More than 1,000 students from 25 countries with more than 130 team will participate in the four-day contest of the region's first robot competition. The event is held to encourage global robotics research and development.

In Japan, famous for the longevity of its people, their endearing use of engrish, and their fetish for girls in Catholic school uniforms, the care of the elderly is a particularly acute problem. A third of the Japanese population is reportedly above the age of 60, and the number of people over 90 years of age just topped two million for the first time. Add in a rapidly shrinking population, and you have a country where you have more people eating the early bird special than not. So it's no surprise that Japan is leading the world in robotic elder care, offering a glimpse into our geriatric future.

You are an inmate in a luxury hotel. Locked in your soundproof suite, you hear nothing and see nothing. Liveried butlers bring you meals on silver carts. You have plenty of time to read, think, and listen to music. All the riches of culture can be called down at your whim. But you are trapped, too, and desperate to talk.

As a kid, I saw the 1968 version of Planet of the Apes. As a future primatologist, I was mesmerized. Years later I discovered an anecdote about its filming: At lunchtime, the people playing chimps and those playing gorillas ate in separate groups. It's been said, "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't." And it can be vastly consequential when people are divided into Us and Them, ingroup and outgroup, "the people" (i.e., our kind) and the Others. The core of Us/Them-ing is emotional and automatic. Humans universally make Us/Them dichotomies along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, language group, religion, age, socioeconomic status, and so on. We do so with remarkable speed and neurobiological efficiency; have complex taxonomies and classifications of ways in which we denigrate Thems; do so with a versatility that ranges from the minutest of microaggression to bloodbaths of savagery; and regularly decide what is inferior about Them based on pure emotion, followed by primitive rationalizations that we mistake for rationality. But crucially, there is room for optimism. Much of that is grounded in something definedly human, which is that we all carry multiple Us/Them divisions in our heads. A Them in one case can be an Us in another, and it can only take an instant for that identity to flip. Thus, there is hope that, with science's help, clannishness and xenophobia can lessen, perhaps even so much so that Hollywood-extra chimps and gorillas can break bread together.

TOKYO, Dec 14, 2017 - (JCN Newswire) - Lockheed Martin and NEC Corporation (TSE: 6701) today announced that Lockheed Martin will use NEC's System Invariant Analysis Technology (SIAT) in the space domain. SIAT's advanced analytics engine uses data collected from sensors to learn the behavior of systems, including computer systems, power plants, factories and buildings, enabling the system itself to automatically detect inconsistencies and prescribe resolutions. NEC's advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities and Lockheed Martin's space domain expertise offer new opportunities in developing enhanced integrated satellite and spacecraft operations with uniquely developed prescriptive analytics. These include rapid assessments of changes in performance and the space environment, such as the potential influence of space weather on electronics. With this information, operators can improve product performance and lifecycle efficiency.

Google has officially opened an artificial intelligence (AI) center in Beijing, the capital of China. The country is home to some of the most renowned thinkers in the field of AI, so it makes sense that one of the largest tech companies in the world would want to set up shop where much of the action is. In a blog post, Fei-Fei Li, Google's chief scientist for AI and machine learning, explained "Chinese authors contributed 43 percent of all content in the top 100 AI journals in 2015--and when the Association for the Advancement of AI discovered that their annual meeting overlapped with Chinese New Year this year, they rescheduled." This shows just how valuable China is to the AI community. Google's China team will be headed by Li, who came to Google after serving as the director of Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Cloudera, Inc. (NYSE: CLDR), the modern platform for machine learning and analytics, optimized for the cloud, announced that Rakuten Card Co., Ltd, one of the leading credit card companies in Japan, is using Cloudera Enterprise to scale with their growth, making more data available to their business faster to evolve and expand the business. The post Rakuten Card Modernizes Data Architecture with Cloudera appeared first on IoT – Internet of Things. Your email address will not be published.

Your favorite artist is in town for what will undoubtedly be the biggest show of the year. You're at the venue's gates, ready to present your ticket for admission, when you realize you forgot it. No problem, security simply scans your face, and after the camera recognizes you, you're permitted entrance. The Chinese government is searching for a dangerous criminal among its population. A machine goes through hundreds of hours of security camera footage and identifies the right person within minutes.

When Google abandoned the Chinese search market over government censorship in 2010, it seemed a remarkably principled act of self-sabotage. The company's decision to return to China today, by establishing a new AI research center in Beijing, is all about safeguarding its future. The center was announced at an event in Shanghai today by Fei-Fei Li, a prominent AI researcher and the chief scientist at Google Cloud. With the announcement, Google is acknowledging the growing importance of China for the future of AI. It is also setting the stage for a battle over who gets to deliver AI to the rest of the world.

Google's announcement about a new facility in China comes after a period of speculation and a talent hunt in the country. As a country, China is both strict on foreign firms influencing its population, and supportive of AI research and development, and Google has been making efforts to demonstrate its AI products there. A new Beijing centre was announced today (13 December) in Shanghai, and will be led by Fei-Fei Li, a professor at Stanford University who is chief scientist of AI and machine learning at Google Cloud, and Dr Jia Li, head of research and development at Google Cloud AI. Google describes itself as an "AI-first" firm. It is extending its artificial intelligence research into China, despite its search engine, App Store, email and cloud services being banned in the country.