When Pham Quang Hung started studying Japanese at Foreign Trade University in Hanoi in 1994, he never imagined that Vietnamese children would one day be able to learn the language in elementary school. Now the first secretary for educational affairs at the Vietnamese Embassy in Tokyo can hardly wait to see the launch in September of a pilot project to offer Japanese lessons at three elementary schools in Hanoi. It will be the first time that Japanese language education has been offered at the publicly run primary school level in Southeast Asia, according to Japanese officials. The project follows the development of a Japanese program that the Vietnamese government introduced for middle and high school students in 2003. At present, English and French are the only foreign languages Vietnamese students can learn in elementary school.

Farooq Bajwa still lives comfortably, up in the hills of San Juan Capistrano in a French chateau-style mansion with views of the Pacific. But his tech company, InfoSpan, and its bustling headquarters in an Irvine office park, are long gone. These days the income from three El Pollo Loco franchises bought two decades ago helps out. The Pakistani immigrant turned entrepreneur earned millions manufacturing computer components in the 1980s and 1990s, but he doesn't blame the dot-com bust for his change of fortune. Rather, he traces it back to a plan he had early last decade for a new business: a text-based payment system that could be used throughout the developing world, particularly for migrant workers to send money home.

While we normal folk can operate drones merely within direct line-of-sight, the military can control a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) over Afghanistan from the other side of the world. Now, French company UAVIA is bringing that more advanced approach to the civilian world. With UAVIA's technology, users can operate a drone remotely via the Web. The vehicle is given its instructions via a 4G internet connection that also sends back an HD video feed from the onboard camera. If the signal cuts out the drone can either continue its pre-planned flight or make a safe landing automatically.

After raising 25 million in funding, Beijing-based ZeroZero Robotics came out of stealth mode and launched their Hover Camera just days before the GMIC Beijing 2016 trade show, the'CES of China.' Co-founder MQ Wang, a Stanford PhD alum focused on machine learning and natural language processing, was inspired to create the autonomous Hover Camera after watching a documentary about a man who walked 1600 miles solo across Australia. Using a machine learning model trained on an NVIDIA Tesla K40 GPU, the camera automatically tracks your face to take photos and capture videos wherever you go. "We wanted the user experience to be very natural -- easy to use," MQ told Mashable. "We wanted to make sure the learning curve for users is minimum. So there is no remote control or anything.

Artificial intelligence technology are looking for ways to transform the fast food industry and KFC introduces this innovation in its new store branch in Shanghai, China. Artificial intelligence (AI) first emerged in the late 1940s. But today, AI is transforming most if not all industries, including the foodservice industry. In fact, a company called Momentum Machines has created an AI-driven robot that can make one burger from scratch every 10 seconds in an hour. Artificial intelligence technology are looking for ways to transform the fast food industry and KFC introduces this innovation in its new store branch in Shanghai, China.

John Holden is a journalist specializing in science, tech and innovation. His work has appeared mainly in the Irish Times. Cornered at a party by some bore talking about his unimaginative app that will "change the world." All seemingly convincing excuses to leave have already been used by the rest of the group (who were all there just a second ago). The last refuge of the rude scoundrel -- the smartphone -- is in your jacket pocket in the cloakroom all the way across the room. So you just have to suck it up and simulate enthusiasm for this guy's pitch.

At the core of the project is the idea of using machines to identify launcher-shaped objects buried within the staggering amount of digital imagery collected by US spy satellites, manned and unmanned aircraft. A senior official in the Department of Defense explained that it is this vast amount of data that makes manual research inefficient. "What was largely a manual process for intelligence analysts has to become an automated one," he said, cited by Defense One. The ultimate goal is to train computers spot what are called transporter-erector-launchers (TELs). North Korea used these kinds of launchers during missile tests conducted over the last few months.

Public discourse on environmental and health issues has risenon social media. Upon an environmental crisis, various chatterssuch as breaking news, misinformation, and rumor couldaggravate social confusion and proliferate negative publicsentiment. In an effort to study public sentiments on environmentalissues in South Korea, we analyzed 158,964 tweetsgenerated over a 4-year period following the Fukushima accidentin 2011, the largest release of radioactivity to environmentin recent history. This event led to a significant increasein public’s interest on environmental and nuclear issues inKorea. We employed Bayesian network and recursive partitioningto observe the classification regression tree structureof major topics. Topics on health and environment were interlinkedclosely and represented both apprehension and concernabout health threats and pollution. Our methodologyhelps analyze large online discourse efficiently and offers insightto crisis response organizations.

We examine the question of whether we can automatically classify the sentiment of individual tweets in Farsi, to determine their changing sentiments over time toward a number of trending political topics. Examining tweets in Farsi adds challenges such as the lack of a sentiment lexicon and part-of-speech taggers, frequent use of colloquial words, and unique orthography and morphology characteristics. We have collected over 1 million Tweets on political topics in the Farsi language, with an annotated data set of over 3,000 tweets. We find that an SVM classifier with Brown clustering for feature selection yields a median accuracy of 56% and accuracy as high as 70%. We use this classifier to track dynamic sentiment during a key period of Irans negotiations over its nuclear program.

Citigroup is to roll out voice recognition software to its Asian customer base, shrinking its branch network as more customers move to online and mobile banking.