With its Shinkansen'bullet trains' and melodious subway system, Tokyo already has some of the world's greatest public transport infrastructure. But the heavily populated city will be pushed to its limits come 2020, when the world descends on the Japanese capital as it plays host to the Olympic games. One company looking to capitalise on the influx of tourists is robotics firm ZMP Inc. According to Reuters, it's planing to team up with Tokyo's Hinomaru Kotso cab firm to update its fleet of 600 cars with driverless technology. ZMP has already had driverless cars on Tokyo's streets, but each had a driver ready to wrestle control should the AI go wayward. It will begin testing truly driverless cars this year, ahead of its ambitious 2020 goal.

With automation set to have a powerful impact on the future of business and society, PwC has appointed its first UK artificial intelligence leader. Euan Cameron has taken up the newly created role, in which he is responsible for driving growth around this area of emerging technology. He is responsible for AI across the UK firm, helping not only clients to identify opportunities to embrace the shift to automation but also PwC itself. "To be successful, AI needs to be implemented as part of a broader business transformation strategy," says Cameron. "This year we expect to see more and more artificial intelligence initiatives move from theory to practice. We are exploring a wide range of opportunities to deploy this technology internally, but also to help our clients with many of their critical business issues. Different industries are adopting robotic process automation (RPA) and AI at varying rates but with the field developing so rapidly, those who wait could miss out on the myriad positive opportunities it will bring."

For most gamers, early June is a kind of video-game Christmas. Summer brings E3 and its associated press conferences with the biggest names in publishing and development telling us what games and consoles to expect in the coming year. For the most part, audiences are shown cinematic trailer after cinematic trailer of grizzled white men brandishing guns on missions they've "just gotta take alone" introduced by white dudes in a blazer/T-shirt/jeans/trainers combo. Some shows manage to do better than others in offering audiences diverse games, and diverse speakers. Last year, we looked at how things stacked up in our diversity report.

BEIJING, June 16, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Gridsum Holding Inc. ("Gridsum" or the "Company") (NASDAQ:GSUM), a leading provider of cloud-based big-data analytics, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence solutions in China, today announced the debut of the Intelligent Voice Recognition System jointly developed with Tencent Cloud to help improve the efficiency of the legal system across China. The advanced AI-enabled Intelligent Voice Recognition System converts voice into text in real time during court proceedings. Gridsum adapted the Tencent speech recognition technology to create a high-accuracy and high-reliability speech-to-text and text-to-speech application for the highly specialized legal space. This technology was surrounded and integrated with/into a comprehensive Software as a Service (SaaS) suite of solutions for the juridical system including judges, courts, law firms and corporates. Gridsum is working in collaboration with the Supreme Court Press to disseminate these solutions throughout the Chinese juridical system.

US has traditionally been the dominant force in technology but its quest to become the AI superpower seems to have taken a hit lately. The latest proposed budget released by the Trump administration plans to slash funding for a variety of government agencies that have conventionally backed artificial intelligence research in the US. The Chinese on the other hand have a solid combination of a huge talent pool, increasing government support, and capital-abundant traditional industries, all of which make them a serious competitor. Alongside government initiatives, China's private companies are also investing massively in AI and related fields. The contest has become all the more direct with China's increasing investments in US-based AI programs. Some of the examples include, Huawei's AI research partnership with the University of California, and Tencent's purchase of a stake in Tesla, which is designing self-driving cars.

Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, today announced new research from IDC detailing the economic impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on CRM. AI-powered CRM activities will drive new efficiencies in how companies sell, service, and market, ultimately expected to create more than $1.1 trillion in new GDP impact worldwide and 800,000 net-new jobs by 2021 -- surpassing those lost to automation. AI has impacted nearly every aspect of our consumer lives, redefining how we engage with technology and each other. With the convergence of increased computing power, big data and breakthroughs in machine learning, AI is also poised to transform how people work. While some researchers predict automation driven by AI could impact 49% of job activities and eliminate around 5% of jobs, new data from IDC suggests AI could also augment and increase the productivity of employees, specifically in CRM-related fields.

The United States appears poised to heighten scrutiny of Chinese investment in Silicon Valley to better shield sensitive technologies seen as vital to U.S. national security, current and former U.S. officials tell Reuters. Of particular concern is China's interest in fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, which have increasingly attracted Chinese capital in recent years. The worry is that cutting-edge technologies developed in the United States could be used by China to bolster its military capabilities and perhaps even push it ahead in strategic industries. The U.S. government is now looking to strengthen the role of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the inter-agency committee that reviews foreign acquisitions of U.S. companies on national security grounds. An unreleased Pentagon report, viewed by Reuters, warns that China is skirting U.S. oversight and gaining access to sensitive technology through transactions that currently don't trigger CFIUS review.

Solar panels stand at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the Mojave Desert near Primm, Nevada in 2014. California and Arizona by far generate the most electricity with solar power in the U.S. The U.S. set a new renewable energy milestone in March, in data released Wednesday. For the first time, wind and solar accounted for 10 percent of all electricity generation, with wind comprising 8 percent and solar coming in at 2 percent. The report was published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), which collects and disseminates environmental data that is used to inform policymakers. Wind and solar generation typically peaks in the spring and fall when there is less energy demand, and the EIA expects April to continue the record-setting 10 percent trend.

"Imagine a future anthropologist with access to trillions of photos of people--taken over centuries and across the world--and equipped with effective tools for analyzing these photos to derive insights. What kinds of new questions can be answered?" This is the dream that has inspired Kevin Matzen, Kavita Bala, and Noah Snavely at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Their thinking is that the millions of photos uploaded each day to social media provide a fascinating window into the cultural, social, and economic factors that shape societies around the world. With powerful enough machine intelligence, they say, it ought to be possible to mine this mother lode of data for deep insights into our civilization.

Let's do a quick exercise. Did you start at the top or bottom? New data show that the way you draw a circle holds clues about where you come from. In November, Google released an online game called Quick, Draw!, in which users have 20 seconds to draw prompts like "camel" and "washing machine." It's fun, but the game's real aim is to use those sketches to teach algorithms how humans draw.