Some of Japan's banks and insurance companies have started using artificial intelligence to handle customers' inquiries more efficiently over the phone and online. Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ's smartphone app features MAI, a virtual bank teller, who can respond to customers by understanding the nature of their queries. For instance, if a customer says, "I lost my ATM card," MAI will recognize the situation and tell the customer what to do. The Android version of the app has already been released. The iPhone version is expected to become available by the end of this month.

It might not happen anytime soon, but then again, it might. In Japan, a short novel co-written by an artificial intelligence program (its co-author is human) made it past the first stage of a literary contest, the Japan News reports. The Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award is named after Hoshi Shinichi, a Japanese science fiction author whose books include "The Whimsical Robot" and "Greetings from Outer Space." Judges for the prize weren't told which novels were written by humans and which were penned by human-computer teams. The award is unique in that it accepts entries from "applicants who are not human beings (AI programs and others)."

Your Fitbit (or whatever it is the activity-enlightened wear these days) can make a pretty good guess at how many calories you're burning through. And it can do it without any input from you. But if you want to keep track of how many you're putting in, you'll still need to do some work yourself, even if it's only choosing from a menu on an app. Inspired by that asymmetry, State University of New York at Buffalo computer scientist Wenyao Xu and colleagues at Northeastern University in China developed Autodietary, a necklace-like gadget that attempts to tell what you're eating. The device senses sounds from your neck to categorize your meal.

UPDATE Mar 12th 2016: AlphaGo has won the third game against Lee Sedol, and has thus won the five-game match. That was the score, as The Economist went to press, in the latest round of the battle between artificial intelligence (AI) and the naturally evolved sort. The field of honour is a Go board in Seoul, South Korea--a country that cedes to no one, least of all its neighbour Japan, the title of most Go-crazy place on the planet. To the chagrin of many Japanese, who think of Go as theirs in the same way that the English think of cricket, the game's best player is generally reckoned to be Lee Sedol, a South Korean. Mr Lee is in the middle of a five-game series with AlphaGo, a computer program written by researchers at DeepMind, an AI software house in London that was bought by Google in 2014.

Image Comics have a big June coming up. They are launching Midnight Of The Soul from Howard Chaykin, She Wolf from Rich Tommaso, an artist's roof edition of Injection, and the return of Frank Quitely to Mark Millar's Jupiter's Legacy for the second book…. The sequel to industry sales-beast JUPITER'S LEGACY is back and it boasts monthly FRANK QUITELY! Superhero offspring Hutch and Chloe have come out of hiding with son Jason to assemble a team of super-crooks from around the globe. It's 1950, and Joel Breakstone, former GI and liberator of Auschwitz, is seriously damaged goods.

The Justice Department has charged three current or former members of the so-called Syrian Electronic Army for computer hacking-related conspiracies. The charges were unsealed Tuesday in the U.S. Eastern District Court of Virginia. Prosecutors allege that two Syrians, 22-year-old Ahmad Umar Agha and 27-year-old Firas Dardar, tricked email users to steal usernames and passwords to compromise government, media and private-sector computer systems. In April 2013 they allegedly tweeted from the Associated Press account on Twitter falsely claiming a bomb had exploded at the White House and injured the president. None of them are in custody.

The ability to access and use financial services is critical to managing day-to-day life, weathering unexpected events, and capturing opportunities. Yet, some 46 percent of working-age adults in developing countries remain excluded from the formal financial system. It means they use the age-old informal mechanisms such as the moneylender, the pawnbroker, or the rotating savings club that can be unreliable and very expensive. In developed countries, working families are more likely to be under- or badly served rather than outright excluded. In the US, for example, every year some 25 million households use alternative services such as payday lenders or check cashers.

Every day new travel sites and apps are launched that promise to make trip planning easier. Some do and some don't. Here are two free tools optimized for smartphones that I tested and really liked: Lonely Planet's free Guides app for iOS and Android, and Destinations on Google, which makes it easy to aggregate information for your next travel adventure. The app includes more than 35 free importable guides to international and U.S. destinations, from Bangkok to London and Boston to San Francisco. I tested New York, Kyoto and Vancouver.

Boiteux, an assistant fire chief from Los Angeles, is helping train Greek first responders to use Emily. Boiteux, an assistant fire chief from Los Angeles, is helping train Greek first responders to use Emily. On a cold, rainy morning a few weeks ago, eight black inflatable rafts, loaded with migrants, bob in the waters off the northern shore of the Greek island of Lesbos. "This boat up there?" he says. So they ask for help from the coast guard." A Norwegian rescue boat with the European Union's border agency, Frontex, heads toward the distressed raft. Hantzopoulos walks along the rocky shore with John Sims, a fire captain from Sahuarita, Ariz. He's teaching members of the Hellenic Red Cross how to use a remote-controlled rescue device called Emily -- which stands for Emergency Integrated Lifesaving Lanyard. You might call Emily a buoy. You might call her a boat. She's about 4 feet long, weighs 25 pounds and looks like a cylinder wrapped in an orange-red life jacket. Sims steers Emily in the water with a remote control. She speeds toward the migrant rafts. "I'll keep her about 20-30 meters behind [them]," he says. The only thing that affects her sometimes over a wave is a little bit of wind. In a high wind situation we would actually fill the hull with some water to be able to weight her down some so, so, she wouldn't fly so bad off the top of the waves."

Under the slogan "Be the First Mover in the Era of Knowledge and Information," South Korea has emerged as one of the world's IT powerhouses in just six years. Incheon International Airport, the epitome of IT convergence, has been named the world's best airport for 11th consecutive years. The S. Korean financial industry, which had finished 86th behind Uganda, has risen to the world's 7th largest, easing regulations on the separation of industrial and financial capital and granting Kakao and KT preliminary licenses to run the nation's first online-only banks. The Go-playing AI AlphaGo had the brand value of Google leapfrogging over that of Samsung Electronics instantly. It was all the work of software.