OSAKA – Osaka Gov. Ichiro Matsui said Tuesday the prefecture relaxed regulations regarding the approval system for opening schools after nationalist private kindergarten operator Moritomo Gakuen requested it, but denied the company influenced the local government's decision. "Compared to other Kansai area prefectures, the hurdles (to run private schools) in Osaka were quite high," Matsui said, adding the reason for the decision was to attract more schools. In April 2012, a few months after Matsui became Osaka's governor, the prefecture relaxed regulations. Nearly six months earlier in September 2011, Moritomo Gakuen head Yasunori Kagoike, who wanted to build an elementary school despite financial difficulties that might have disqualified it from getting prefectural approval, asked the Osaka to ease the rules. Moritomo Gakuen has been under fire recently following revelations of a questionable land deal and for distributing anti-Chinese and anti-Korean literature at its kindergarten.

ROOBO also manufactures an intelligent drone, a VR headset and smart bone conduction headphones. ROOBO's team has 300 employees and 7 offices worldwide. Area17 is developing a collision avoidance autonomous navigation system for mobile and aerial robots. Also Cafe X Technologies, Fellow Robots and Simbe Robotics received undisclosed amounts. ROOBO also manufactures an intelligent drone, a VR headset and smart bone conduction headphones.

The world is changing at warp speed. What seemed like science fiction just a few years ago is now almost mainstream. Our thermostats know when to turn the heat up or down, depending on our routine behavior and the weather outside. Some cars have the intelligence to drive themselves. And from selling coffee in Japan to patrolling shopping malls in Silicon Valley, robots are taking the place of humans.

Imagine you're part of a great swelling crowd, one of 60,000 people who fill up the cauldron of noise and chaos that is a sold-out football stadium. For you and everyone around you, the game is an open-air gathering place, a chance to steam and scream and worry about nothing except the other team's menacing D. To the security officials responsible for your safety, it is a constant source of worst-case-scenario planning. They install metal detectors; they enlist a kennel's worth of bomb-sniffing dogs; they plant concrete pillars around the perimeter to keep out cars; they train personnel in the dark art of bag searching; they even obtain a temporary flight restriction from the FAA to keep all aircraft above 3,000 feet for a radius of 3 miles. They spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours to keep you safe, yet they know that none of it can stop a 3-pound off-the-shelf drone from flying in and dropping something on the crowd. Whatever it is, you'll never see it coming, and because there is currently no legal way to bring down a drone with any accuracy or reliability, there's nothing anyone can do but wait for it. In the summer of 2015, Ross Lamm and Dave Romero watched just such a scenario unfold from within a skybox at a large university stadium. The head of security for the college, fearful of the damage drones could do, had decided to run a simulation of a drone attack inside his 60,000- capacity football stadium.

Uber was having a bad month even before Waymo, Google's self-driving car outfit, filed a bombshell lawsuit accusing the ridesharing giant of swiping gobs of its autonomous driving tech. Now, on top of political criticisms of CEO Travis Kalanick and accusations of a sexist corporate culture, the company must worry about a legal dispute that could cost it a truckload of money, kill its self-driving research, and even land more than one executive in prison. The lawsuit, which Waymo filed Thursday, alleges former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski secretly downloaded 14,000 files proprietary technical files before leaving to found self-driving truck startup Otto. Uber acquired Otto last summer and put Levandowski in charge of its self-driving efforts. "From what we know in the complaint, this seems to be fairly straightforward," says Shawn Thompson, a former FBI attorney and federal prosecutor who now advises companies on protecting against insider threats, like employee theft.

Annoying pauses in your streaming movies are going to become less common, thanks to a new trick Netflix is rolling out. It's using artificial intelligence techniques to analyze each shot in a video and compress it without affecting the image quality, thus reducing the amount of data it uses. The new encoding method is aimed at the growing contingent of viewers in emerging economies who watch video on phones and tablets. "We're allergic to rebuffering," said Todd Yellin, a vice president of innovation at Netflix. "No one wants to be interrupted in the middle of Bojack Horseman or Stranger Things."

Japan Exchange Group and the Tokyo Stock Exchange are looking to bring artificial intelligence to bear on determining abusive trading practices in market surveillance operations.

Industrial design in mobile phones is at its striking best. The current crop of announcements at this year's Mobile World Congress are testament to this: the solid, clean look of the Nokia 6, the simple but elongated shape of the LG G6 and the eye-popping colours of Huawei's P10. But perhaps the most attractive design of the lot is Sony's Xperia XZ Premium. It modifies the already-elegant look of last autumn's Xperia XZ, building on the distinctive curved edges and flat base and top (hey, it even stands up on its own!) but only gently. This new phone is bigger thanks to the 5.5-inch display on board.

A young elephant delicately lifts the barrier blocking the railroad tracks in India's Chapramari Wildlife Sanctuary and slips under. Once across the tracks, it gingerly steps over another obstruction. "It looks as though this elephant has done this before," says Joyce Poole, an elephant behavior expert and co-founder of Elephant Voices. Elephants have long been famous for their smarts--they have long-term memory, can use tools, and maintain complex social groups. But increasingly, elephants are being recognized for their problem-solving abilities.

Artificial intelligence came alive in the '80s with many startups, governments, and large enterprises deploying new systems that executed tasks typically performed by human experts. These were largely rule-based systems that encoded behaviors in rules instead of using the strict procedural logic of traditional programming languages. Then, as memory became more affordable, systems were able to handle much more computationally intense tasks, such as machine learning, planning and scheduling, and natural language understanding. Now in the age of big data, many believe AI has completely changed the tech landscape, but in some ways, as the Talking Heads song goes, it's the "same as it ever was." What remains the same are the core elements of an intelligent application.