Domestic companies are coming up with a series of new services that leverage the latest in drone technology. MicroAd Inc., a Tokyo-based online advertising company, has unveiled a service called Sky Magic to produce sound-and-light extravaganzas. Drones illuminated with LED lights can project logos, words, shapes and pictures in spaces above large-scale events. At its roll-out event in Chiba in April, five drones flew in a formation depicting an inverted image of Mt. Fuji as a live shamisen performance was held in front of an audience of some 1,300.

Siri is expected to expand beyond the iPhone and iPad to third-party apps and Macs, a move designed to hike the usefulness and IQ of Apple's personal digital assistant. Analysts who cover Apple predict an expanded role for Siri will be one highlight of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, which begins Monday in San Francisco. Apple did not respond to a request for comment. The Cupertino, California company has a big job ahead. Even though Siri was first to bat among digital assistants, it has limited utility and risks putting Apple in second-tier status when it comes to the make-or-break technology of the moment: artificial intelligence and natural-language learning that can simulate human conversation.

Since making its first public appearance last October, Sharp Corp.'s humanoid robot smartphone, RoBoHoN, has created a lot of buzz. But the eye-catching 19.5-cm-tall robot, which can walk, talk and dance but still works as a phone, has also left many people wondering why a phone and a robot should be bundled together, and what Sharp's long game is. As it turns out, Sharp is dead serious about the project. Officials say the firm thinks a robot phone could be the next big thing -- in fact, as big as the smartphone boom. The company is even envisioning a science fiction-like future in which everyone will carry his or her own robot phone that doubles as a personal assistant.

The estimation of class prevalence, i.e., the fraction of a population that belongs to a certain class, is a very useful tool in data analytics and learning, and finds applications in many domains such as sentiment analysis, epidemiology, etc. For example, in sentiment analysis, the objective is often not to estimate whether a specific text conveys a positive or a negative sentiment, but rather estimate the overall distribution of positive and negative sentiments during an event window. A popular way of performing the above task, often dubbed quantification, is to use supervised learning to train a prevalence estimator from labeled data. Contemporary literature cites several performance measures used to measure the success of such prevalence estimators. In this paper we propose the first online stochastic algorithms for directly optimizing these quantification-specific performance measures. We also provide algorithms that optimize hybrid performance measures that seek to balance quantification and classification performance. Our algorithms present a significant advancement in the theory of multivariate optimization and we show, by a rigorous theoretical analysis, that they exhibit optimal convergence. We also report extensive experiments on benchmark and real data sets which demonstrate that our methods significantly outperform existing optimization techniques used for these performance measures.

In his new book, The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling, Adam Kucharski details how trying to understand dice games led one mathematician to develop probability theory, how one of the first wearable computers was designed to covertly predict the fall of a roulette ball, and how poker-playing bots are advancing more quickly than we think. As he shows, science, mathematics, and gambling have long been intertwined, and thanks to advances in big data and machine learning, our sense of what's predictable is growing, crowding out the spaces formerly ruled by chance. At the same time, though, we're letting more of our lives be influenced by algorithms, bits of code whose effects are beyond our full understanding. As in so many other areas, the creations are outpacing their creators. In the lightly edited interview below, Kucharski explains how we got here, what poker-playing bots can show us about being human, and what comes next. In the book you call gamblers the godfathers of probability theory, noting that it's a newer area of mathematics than we might expect.

IBM has opened The Watson Centre at Marina Bay in Singapore – an incubator designed to bring together organisations of all sizes, business partners and IBM experts to co-create business solutions that leverage IBM's cognitive, Blockchain and design capabilities. IBM's new Asia Pacific headquarters is based in the same location, in the heart of Singapore's financial district. IBM Garage Singapore With the advent of Blockchain, and the increasing demand from clients across Asia to explore the possibilities of this transformative technology, IBM will help accelerate the design, development and commercialization of Singapore Blockchain applications through the IBM Garage and the IBM Global Entrepreneur program. At the IBM Garage, experts collaborate with clients, developers and entrepreneurs to test-drive tools, processes, and procedures to make Blockchain real. The garage creates a bridge between the scale of enterprise and culture of startups and supports the development of an Open Standards based Blockchain ecosystem and creates new work opportunities in Singapore.

EHang 184, the world's first passenger drone, capable of autonomously carrying a person in the air for 23 minutes, has been cleared for testing. The approval was given out by the Nevada governor's office to develop and test the vehicle at the state's Federal Aviation Administration-approved drone test site. The electric EHang 184 passenger drone by Chinese firm EHang was unveiled at CES in Las Vegas in January. The Chinese company said that the EHang 184 Autonomous Aerial Vehicle (AAV) is a 142-horsepower "personal flying vehicle" that can transport a single person at an altitude of more than 11,000 feet, China's People's Daily Online reported. According to BBC, Macquarie consultancy senior analyst Douglas McNeill gave his opinion of the flying drone concept.

The security threat landscape continues to evolve not just in scale, but, more importantly, in sophistication. Despite a range of advancements in the industry to safeguard against increasingly bold and intricate threats, organizations have struggled to keep pace with the technologies and techniques employed by those responsible for such attacks. As companies continue to increase their digital footprints, "identify and diagnose" capabilities are not enough to remediate against a growing fundamental business challenge for organizations of all shapes and sizes. We spoke with Avivah Litan, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, about the development of advanced security analytics and important considerations for organizations looking to implement machine learning to defend against an array of internal and external security threats. Q: How are analytics and machine learning changing the current security landscape?

An autonomous robot developed by researchers in Singapore scans for missing or misplaced library books. You know you've done it. You grab a library book off the shelf, flip through the pages, then go to put it back and realize you forgot where it came from. So you just glance over your shoulder and take a wild guess. Misplaced library books frustrate patrons and give librarians migraines.

Though Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema's '"The Conjuring 2" ghosted all of its competition at the weekend box office, all eyes are on the performance of Universal Pictures and Legendary Pictures' "Warcraft." Though the video game adaptation grossed only a modest sum in the U.S and Canada, given its hefty production budget, the picture's international numbers wildly make up for it. "Warcraft" grossed an estimated 24.4 million in ticket sales in the U.S., coming in just shy of analyst projections of 25 million and taking the second place spot. The film has a 160 million price tag attached to it, proving that film adaptations of massively popular video games (the multiplayer strategy game "World of Warcraft" is produced by Irvine-headquartered publisher Blizzard Entertainment) are still a tough sell in the U.S. Reviews have been decidedly negative for the picture. As of Sunday, only 27% of Rotten Tomatoes critics favored it, though up from the paltry 16% positive rating the film had just days before its release.