If artificial intelligence takes over our lives, it probably won't involve humans battling an army of robots that relentlessly apply Spock-like logic as they physically enslave us. Instead, the machine-learning algorithms that already let AI programs recommend a movie you'd like or recognize your friend's face in a photo will likely be the same ones that one day deny you a loan, lead the police to your neighborhood or tell your doctor you need to go on a diet. And since humans create these algorithms, they're just as prone to biases that could lead to bad decisions--and worse outcomes. These biases create some immediate concerns about our increasing reliance on artificially intelligent technology, as any AI system designed by humans to be absolutely "neutral" could still reinforce humans' prejudicial thinking instead of seeing through it. Law enforcement officials have already been criticized, for example, for using computer algorithms that allegedly tag black defendants as more likely to commit a future crime, even though the program was not designed to explicitly consider race.

How important is artificial intelligence (AI) to Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU)? Gone is the era of PC, and soon will we say goodbye to the era of mobile internet ... We believe that coming is the era of artificial intelligence. Andrew Ng, Baidu's chief scientist, has some experience in this area. During his previous tenure at Google parent Alphabet, he led the Google Brain AI project. He is also an adjunct professor at Stanford University, where he taught AI.

A handful of startups are employing artificial intelligence technologies and big data in an attempt to diagnose dementia, particularly Alzheimer's disease. The effort could lead to better interventions and even therapeutic drugs if it becomes possible to detect cognitive decline before it really starts. The benefits to society – not to mention market potential – for the early detection of dementia and Alzheimer's disease are huge. According to the World Health Organization, there were 47.5 million people worldwide with dementia in 2015, with 7.7 million new cases each year. The total number of people with dementia is projected to reach 75.6 million in 2030 and almost triple by 2050 to 135.5 million.

The Japan Times newsroom selected these tech and digital stories as the most important of 2016. All systems go: For a few weeks in the summer, it seemed to be all that anyone was talking about was "Pokemon Go," an augmented-reality game you play on your phone. The game was the result of a collaboration between Nintendo and Niantic. With China's Alibaba offering the world's first virtual reality shopping experience, it seems the race for dominance has just begun. Insiders believe driverless cars will become a hot topic in 2017 as Japan hopes to showcase self-driving vehicles at the 2020 Olympics.

It has been an eventful 12 months. Samsung smartphones exploded, GoPro drones dropped out of the air and Pebble smartwatches met an untimely end. Facebook became embroiled in a fake news controversy, Yahoo revealed several mega-breaches, we identified the supposed creator of Bitcoin - who then went AWOL - and millions indulged in a game of Pokemon Go. Yet none of those stories made our most-read-of-the-month list - based on the number of times an article was clicked - as you can see below. There is a good rule of thumb: if you do not want your employer to know what you are up to online, wait until you are not on the job.

It's been a year that should dispel doubts the car industry is going through a technological revolution. The convergence of traditional motor manufacturing and new digital technologies has been shifting slowly through the gears for a couple of years. But in 2016, things hit top speed. A string of deals, strategic announcements and investments has even left some experts wondering if a bubble is growing. "Manufacturers finally really understood the need for change," says Martin Benecke, Frankfurt-based analyst at IHS Automotive. "They see the competitive threat from Google and Apple.

BENGALURU: Mediatech startup Dailyhunt, InShorts and ScoopWhoop -through its latest acquisition Touchfone -amongst others are increasingly leveraging machine learning capabilities to improve personalisation and interaction for the end user. From InShorts introducing quizzes to Dailyhunt's personalised news feed, they aim to increase end users' monthly time spent on the app, ultimately targetting higher ad revenue potential. InShorts recently integrated a quiz into its app, which is in its beta phase and has been introduced to 10,000 users. While the user swipes through news content, the quiz emerges as an option. The user can play with a random opponent or share an invite with a friend through WhatsApp.

Booking.com, a major brand within Priceline Group (NASDAQ:PCLN), will start using AI within its mobile apps to provide users instant booking options to a location's main venues and attractions. This option will be provided through QR (quick response) code and would be based on the personal preferences of a user based on their past booking history. This highly personalized Booking Experiences tool has been launched on Booking.com's Further roll-out for Dubai, London and Paris is expected to be done by the end of July. New York City will get the feature by this fall.

Hundreds of drones are expected to hit the Singapore skies in the near future, but with limited airways and a dense population, many question how they will safely fly over the city. Now, researchers have unveiled a traffic management system, which is much like the traffic laws and infrastructure cars have on roads. Named Traffic Management of Unmanned Aircraft Systems, this initiative would designate air-lanes and use virtual fences to reroute drones around restricted geographical locations. Traffic Management of Unmanned Aircraft Systems is the brainchild of Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. The team has been studying different ways for drones to fly efficiently and safely - even with hundreds in the sky.

Distributed constraint optimization problems enable the representation of many combinatorial problems that are distributed by nature. An important motivation for such problems is to preserve the privacy of the participating agents during the solving process. The present paper introduces a novel privacy-preserving branch and bound algorithm for this purpose. The proposed algorithm, P-SyncBB, preserves constraint, topology and decision privacy. The algorithm requires secure solutions to several multi-party computation problems. Consequently, appropriate novel secure protocols are devised and analyzed. An extensive experimental evaluation on different benchmarks, problem sizes, and constraint densities shows that P-SyncBB exhibits superior performance to other privacy-preserving complete DCOP algorithms.