Japan plans to build the world's fastest supercomputer in a bid to arm its manufacturers with a platform for research that could help them develop and improve driverless cars, robotics and medical diagnostics. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry will spend ¥19.5 billion ($173 million) on the previously unreported project, a budget breakdown shows, as part of a government policy to get back Japan's mojo in the world of technology. The country has lost its edge in many electronic fields amid intensifying competition from South Korea and China, which is home to the world's current best-performing machine. In a move that is expected to vault Japan to the top of the supercomputing heap, its engineers will be tasked with building a machine that can make 130 quadrillion calculations per second -- or 130 petaflops in scientific parlance -- as early as next year, sources involved in the project said. At that speed, Japan's computer would be ahead of China's Sunway Taihulight, which is capable of 93 petaflops.

Everyone is on social media. According to Pew Research, in 2015 an astounding 65 percent of all Americans were using social media. That's more than 200 million people in the USA alone, and is approximately the same amount as the number of people in America who own pets. Worldwide, the total on social media already exceeds 2 billion people. That's twice as many people worldwide as the number who own a car.

Radical automation of media set to change the way industry optimises digital. Zenith recently developed an automation of digital planning that delivers significant improvement in effectiveness for marketers and is set to fundamentally change the way that agencies and their clients optimise digital media. Over the past six months a taskforce of data scientists and strategists from Zenith has been developing sophisticated automation of digital planning using the network's machine-learning technology and bespoke algorithms. Marketers are currently faced with a confusing array of multi-touchpoint customer journeys, so Zenith has looked at how machine learning could be used to efficiently process large amounts of data and to automate the most complex and time-consuming aspects of digital planning. Using live Aviva campaigns, the taskforce collected advertising cookie data from the technology stack of a leading demand-side platform (DSP) and matched it with corresponding first party sales data.

More U.S. shoppers are rushing to their phones and tablets rather than to physical stores on Black Friday than ever before. U.S. consumers spent a record $1.2 billion via mobile on Friday, according to a new report from Adobe. This represents a generous 33% increase from last year. Online spending as a whole also blasted through previous records, with shoppers spending $3.34 billion overall, a 21.6% jump over last year. The best-selling electronics on Black Friday were Apple iPads, Samsung 4K TVs, Apple MacBook Air, LG TVs and the Microsoft Xbox, according to the report. It appears that video games and consoles were hot-ticket items, with the Nintendo NES Classic, the Playstation VR bundle, and the Playstation 4 Call Of Duty: Black Ops bundle being quick to sell out.

We have seen a tremendous increase in computing power over the past decades, with 6 billion people now connected through PCs and mobile phones. Over the next few years, we expect to see the emergence of 75Bn smart things (according to Morgan Stanley), such as smart toothbrushes, connected robot arms, and driverless cars. While the tectonic shift in technology truly excites me, the changes in the way a company can interact with its customers is more important. Using the trillions of data points and interactions (e.g., iBeacon locations in airports, tweets, ANPR, online browsing patterns, shopping data), companies can provide increasingly more personalised communications and deliver more meaningful marketing. We are in the "Age of the Customer" – and this could not be more relevant for the airline and travel sector.

Bots are a growing segment of software that acts as an agent on a human's behalf. These tasks range from ordering online, to making dinner reservations, to handling customer service requests, to helping employees be more productive in the workplace. Historically, most bots have used simple rules-based approaches to present an output for a given input (such as presenting the weather). But today, with advances in server-side processing power and improvements in implementing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), bots are starting to provide real value to consumers. The tide has finally turned and bots are entering the mainstream consciousness, especially after the recent announcements at Facebook's annual conference F8.

Data is the fuel that drives the machine learning algorithmic engines and ultimately provides the business value. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Ed Featherston, director / senior enterprise architect at Collaborative Consulting, will discuss the key considerations around quality, volume, timeliness, and pedigree that must be dealt with in order to properly fuel that engine. Speaker Bio Ed Featherston is a director/senior enterprise architect at Collaborative Consulting. He brings 37 years of technology experience in designing, building, and implementing large complex solutions. He has significant expertise in systems integration, Internet/intranet, and cloud technologies, Ed has delivered projects in various industries, including financial services, pharmacy, government and retail.

I've done it a hundred times. Someone called it "a clown car that drove into a gold mine," and like all clown cars, Twitter makes the passengers get out once in awhile. If I go back, it's because I'm addicted. For an information junkie, that little bubble is hard to resist. But Twitter -- and Facebook, for that matter -- is desperately broken in ways that alienate users, spread hate and endanger us as a species.

The medical profession is under increasing pressure. A global shortfall in healthcare workers will reach 12.9 million by 2035, according to the World Health Organization. And in China, the shortage of healthcare professionals is even more acute. In response to this, Chinese search engine Baidu launched a medical chatbot named Melody, designed to speed up the process of diagnosing patients. Melody, announced in October, was created for Baidu's Doctor mobile app.

Imagine a library of fear. Lining its aisles aren't photo albums of snakes and plummeting aircraft, but are instead volumes containing cross-sectional scans of human brains. They are familiar fMRI images of folded grey matter and feature red-yellow flames of neural activity. In the fear library, these flames vary volume to volume and fear to fear. Different fears feature unique, consistent signatures in the brain, which is the fact that allows them to be so neatly cataloged.