ah to pick up a local elder to witness the sale of a plot of land. At two in the afternoon, a rocket from a US Predator drone hit the vehicle, killing three of its passengers. One of the four men killed, Mohamed Saleh al Manthari, had three children aged between one and six. His father, Saleh al Manthari, says Mohamed was the family's only breadwinner.