Hanover German Chancellor Angela Merkel has kicked off the world's biggest digital business fair in Hanover with a speech urging developers not to leave their fellow humans behind. At the opening ceremony for the CeBIT expo, Merkel appealed to tech firms to include the'millions of people who in some ways don't know what awaits them' in the digital revolution, adding that politicians could not achieve such inclusion without help from the industry. Merkel is set to peruse the latest trends at the trade fair in detail on Monday, when it opens to the public, together with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. 'We cannot let a situation arise in which only certain people generate wealth,' Abe said on Sunday, reinforcing the theme of shared benefits. Merkel admitted that Europe was all too often lagging behind in digital technology.

NEC, in partnership with Singapore public transport service provider SMRT Corporation, is using artificial intelligence (AI) to prevent bus accidents on the city-state's roads. The Japanese giant is taking historical data from a bus driver's work records, telematics data produced by each bus, and observations made by on-board data scientists to determine whether a driver is likely to cause an accident in the next three months, and intervene before SMRT has to deal with the costly and potentially life-threatening aftermath. Addressing the Tech Leaders Forum 2017 on Monday, Mervyn Cheah, head and vice president of NEC Laboratories Singapore, explained that once an at-risk driver is identified, they are sent for further training. "Buses on the road, sometimes they do create accidents and actually they will always react when they have an accident, you'll send them for training," he said. "What if you could have AI and really predict if a bus driver will cause an accident in the next three months or so and then preempt that and then send them for training before they even create an accident?"

Governments across the world may be fretting over the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation on employment, but Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Sunday his government does not fear the technology. Japan is struggling with a declining and aging population, and sluggish growth. Abe said AI could actually help the country to grow. "Machines equipped with AI, or machines that are essentially robots no longer perform only narrow … functions … the machines of tomorrow will be tasked with solving … (a) multitude of challenges," Abe told an audience at the CeBIT technology trade show in Hannover, Germany, on Sunday. "Japan has no fear of AI. Machines will snatch away jobs? Such worries are not known to Japan. Japan aims to be the very first to prove that growth is possible through innovation, even when a population declines," the prime minister said.

Declining birth rate, aging population, natural disasters, pollution: Do these sound like issues the IT industry can deal with? Japanese businesses say yes, and a number of them are at the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, to explain why. Industry 4.0 -- the building of "smart factories" in which machines monitor one another and make decentralized decisions about production and maintenance -- has been a theme of recent Cebit shows. Now, under the banner Society 5.0, the show's partner country for 2017, Japan, wants to take the transformation beyond industry, making "smart society" one of the show's talking points. Behind the drive are some very real societal problems.

SAN FRANCISCO – Jeff Jones, president of the embattled ride-hailing company Uber, has resigned just six months after taking the job, the company confirmed Sunday. In a brief statement, Uber didn't say why Jones left. "We want to thank Jeff for his six months at the company and wish him all the best," it said. Jones told the tech blog Recode, which first reported his resignation, that his values didn't align with Uber's. "The beliefs and approach to leadership that have guided my career are inconsistent with what I saw and experienced at Uber, and I can no longer continue as president of the ride sharing business," he said in a statement.

Jeff Jones, president of the embattled ride-hailing company Uber, has resigned just six months after taking the job, the company confirmed Sunday. In a brief statement, Uber didn't say why Jones left. "We want to thank Jeff for his six months at the company and wish him all the best," it said. Jones told the tech blog Recode, which first reported his resignation, that his values didn't align with Uber's. "The beliefs and approach to leadership that have guided my career are inconsistent with what I saw and experienced at Uber, and I can no longer continue as president of the ride sharing business," he said in a statement.

Analytics are key to building a better chatbot. The following is a case study on how the Facebook bot Machaao uses Dashbot Analytics to increase user experience and engagement. By the age of four, every Indian boy has been introduced to cricket. It's a legacy passed on from generation to generation for over four decades. But cricket is not only a passion for Indians; it's one of the most popular sports in the world, with an estimated 2.5 billion fanbase.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. The iPhone 8 is expected to follow suit and that means removing the iconic home button with much talk of new facial recognition technology replacing it. The information comes straight from itself after AppleInsider spotted the company has published a new application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for "Locking and unlocking a mobile device using facial recognition". As AppleInsider notes: "The core idea of the patent is that an iPhone uses the front-facing camera to detect and recognize the user's face, unlocking the device if the face it sees belongs to the authorized device owner… if the iPhone has been motionless for a period of time, and the camera cannot see the user, it can automatically lock.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is steadily reshaping healthcare from all sides, introducing technologies we wouldn't have thought possible five or 10 years ago. It's happening in the clinic (see HealthTap's Doctor A.I.), it's happening in diagnostics (see IBM Watson), and now it's moving into earlier-stage drug discovery with Palo Alto, California-based twoXAR. "In the couple years that we have been around, we've been told hundreds of times that computers cannot do this; that biology is too complex; that this will never work," said Andrew A. Radin, CEO of the AI-driven biopharmaceutical company. "Yet, in every single disease program where we have run proof-of-concept studies on our novel AI-identified candidates, we have generated efficacious results across standard end points." Using a custom-built computational platform, twoXAR works to identify what it calls "unanticipated associations between drug and disease."

The independence clustering problem is considered in the following formulation: given a set $S$ of random variables, it is required to find the finest partitioning $\{U_1,\dots,U_k\}$ of $S$ into clusters such that the clusters $U_1,\dots,U_k$ are mutually independent. Since mutual independence is the target, pairwise similarity measurements are of no use, and thus traditional clustering algorithms are inapplicable. The distribution of the random variables in $S$ is, in general, unknown, but a sample is available. Thus, the problem is cast in terms of time series. Two forms of sampling are considered: i.i.d.\ and stationary time series, with the main emphasis being on the latter, more general, case. A consistent, computationally tractable algorithm for each of the settings is proposed, and a number of open directions for further research are outlined.