Around a year ago, a former embedded systems designer from the Japanese automobile industry named Makoto Koike, started helping out at his parents cucumber farm, and was amazed by the amount of work it takes to sort cucumbers by size, shape, colour and other attributes. In Japan, each farm has its own classification standard and there's no industry standard. There are some automatic sorters on the market, but they have limitations in terms of performance and cost, and small farms don't tend to use them. Makoto first got the idea to explore machine learning for sorting cucumbers from a wildly different source - Google AlphaGo - competing with the world's top professional Go player. "When I saw the Google's AlphaGo, I realized something really serious is happening here, said Makoto. That was the trigger for me to start developing the cucumber sorter with deep learning technology."

Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) the silver bullet that will make doctors all over the world unemployed? Will AI be able to outperform oncologist in creating treatment plans for cancer patients? Keep reading and get new perspectives on healthcare AI as I untangle opportunities and grand challenges within the field. "Too much information, too little time" is one of the big challenges in healthcare today. Patients, healthcare professionals and medical devices generate huge amounts of data.

Baidu, the Chinese-based internet services conglomerate, has made several major announcements about its upcoming IoT projects. The company's plans center on a revamped artificial intelligence (AI) platform, which the company hopes will enable it to effectively increase its presence in the world of the IoT. Baidu plans to use this revamped AI platform to develop a voice assistant similar to Amazon's Echo, reports Bloomberg. It will be working with speaker manufacturer Harman Industries to develop the device, which it hopes will allow users to order food, summon a ride, or control smart home products via voice commands. The Echo's surprising success has prompted Google, Samsung, and Apple to try and develop competitors, and Baidu, too, is seeking to replicate the success Amazon has seen. The company is partnering with chipmaker Nvidia to develop an AI platform for driverless cars and taxis, according to Fortune.

Artificial intelligence--the kind where robots understand a wide number of human concepts--has been a military focus for decades, and scientists in Japan may have just made a college-ready AI. For the first time, a Japanese artificial intelligence program has scored above average on a national standardized college entry exam, performing well enough to have an 80 percent likelihood of getting into 33 national universities, according to the National Institute of Informatics, or NII. The AI program scored 511 points out of 950 on the National Center Test for University Admissions (similar to the SATs), with a particularly strong performance in math and history, and well above the national average of 416. It was a first for the program, which performed less well in 2013 and 2014, according to the Wall Street Journal. NII announced the breakthrough on Saturday.

The Royal Navy has tested an unmanned speedboat near Tower Bridge in advance of a naval drone exercise off the UK coast this autumn. To the delight of tourists, Tower Bridge swung open to let through the sleek, low-slung craft, known as Mast (Maritime Autonomy Surface Testbed). Accompanied by the patrol craft HMS Archer, the 32ft-long Mast spent an hour on Monday weaving between pleasure boats and goods barges at a moderate pace, heading up the river towards Westminster before returning downriver. Although it is capable of navigating and avoiding collisions autonomously and can be operated via remote control, Mast had a coxswain on board to take control if needed because of Port of London bylaws, which also limited the speeds at which it could travel. Mast is being developed with research funding from the Ministry of Defence's science and technology laboratory, to explore how well such vessels function autonomously.

The mobile marketing attribution analytics company AppsFlyer, and Chinese internet giant Tencent have announced a partnership to make AppsFlyer's analytics platform available for marketers to track the effectiveness of app install campaigns on Tencent Social Ads. "The app economy is quickly becoming a global economy, and this partnership with Tencent Social Ads, one of the biggest and most important distribution platforms in the world, opens up myriad possibilities for app marketers and developers looking to grow in China, while enabling us to expand our footprint in Asia and globally as well," said Elad Masiach, VP Partner Development at AppsFlyer. Google has added automatically generated insights of data into the Android and iOS versions of Google Analytics. This new feature is quite similar to the insights in plain English that are provided by products like BeyondCore, which was acquired by Salesforce very recently. Machine learning and artificial intelligence is used to convert raw data into credible information which "lets you see in 5 minutes what might have taken hours to discover previously", said Google in a company blog post. Salesforce announced the expansion of its Wave Analytics portfolio with new Salesforce Wave Apps for B2B Marketing and Financial Services, as well as 19 apps from ISV partners.

No company is immune to cyber criminal activity. In 2013, Target was hacked despite receiving as many as 10,000 security alerts per day. While Target is a Fortune 100 retailer, even medium-sized companies have to sift through hundreds of thousands of alerts each year. Alerts are investigated before being categorized as false positives and ultimately ignored, but most alerts are idiosyncratic to a product or application with little context of the overall business impact. To prevent financial and reputational loss, security teams are driven to find the most critical needles in an ever-growing haystack of security information.

The National Museum of Nature and Science on Tuesday added Lion Corp.'s enzyme-based laundry detergent Top to a list of important historical materials that have had an impact on Japanese lives and culture. Top, which first hit the market in 1979, was among 16 items honored with the designation by the Tokyo museum as "Essential Historical Materials for Science and Technology." With its protein-removing enzymes, the laundry detergent has been popular for its cleaning performance and environmentally friendly formula. Among the other products chosen to make the annual list this year were NEC Corp.'s PC-9801 16-bit personal computer, which debuted in 1982, and the Yagi-Uda antenna, the world's first directional ultrashort-wave antenna that is now used throughout the world in radios and televisions. The antenna, commonly known as the Yagi antenna, derives its name from one of its developers, Dr. Hidetsugu Yagi of Tohoku University.

Chatbots are a hot topic in tech -- positioned at the intersection of many macro tech trends like the rise of artificial intelligence, messaging apps surpassing social apps in users, and enterprises struggling with customer acquisition and engagement on mobile. Investment dollars are gushing into the leading messaging apps, and all of the tech giants have announced significant new initiatives. If you have ever used Amazon Alexa, you can see what the hype is about. But will chatbots be as revolutionary as the hype would have it? To predict how chatbots will evolve, we can look to Asia, a region that has led the West in this space. WeChat is often cited as the poster child for chatbots.

There's an emerging market called Dataism, which venerates neither gods nor man - it worships data. From a Dataist perspective, we may interpret the entire human species as a single data-processing system, with individual humans serving as its chips. A city of 100,000 people has more computing power than a village of 1,000 people. Different processors may use diverse ways to calculate and analyse data. Using several kinds of processors in a single system may therefore increase its dynamism and creativity. A conversation between a peasant, a priest and a physician may produce novel ideas that would never emerge from a conversation between three hunter-gatherers. There is little point in increasing the mere number and variety of processors if they are poorly connected. A trade network linking ten cities is likely to result in many more economic, technological and social innovations than ten isolated cities. 4. Increasing the freedom of movement along existing connections. Connecting processors is hardly useful if data cannot flow freely.