The transport ministry said Monday it will introduce safety standards for self-driving vehicles in Japan as early as this fall, including an alarm system that sounds 15 seconds after a driver takes his hands off the steering wheel while traveling on a highway. The introduction of the integrated standards is expected to spur the development of self-driving vehicles by Japanese automakers as well as information technology companies as they will make clear the technology necessary for such cars. The safety standards are in line with an agreement reached Friday by a U.N. working party tasked with creating a uniform system of regulations for vehicle design to facilitate international trade. Japanese automakers will be able to sell vehicles that pass domestic safety tests based on the new standards in the European market in the future as the same standards are expected to be introduced there. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism will revise relevant ministerial ordinances under the Road Traffic Act in line with the new regulations.

This list isn't just about what is new and innovative. It is about what will be adopted at scale. The beginning of a new year is usually the time to predict key trends for the year to come, and so it goes with the insurtech sector as well. Most lists focus on the latest sexy technologies and applications. But, after a year, we find these have hardly gained any traction and so cannot really be considered "trends" in our view.

Aiming to tackle the severe shortage of specialist doctors in India, the 27-year olds behind the DocsApp platform promise a consultation with a doctor within 30 minutes of logging on to their app (with a little AI help). DocsApp cofounders Satish Kannan and Enbasekar D graduated from IIT Madras in 2012, both on a fast track, completing undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering. While Kannan went off to work as an engineer for Philips Healthcare, where he says he witnessed how the medical industry works from the inside, Enbasekar cut his teeth working on machines to diagnose diabetic retinopathy. The university friends quickly realized that there was a problem with the healthcare system in India. India faces a severe shortage of doctors, with around 150,000 specialists available to meet the needs of a billion strong population.

The ride-hailing company with a glittering informal valuation of $70 billion shot itself in the foot on Saturday, public-image-wise, by apparently sending drivers to New York's Kennedy airport during a one-hour taxi drivers' strike staged to protest President Trump's immigrant and refugee ban. That action, in which Uber announced it would suspend "surge" charges on Kennedy airport trips during the strike, provoked thousands of Uber users to adopt the "#DeleteUber" hashtag on Twitter, signifying that they were removing the company's ride-ordering app from their smartphones. Hours later, Uber was backpedaling furiously, tweeting that the firm had not been trying to break the strike. Chief Executive Travis Kalanick subsequently announced a $3-million defense fund for Uber drivers caught in Trump's immigration net and issued a bland statement about Trump's executive order that stopped short of actually criticizing it. He merely observed that "allowing people from all around the world to come here and make America their home has largely been the U.S.'s policy since its founding."

Sometimes a coffee means something: it's an opportunity to catch up with friends, sit quietly among strangers, or unofficially pay a morning's rent on your Starbucks office. That's when you want a big, spacious cafe rich with the sound of typing and dense with the smell of roasted beans and five-minute pour-overs the price of a steak. Other times, though, a coffee is pure fuel: a jolt of caffeine to kick you up and out of your sleepy doldrums. Cafe X is for those times. When you go to Cafe X, there are no hipster bartenders, and no judgy glances when you ask for a bit of half-and-half.

This series of blog posts aims to provide an intuitive and gentle introduction to deep learning that does not rely heavily on math or theoretical constructs. The first part in this series provided an overview over the field of deep learning, covering fundamental and core concepts. The third part of the series covers sequence learning topics such as recurrent neural networks and LSTM. I wrote this series in a glossary style so it can also be used as a reference for deep learning concepts. The earliest deep-learning-like algorithms that had multiple layers of non-linear features can be traced back to Ivakhnenko and Lapa in 1965 (Figure 1), who used thin but deep models with polynomial activation functions which they analyzed with statistical methods. In each layer, they selected the best features through statistical methods and forwarded them to the next layer. They did not use backpropagation to train their network end-to-end but used layer-by-layer least squares fitting where previous layers were independently fitted from later layers.

An important step in data analysis is data exploration and representation. In this tutorial we will see how by combining a technique called Principal Component Analysis (PCA) together with Cluster Analysis we can represent in a two-dimensional space data defined in a higher dimensional one while, at the same time, being able to group this data in similar groups or clusters and find hidden relationships in our data. More concretely, PCA reduces data dimensionality by finding principal components. These are the directions of maximum variation in a dataset. By reducing a dataset original features or variables to a reduced set of new ones based on the principal components, we end up with the minimum number of variables that keep the maximum amount of variation or information about how the data is distributed. If we end up with just two of these new variables, we will be able to represent each sample in our data in a two-dimensional chart (e.g. a scatterplot). As an unsupervised data analysis technique, clustering organises data samples by proximity based on its variables.

The first robotic barista opened in San Francisco on Monday. SAN FRANCISCO -- Something futuristic is brewing in a shopping complex here. The first robotic barista in the U.S., named "Gordon," started serving up to 120 coffee drinks an hour today-- ironically, just several thousand fee away from a Starbucks in the same complex. "A lot of us spend a lot of time in line waiting for coffee," says Henry Hu, CEO of Cafe X Technologies, the local start-up that created the robot. "And we decided to do something about it."

The founder of video game company Bandai Namco, which released cult game Pac-Man, has died at the age of 91, the firm has announced. Masaya Nakamura established Nakamura Manufacturing, which went on to become the Nakamura Amusement Machine Manufacturing Company (Namco) in 1956. He started out installing two electric horses on the roof of a department store in Japan as amusement rides. He was known as the "father" of Pac-Man because it was a Namco release in 1980. The game was developed by Toru Iwatani and in 2016 was named the highest-grossing arcade game of all time by the website US Gamer.

In the hopes of relieving building pressures in hospitals and care homes, researchers are developing'culturally aware' robots. The emotional machines could help care for the elderly, assisting them in taking their medications and offering them companionship. Researchers have been awarded £2 million ($2.5 million) in funding to develop the bots over the next three years. In the hopes of relieving building pressures in hospitals and care homes, researchers are developing'culturally aware' robots. Pepper went on sale to consumers in Japan in June 2015 and then enterprise customers, who pay for the bot on a three-year rental basis worth around $16,000 (£12,188.80),