Over the last several decades, the digital revolution has changed nearly every aspect of our lives. The pace of progress in computers has been accelerating, and today, computers and networks are in nearly every industry and home across the world. Many observers first noticed this acceleration with the advent of modern microchips, but as Ray Kurzweil wrote in his book The Singularity Is Near, we can find a number of eerily similar trends in other areas too. According to Kurzweil's law of accelerating returns, technological progress is moving ahead at an exponential rate, especially in information technologies. This means today's best tools will help us build even better tools tomorrow, fueling this acceleration.

Bruce Wilcox is the director of natural language strategy for Kore. The discussion around robots has only increased in the past few years -- especially when things like IBM Watson and Siri are well-known topics for everyday conversation. But beyond the physical capabilities of robots, the bigger question is what robots' minds will be capable of in the future. How will we communicate with a robot's mind? Will it only act in the physical world or will it also be able to act in the Internet world?

A century ago, more than 60,000 tigers roamed the wild. Today, the worldwide estimate has dwindled to around 3,200. Poaching is one of the main drivers of this precipitous drop. Whether killed for skins, medicine or trophy hunting, humans have pushed tigers to near-extinction. The same applies to other large animal species like elephants and rhinoceros that play unique and crucial roles in the ecosystems where they live.

In response to increases in the number of security threats and in the volume of traffic on the network, the various research and development (R&D) laboratories at NTT (hereafter, NTT R&D) are carrying out R&D to address social issues, reinforce industrial strength, help revitalize local economies, and thereby build a better society by providing advanced technologies that enable information and communication technology (ICT) to further penetrate our lives. Toward these ends, NTT R&D is focused on networking, cloud, security, and basic technologies that provide foundations for those technical areas. This article first addresses artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT), both of which have come under the spotlight in recent years. AI has become a hot topic and aims at duplicating the intellectual faculties of humans using machines. The workings of the human brain can be regarded as consisting of three processes: 'recognition/understanding of the external world,' 'inferring/judging,' and'providing feedback to the external world.' Based on this understanding, AI is beginning to be used in a number of different fields. What are the intellectual faculties of humans? Human activity for perceiving/recognizing the external world means recognizing not only objects and people but also human emotions and nuances of human expression.

As the average age of farmers globally creeps higher and retirement looms, Japan has a solution; robots and driverless tractors. The Group of Seven agriculture ministers began their two-day meeting in Niigata on Saturday for the first time in seven years to discuss how to meet increasing food demand as aging farmers retire without successors. With the average age of Japanese farmers now 67, agriculture minister Hiroshi Moriyama will outline his idea of replacing retiring growers with Japanese-developed autonomous tractors and backpack-carried robots. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has warned that left unchecked, aging farmers could threaten the ability to produce the food the world needs. The average age of growers in developed countries is now about 60, according to the United Nations.

China's Nasdaq-listed internet search engine giant Baidu Inc. said Friday it has formed a team in Silicon Valley dedicated to its self-driving car efforts. The announcement comes as Chinese officials rush to set up a road map for incorporating highway-ready, self-driving cars within three to five years. Baidu's Silicon Valley team will grow to more than 100 researchers and engineers, focused on research, development and testing, by the end of 2016, the company said in a statement Friday. The Beijing-headquartered firm is looking to work on areas "integral to self-driving car development, including planning, perception, control and systems." The team in Silicon Valley will be part of the company's newly created Autonomous Driving Unit.

Staffers at McCann Erickson Japan in Tokyo recently met their new colleague: AI-CD? The concept was sparked by an idea at South by Southwest, and data-driven success stories -- including Netflix's and Buzzfeed's approaches in creating targeted original content -- helped to trigger the development of AI-CD beta. To set AI-CD beta apart as an advertising prodigy (albeit, a robotic one), it initially analyzed and categorized the winners of the All Japan Radio & Television Commercial Confederation annual CM Festival for the past 10 years, which celebrates creative excellence in TV advertising in Japan. Depending on the creative challenge, it mines patterns including how weather, location or current events have affected an existing campaign, or how related commercials have performed historically on YouTube. This logic-based direction then results in a targeted strategy for a product or brand, which is actually written out using a brush attached to a robotic arm.

We take a look at how robots are changing the world by counting down the top robotic technology right now. When it comes to robots, there are many ways you can look at them. But the fact is, most of that is just fantasy – the tales of sci-fi movies and novels. Of course, we'll more than likely see a day when robots are mainstream or even our equals, although that won't happen any time soon. They're mostly prototypes and elaborate plans put together by billion-dollar companies at this stage. However, that's not to say robotic technology doesn't have potential.

SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 22, 2016) - Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU), China's leading search engine, today announced it has formed a self-driving car team in Silicon Valley focused on research, development and testing. The team will be part of Baidu's newly-created Autonomous Driving Unit (ADU). Baidu plans to grow the team to over 100 researchers and engineers by the end of the year. The team will include machine learning researchers as well as hardware and software engineers across a variety of technical domains, from robotics and computer vision to onboard computers and sensors. Additionally, the company is looking for individuals with experience in the automotive industry.

Internet giant Google has asserted that its Artificial Intelligence(AI) and cloud computing is the most lucrative and promising businesses in the tech industry. That AI type of service-based business is fast becoming the new way to reap profits in the tech industry, the California-based tech giant said. "We've always been doing cloud, it's just that we've been consuming it all internally at Google. But as we have grown, really matured in how we handle our data center investments and how we can do this at scale, we have definitely crossed over to the other side to where we can thoughtfully serve external customers," Google CEO Sundar Pichai said. "We have been investing in machine learning and AI for years, but I think we're at an exceptionally interesting tipping point where these technologies are really taking off. That is very, very applicable to businesses as well. So thoughtfully doing that externally we view as a big differentiator we have over others," Pichai added.