Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance says it has two primary goals for the move: to increase productivity by 30 percent and to save about 140 million yen (US$1.2 million) a year. Workers at Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance are being replaced with an artificial intelligence system. The system is based on IBM's Watson Explorer which the company says has "cognitive technology that can think like a human," enabling it to "analyse and interpret all of your data, including unstructured text, images, audio and video." "With Watson, you can provide personalized recommendations by understanding a user's personality, tone, and emotion," IBM adds. Despite the AI'hire', the final say on all of the company's insurance payouts remains with a human.

Yandex recently announced its new search algorithm Palekh, which improves how Yandex understands the meaning behind every search query by using its deep neural networks as a ranking factor among others. Ultimately, the new algorithm helps Yandex improve its search results across the board but especially for long-tail search queries. As most State of Digital readers know, long-tail search queries are categorized by searches that the search engine very rarely processes. There is a correlation between the rarity of a query and the length of it. Typically, the shorter the query the more common it is and the longer it is the more rare it is.

Cloud computing is now being embraced by a majority of enterprises of all sizes. Yesterday's debate about public vs. private has transformed into the reality of hybrid cloud: a recent survey shows that 74% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy. Meanwhile, 94% of enterprises are using some form of XaaS - software, platform, and infrastructure as a service. Cloud Expo is the single show where delegates and technology vendors can meet to experience and discuss the entire world of the cloud. Learn what is going on, contribute to the discussions, and ensure that your enterprise is as "Cloud-Ready" as it can be!

You've probably broken the rules of just about every app you use. If you've changed your phone number and not immediately told Facebook, you're infringing the site's terms of service. Facebook's "statement of rights and responsibilities" requires its users to tell it of any change within 48 hours, as pointed out by The Guardian. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

A German inventor hopes his plan to add print patterns on clothes will prevent businesses from marketing toward people based on their online activities. The new "HyperFace" technology seeks to camouflage computer users by putting patterns on clothes that would make it appear as if they had multiple eyes and mouths, which would confuse facial recognition programs, according to a Guardian report Wednesday. Companies have been able to learn about individual's spending habits by developing methods such as facial recognizing through the computer's camera. "HyperFace" hopes its imitation facial features will cloud the systems from being able to tell which faces were real and subsequently misinterpret the emotional reactions detected towards certain online products. The product was slated to hit the market in a textile print on Jan. 16, 2017 at the Sundance Film Festival, in Park City, Utah, after being in the works since 2013.

With the increased attention on fraud and cybersecurity, companies are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to strengthen fraud mitigation efforts to predict the trustworthiness or riskiness of an online transaction. In an effort to achieve the same, iovation, a provider of device-based solutions for authentication and fraud prevention, launched the iovationScore machine learning fraud prevention solution. Michael Thelander, Product Marketing Manager, iovation in an interview with Techseen discussed this new solution and the advent of machine learning in fraud detection. Thelander: iovationScore is less about "fraud detection" than it is a tool for "real-time predictive analysis." One of its uses is to provide immediate insight into how risky a device is, from the very first moment that device appears on your digital doorstep.

One sector which appears safe for now is academia; at the end of 2016 a team of researchers gave up making a robot which could pass the entrance exam for Tokyo University. Noriko Arai, a professor at the National Institute of Informatics, told Kyodo news agency: "AI is not good at answering the type of questions that require an ability to grasp meanings across a broad spectrum". The spread of AI isn't limited to Japan; our NHS is trialing artificial intelligence as an alternative to the 111 helpline, and bosses have said AI is the next frontier for online retail. Professor Steven Hawking warned in October last year of the "disruption" AI could bring to our economy. He said that the technology promised to bring great benefits, such as eradicating disease and poverty, but "will also bring dangers, like powerful autonomous weapons or new ways for the few to oppress the many".

A new startup seeking to change the way the fan community experiences anime, Kitsu, announces it has raised $600,000 in a seed round, receiving funds from San Francisco-based VIZ Media and Manila-based entrepreneur Bernard Chong. Kitsu is putting the cash toward building out its content discovery platform, kitsu.io, Kitsu is designed to help anime and manga fans track, share and discover content, using a world-class recommendation engine layered with social, machine learning and more. Users have found the ability to track what they've already seen and what they are planning to see to be a key selling point, and "Version 3" -- a ground-up rewrite and redesign coinciding with the seed round investment -- heavily focuses on the social aspect, leveraging a machine learning engine to bring up content users are more likely to enjoy using complex interest clusters rather than show-to-show recommendations. "What makes me most excited about where Kitsu is going is how easy it's going to be to connect with other anime and manga fans," said Fabian.

Science fiction has long imagined a future in which humans are ousted from their jobs by machines. For 34 staff at a Japanese insurance firm, that vision just became a reality. Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance is laying off the employees and replacing them with an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can calculate insurance payouts. The firm believes it will increase productivity by 30%. It expects to save around 140m yen (£979,500 / $1.2m) a year in salaries after the 200m yen AI system is installed later this month.

The military has for the first time fired a high-powered electromagnetic projectile from a ground artillery piece, raising Pentagon hopes for arming both the U.S. Army and Navy with advanced technological weaponry, Popular Mechanics reported Tuesday. The tungsten projectile, known as the Hypervelocity Projectile, can reach Mach 3 or over 2,300 miles per hour when fired, faster than any round in service. It potentially could even reach supersonic speeds. Already a historic piece of firepower when fired from an Army howitzer, the projectile was developed for an even more powerful, high-tech piece of Navy weaponry that previously existed only in science-fiction - the railgun. The railgun abandons traditional gunpowder-based firearms for what's essentially a large, overpowered electrical circuit.