Codified narrative is the product of converting human-friendly narrative into computer-friendly code. In past blogs, I discussed my own approach towards this process of codification. Here, I will be covering the idea of spatial, temporal, and contextual distribution of codified narrative. I have never suggested that narrative can or should be used in place of quantitative data. However, I have reflected on how the quantitative regime has tended to dominate discourse; this has perhaps led to data being contextually constrained or deprived. Geography is a type of context that can shape the extent to which people interact with the world. Space provides a medium to distribute resources. It can be involved in forced confinement. An office full of cubicles demonstrates control and dominance over space.

Honda Motor Co. will spearhead its artificial intelligence efforts out of a new lab in Tokyo so that researchers can work closely with its engineers to commercialize the technology. Honda, based in Tokyo, will start the R&D center next year and combine existing AI teams in Silicon Valley, Europe and Japan at the downtown location, according to Yoshiyuki Matsumoto, president of the automaker's largely independent research arm. In choosing Tokyo over Silicon Valley, the carmaker is betting closer interaction between its scientists and developers will lead to AI-enabled products consumers want, he said in an interview. Advances in artificial intelligence are sprouting like "bamboo shoots after rain," so it's time to find commercial uses for the technology by marrying research with Japan's traditional strength in hardware, Matsumoto said. "We won't make much difference if we did the same things as everyone else in Silicon Valley. And not everyone has succeeded there."

The idea of artificial intelligence (AI) -- autonomous computers that can learn independently -- makes some people extremely uneasy, regardless of what the computers in question might be doing. Those individuals probably wouldn't find it reassuring to hear that a group of researchers is deliberately training computers to get better at scaring people witless. The project, appropriately enough, is named "Nightmare Machine." Digital innovators in the U.S. and Australia partnered to create an algorithm that would enable a computer to understand what makes certain images frightening, and then use that data to transform any photo, no matter how harmless-looking, into the stuff of nightmares. Images created by Nightmare Machine are unsettling, to say the least.

How to get people interested in art? How to expose permanent-collection works that sit in storage? These are questions art museums constantly ponder. Recently, Tate Britain asked another one: How can artificial intelligence help? It put the question to anyone who wanted to compete for the 2016 IK Prize, which promotes the use of digital technology in the exploration of art at Tate Britain or on the Tate website.

The CEO and founder of cloud-based accountancy software giant Xero says artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies will be "transformational" for finance over the next few years. Rod Drury told Business Insider during a recent interview in London: "We'll see more innovation in the next 2 years than we have in the last 10 years, all driven by AI." The Xero founder says: "We're getting a massive hit on the R&D we've done around machine learning and AI. We think it's going to be transformational for the industry. "If you capture information from the bank statement and the invoice and the bills that are flying through, you can actually programme things to do a whole lot of work for you and you're just checking and making fixes, which trains the machine." Xero's accountancy software helps small and medium-sized businesses manage their accountants in the cloud but Drury believes much of the management -- things like categorizing expenditure and sending accounts to be checked -- could be automated by "smart" AI and machine learning programmes, which learn the habits of your business. "You can build unique system for each business," says Drury. "The first innovation in cloud accounting was actually getting these transactions into the cloud.

Neural networks (NN) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in various applications. Unfortunately in applications where training data is insufficient, they are often prone to overfitting. One effective way to alleviate this problem is to exploit the Bayesian approach by using Bayesian neural networks (BNN). Another shortcoming of NN is the lack of flexibility to customize different distributions for the weights and neurons according to the data, as is often done in probabilistic graphical models. To address these problems, we propose a class of probabilistic neural networks, dubbed natural-parameter networks (NPN), as a novel and lightweight Bayesian treatment of NN. NPN allows the usage of arbitrary exponential-family distributions to model the weights and neurons. Different from traditional NN and BNN, NPN takes distributions as input and goes through layers of transformation before producing distributions to match the target output distributions. As a Bayesian treatment, efficient backpropagation (BP) is performed to learn the natural parameters for the distributions over both the weights and neurons. The output distributions of each layer, as byproducts, may be used as second-order representations for the associated tasks such as link prediction. Experiments on real-world datasets show that NPN can achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Amidst the proliferation of smart devices, traffic lights have largely remained conventional, their colors changing based on preprogrammed timing that can go years without being adjusted. But there's a noteworthy exception, and it's located in Pittsburgh. There, Carnegie Mellon University professor of robotics Stephen Smith's startup is being put to the test, and the results garnered since its 2012 implementation are encouraging. The Surtrac system uses artificial intelligence (AI) to coordinate with other traffic lights via radar sensors and cameras at each light, reports IEEE Spectrum. It's estimated to have cut emissions by a fifth and idling time by more than 40%; driving time is down 25%.

If you could see that the car in front of you was being driven autonomously and therefore navigating in an ultra-safe manner, how would you react? Would you treat it as you would any other road user or be more inclined to torment it, knowing it would yield to your advances? It's a very real question that car makers and insurance companies are wrestling with and one that has prompted Swedish automotive giant Volvo to take preemptive action. The Guardian reports that it's decided that when the first 100 self-driving 4x4s hit London's streets in 2018, they'll look no different to any other Volvo of the same model so that other road users aren't tempted to "take them on." Those are the words of Erik Coelingh, senior technical leader at Volvo Cars: "From the outside you won't see that it's a self-driving car. From a purely scientific perspective it would be interesting to have some cars that are marked as self-driving cars and some that are not and see whether other road users react in a different way," he told the newspaper.

There's not much that hasn't changed in Apple's Macs over the last 20 years. But one thing has stayed: the distinctive chime that plays when you turn them on. But the new MacBook Pro, released last week, will no longer make that sound. And it appears to suggest that the noise – which arrived with the iMac G3 in the late 90s – is on its way out. The new computer doesn't make any sound at all when it's turned on.

Legislators have approved a bill that would block all porn in Israel unless people ask to view it. The Israeli Ministerial Committee for Legislation unanimously approved the bill, which forces internet companies in the country censor adult websites by default. Backers of the new legislation claim that it is a way of stopping young people getting online. Under the terms of the bill, anyone wanting to access pornography online would have to tell their internet service provider, either by writing to them, ringing them or getting in touch their website. An employee shows a Samsung Electronics' Gear S3 Classic during Korea Electronics Show 2016 in Seoul, South Korea Visitors experience Samsung Electronics' Gear VR during the Korea Electronics Grand Fair at an exhibition hall in Seoul, South Korea Amy Rimmer, Research Engineer at Jaguar Land Rover, demonstrates the car manufacturer's Advanced Highway Assist in a Range Rover, which drives the vehicle, overtakes and can detect vehicles in the blind spot, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire Chris Burbridge, Autonomous Driving Software Engineer for Tata Motors European Technical Centre, demonstrates the car manufacturer's GLOSA V2X functionality, which is connected to the traffic lights and shares information with the driver, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire In its facilities, JAXA develop satellites and analyse their observation data, train astronauts for utilization in the Japanese Experiment Module'Kibo' of the International Space Station (ISS) and develop launch vehicles The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to the music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight.