As artificial intelligence increasingly takes center stage in computer technology, large-scale orders are heading to Japan's supercomputer makers from research entities in need of the massive processing power those machines provide. Fujitsu is assembling a dedicated AI-use supercomputer for the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, better known as Riken, which plans to start using it in April. Tokyo Institute of Technology, also known as Tokyo Tech, has ordered a large-scale system for AI-education purposes from SGI Japan, another supercomputer maker. The institute plans to introduce it in August. And industry insiders are looking forward to an even bigger opportunity: a huge AI-use supercomputer the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, or AIST, wants to start using in 2018.

In 2015, ad agency McCann Japan's creative planner Shun Matsuzaka set himself a task he called the "creative genome project": he wanted to create the world's first AI creative director, capable of directing a TV commercial. And last week, Matsuzaka showed off his creation at the UK advertiser trade body ISBA's annual conference in London. The creative brief: The type of brand, the campaign goal, the target audience, and the claim the ad should make. They then assembled a database of deconstructed ads from all the winners of some of Japan's biggest award shows from the past 10 years -- mapping and tagging each of the elements of the ads to help determine what made them successful. Confectionery giant Mondelez was the first client willing to put the AI creative director to the test.

As the artificial intelligence market is projected to grow by 53% in by 2020, advertisers are looking for ways to use the technology to their advantage. Vernon Vasu, CMO at ReFUEL4 states that researchers are looking into using AI for creative development in the future, but for now advertisers can use AI's incredible data mining and organizing capabilities to understand audiences like never before Artificial intelligence is one of the most buzzed-about terms in technology. The AI market is estimated to reach $5.05 billion USD by 2020, up from $419.7 million USD in 2014 – a 53% increase. With the launch of Facebook's chatbots, Amazon's Echo, and IBM's Watson, companies in many fields are considering how they can use new AI tools to their advantage. Advertising agencies that use AI, machine learning, and image recognition are hyper-targeting consumers by learning their interests and tastes.

AI services like Apple's Siri and others operate by sending your queries to faraway data centers, which send back responses. The reason they rely on cloud-based computing is that today's electronics don't come with enough computing power to run the processing-heavy algorithms needed for machine learning. The typical CPUs most smartphones use could never handle a system like Siri on the device. But Dr. Chris Eliasmith, a theoretical neuroscientist and co-CEO of Canadian AI startup Applied Brain Research, is confident that a new type of chip is about to change that. "Many have suggested Moore's law is ending and that means we won't get'more compute' cheaper using the same methods," Eliasmith says.

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has said the impact of fake news is increasingly concerning and unveiled plans to tackle "unethical" political advertising and the harvesting of data. The British computer scientist said, exactly 28 years after his invention, three new trends have become alarming in the last year. In an open letter, the 61-year-old said misuse of data has created a "chilling effect on free speech" and warned of "internet blind spots" that are corrupting democracy. One problem, he wrote, is that most people find their news and information through a "handful" of social media sites and search engines, which are paid whenever someone clicks a link. "The net result is that these sites show us content they think we'll click on -- meaning that misinformation, or fake news, which is surprising, shocking, or designed to appeal to our biases, can spread like wildfire," he said.

The Indus script has long challenged epigraphists because of the difficulty in reading and classifying text and symbols on the artefacts. Now, a Chennai-based team of scientists has built a programme which eases the process. Ronojoy Adhikari of The Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Satish Palaniappan, who is at Sri Sivasubramaniya Nadar College of Engineering, have developed a "deep-learning" algorithm that can read the Indus script from images of artefacts such as a seal or pottery that contain Indus writing. Scanning the image, the algorithm smartly "recognises" the region of the image that contains the script, breaks it up into individual graphemes (the term in linguistics for the smallest unit of the script) and finally identifies these using data from a standard corpus. In linguistics the term corpus is used to describe a large collection of texts which, among other things, are used to carry out statistical analyses of languages.

WAKAYAMA – An animal handler died Sunday after being hit by the trunk of an elephant at an amusement facility complex in Wakayama Prefecture, police said. Wichai Madee, from Thailand, and another handler were washing the animal in a cage at Adventure World in the resort town of Shirahama when the elephant began thrashing its trunk back and forth, authorities said. The 37-year-old handler, standing in front of the 3.5-ton elephant with a brush in his hand, was flung against an iron fence nearby. The elephant then pushed him around with its trunk. The elephant is a 40-year-old female and apparently did not want the handlers' attention at the time the incident occurred around 9:15 a.m., before the facility opened, the police said.

The robotics market is undergoing a major transformation. Robots are growing beyond the industrial sector and beginning to assume the roles of personal assistants, surgical assistants, delivery vehicles, and autonomous vehicles, among many others. Until now, industrial robots have accounted for more than 50% of overall robotics market revenue. But 2016 marked one of the critical turning points of this shift in the robotics market, as Tractica estimates that industrial robots is set to drop to 41% of total robotics revenue, with the remaining 59% coming from non-industrial robots. Robotics is the interdisciplinary branch of engineering and science.

As I start to look at the emerging trends of 2017 from the vantage of IndieBio, where we see hundreds of biotech startup applications and technologies per year, a few key themes are already emerging. Even as political landscapes change, science and technology continue to push forward. Most of us have seen science fiction shows that show future doctors regrowing and replacing entire organs. That fiction is now becoming a reality with cell therapies from companies like Juno (curing two infants with leukemia of their previously treatment resistant cancers with engineered T-cells), induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) pioneered by the Nobel prize winning scientist, Shinya Yamanaka that can become any cell in the body, growing organoids (mini organs with some function of a fully grown organ like the stomach organoids grown by researchers in Ohio), and entirely re-grown organs. There are a plethora of biotechs focused on developing the next generation of regenerative therapies.

A group of financial technology startups under Dayli Financial Group, a startup alliance in Seoul, have joined hands to offer AI services that could give "practical help" to financial firms. "Unlike Google's AlphaGo, IBM's Watson and Facebook's AI Research lab, which are more like pure research, our AI-based services are focused on addressing issues facing businesses," said Sophie Eom, who heads machine learning-based analytics solution firm Solidware, at a press conference in Yeouido, Seoul on Feb. 22. Solidware is one of the seven startups that have joined forces to form the startup group, called Dayli Intelligence. Each of the seven startups under the group, including Leevi and Heenam, is specialized in different fintech segments, but together they can offer better services, according to Eom, who also serves as a chief of the group's AI division. "After a series of meetings with corporate customers, I have found there is demand for a bundle of solutions, not just a single service," she said. The group will provide AI-based solutions for data analysis, natural language processing, and data scraping, which can be tailored for banks, insurance firms, and credit rating agencies.