China has implemented an online video game curfew for minors, a move meant to prevent addiction to games and to improve health among children and teens. According to government rules issued Wednesday, game companies cannot let players younger than the age of 18 play on their online game networks between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. Chinese officials have been concerned about minors becoming addicted to games. The matter is "worthy of high attention," according to an official government interview posted by Xinhua News Agency, the country's state news agency. The new rules are "of great significance and practical role in strengthening and improving the management of online games, effectively protecting the physical and mental health of minors, and creating a literate and fluent network space," the official says. China is the world's largest video game market, with 626 million video game players, and revenue generated of $24.8 billion in 2018, according to consulting and research firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

A lawmaker with severe physical disabilities attended his first parliamentary interpellation Thursday since being elected in July and became the first lawmaker in Japan ever to use an electronically-generated voice during a Diet session. In the session of the education, culture and science committee, Yasuhiko Funago, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a condition also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, greeted the committee using a speech synthesizer. He also asked questions through a proxy speaker. "As a newcomer, I am still inexperienced, but with everyone's assistance, I will do my best to tackle (issues)," he said at the beginning of the session. An aide then posed questions on his behalf and expressed his desire to see improvements in the learning environment for disabled children.

NEW DELHI – As India prepares to install a nationwide facial recognition system in an effort to catch criminals and find missing children, human rights and technology experts on Thursday warned of the risks to privacy from increased surveillance. Use of the camera technology is an effort in "modernizing the police force, information gathering, criminal identification, verification," according to India's national crime bureau. Likely to be among the world's biggest facial recognition systems, the government contract is due to be awarded Friday. But there is little information on where it will be deployed, what the data will be used for and how data storage will be regulated, said Apar Gupta, executive director of non-profit Internet Freedom Foundation. "It is a mass surveillance system that gathers data in public places without there being an underlying cause to do so," he said.

A pioneering blood test which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to spot signs of brain tumours could be used by the NHS. Scientists hope the diagnostic aid could be rolled out within 18 months, following a promising trial of the test. The AI-based test was able to identify signs of gliomas, the most common form of brain tumour, with a 90 per cent success rate. Brain tumours often produce ambiguous symptoms, such as headaches, memory or vision problems. A scan is currently the only reliable way to spot them.

Violent video games are often blamed for people behaving aggressively in real life, but a new study claims that there is no clear link between the two. They found that, while people who played video games as a child were more likely to get into fights as an adult, gaming could not be pinpointed as the cause. Other factors such as gender and environment may have just as important role to play in people becoming violent as adults, the researchers claim. 'While the data show that fighting later in life is related to playing video games as an adolescent, most of this is because, relative to females, males both play games more often and fight more often,' said Dr Michael Ward from the University of Texas Arlington, who authored the study. 'Estimates that better establish causality find no effect, or a small negative effect.'

In the world of federal IT, the Government Accountability Office is known primarily for its hard-hitting audits of government tech systems and programs. But what technologies does GAO itself use in service of its work? And what emerging capabilities might help it fulfill its mission into the future? The watchdog agency is just beginning to explore the latter question, with help from a new internal innovation team. GAO released a blog post this week teasing the work coming out of its new Innovation Lab -- a group focused on "transforming the way that GAO thinks about and uses advanced analytical capabilities."

Grishma is a Data Scientist with the UX Research and Design team at IBM Data & AI in San Francisco. She works across portfolios along with user research and design teams and uses data to understand users' struggles and find opportunities to enhance their experience. Grishma earned her Masters in Computer Science at University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests are in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. She has spoken and facilitated workshops at multiple conferences including PyCon US and O'Reilly OSCON.

Once it has used deep learning to identify an object, the robot uses a knowledge base to pull out more detailed information that helps it carry out its orders. For example,when it identifies an object as a car, it consults a list of facts relating to cars: a car is a vehicle, it has wheels and an engine, and so on. These facts need to be hand-coded and are time consuming to compile, however, and Stump says the team is looking into ways to streamline this.

And while we don't always know the full impact of such technological advancement, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) it's becoming increasingly clear that AI will disrupt nearly every industry in one way or another. While many people fear a future in which robots have eliminated human employees from the workforce, AI technology is not nearly that sophisticated yet. Sure, an autonomous train is already helping a company automate its mining operations in Australia, Google is making music with AI and a robot named Flippy has a job flipping burgers in Southern California, but the technology has quite a ways to go before it'll free us from all mundane and repetitive tasks. While experts argue whether AI will ultimately create more jobs than it destroys, we know it is already being used to help humans do their jobs better and augment the number of tasks they can handle concurrently. The technology has been around longer than most people realize.

Artificial intelligence has become a crucial part of our technological infrastructure and the brain underlying many consumer devices. In less than a decade, machine learning algorithms based on deep neural networks evolved from recognizing cats in videos to enabling your smartphone to perform real-time translation between 27 different languages. This progress has sparked the use of AI in drug discovery and development. Artificial intelligence can improve efficiency and outcomes in drug development across therapeutic areas. For example, companies are developing AI technologies that hold the promise of preventing serious adverse events in clinical trials by identifying high-risk individuals before they enroll.