The situation was further compounded by demographic changes. Ongoing rural depopulation in Japan has seen the average age of farmers rise to 67, according to 2015 census figures. To counter the situation and encourage greater cultivation, Asahi Shuzo joined forces with Fujitsu. The ICT company's solution involved the deployment of solar-powered IoT sensors and cameras in paddy fields, with the resulting data connected to the Fujitsu Akisai food and agriculture industry cloud. The sensors measured environmental conditions, including atmospheric humidity levels, ground and air temperatures, ground moisture and electroconductivity. "The use of Fujitsu's Akisai system in Dassai production has created a win-win for both Asahi Shuzo and its farmers."

Knowing when and where a person is, was, and will be can enable magical customer experiences. Flybits today announced that it's raised $35 million in series C funding led by Point72 Ventures, with participation from Mastercard, Citi Ventures, and Reinventure, along with existing partners Portag3 Ventures, TD Bank, and Information Venture Partners. The fresh funding brings its total raised to $50 million, and it comes as Flybits notches 300% growth in 2019 and gears up to hire across sales, engineering, and business development teams and offices, including adding solutions engineers, sales executives, business development reps, and engineers. "Customers are already used to seeing content and recommendations based on their behavior," said CEO Hossein Rahnama. But Flybits leverages an unlimited amount to create far more personalized and relevant recommendations than ever before, all in an effort to help financial institutions deliver real time lifestyle banking that gets at their customers' deeper needs.

"The increasing amount of available data, mainly due to the proliferation of access to the internet in countries where peacekeeping missions take place, has caused a technology-driven transformation of the operational environment. This comes at a time of significant developments in the fields of artificial intelligence and particularly machine learning, most of whose applications still rely on massive amounts of data. As such these developments have produced some promising individual initiatives to exploit this new and growing potential for United Nations operations." At least as early as 1996 researchers have used machine learning (ML) to predict conflicts[1]. Today, mainly due to significantly higher amounts of available data[2], advancements in computing power and the progress made in natural language processing, several artificial intelligence (AI) tools have been added to the peacekeeping arsenal.

QuantX recently became the first-ever computer-aided breast cancer diagnosis system cleared by the FDA for use in radiology, but it's not putting radiologists out of a job any time soon. "Radiology is the backbone of diagnosing many diseases today," said Jeffrey Aronin, chairman and CEO of Paragon Biosciences. "We believe the future is radiologists with technology." The combination of humans and machines apparently works really well. In a clinical study, QuantX helped radiologists interpret MRIs, noting the differences between cancerous and noncancerous breast lesions.

Pluribus is the first AI bot capable of beating human experts in six-player no-limit Hold'em, the most widely played poker format in the world. This is the first time an AI bot has beaten top human players in a complex game with more than two players or two teams. We tested Pluribus against professional poker players, including two winners of the World Series of Poker Main Event. Pluribus succeeds because it can very efficiently handle the challenges of a game with both hidden information and more than two players. It uses self-play to teach itself how to win, with no examples or guidance on strategy. Pluribus uses far fewer computing resources than the bots that have defeated humans in other games. The bot's success will advance AI research, because many important AI challenges involve many players and hidden information. For decades, poker has been a difficult and important grand challenge problem for the field of AI. Because poker involves hidden information -- you don't know your opponents' cards -- success requires bluffing and other strategies that do not apply to chess, Go, and other games.

IBM has been tweaking the AI-powered highlight picking algorithm it deploys during the Wimbledon tennis championships this year to take into account a wider array of factors to better find and personalise the best points to share with fans around the world. Big Blue is celebrating a 30-year technology partnership with the famous grass court tennis tournament, and in 2017 it unveiled an AI-powered system for picking the best points to insert into a highlights package, with the aim of delivering highlights "better than an international media organisation" as Sam Sneddon, IBM sports and entertainment lead, told Computerworld UK during a tour of its technology bunker on-site at the Championships this year. Whether it was Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer's five-hour epic mens' final, or Simona Halep's swift dismantling of Serena Williams in the ladies' final, IBM was working in the background to map and collect every second of footage before feeding it through a set of machine learning and deep learning algorithms which decide the points that would make for the best 5-10 minute highlight package. The Watson system analyses 39 factors, like player gestures and crowd reactions, from live footage and assigns an'excitement score'. For an idea of scale, IBM collects 4.5 million tennis data points per tournament.

Not many robotics companies can boast legions of fans online, but not many robotics companies make robots quite like Boston Dynamics. Each time the firm shares new footage of its machines, they cause a sensation. Whether it's a pack of robot dogs towing a truck or a human-like bot leaping nimbly up a set of boxes, Boston Dynamics' bots are uniquely thrilling. And when a parody video circulated last month showing a CGI "Bosstown Dynamics" robot turning on its creators, many mistook it for the real thing -- a testament to how far the company has pushed what seems technologically possible. But for all its engineering prowess, Boston Dynamics now faces its biggest challenge yet: turning its stable of robots into an actual business. After decades of kicking machines in parking lots, the company is set to launch its first ever commercial bot later this year: the quadrupedal Spot.

Williams Syndrome, a rare neurodevelopmental disorder that affects about 1 in 10,000 babies born in the United States, produces a range of symptoms including cognitive impairments, cardiovascular problems, and extreme friendliness, or hypersociability. In a study of mice, MIT neuroscientists have garnered new insight into the molecular mechanisms that underlie this hypersociability. They found that loss of one of the genes linked to Williams Syndrome leads to a thinning of the fatty layer that insulates neurons and helps them conduct electrical signals in the brain. The researchers also showed that they could reverse the symptoms by boosting production of this coating, known as myelin. This is significant, because while Williams Syndrome is rare, many other neurodevelopmental disorders and neurological conditions have been linked to myelination deficits, says Guoping Feng, the James W. and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience and a member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Over the past few years, robotics has witnessed a tremendous transformation and is invading other industries. And among all, agriculture is one such sector that is making the best out of robotics -- not only in terms of problems with labour shortages in agriculture but also in terms of reducing food waste. Vegetable harvesting is one of those fields in agriculture that has witnessed some of the most technological advances. Harvesting needs a significant amount of human labour, and while many vegetables don't need much care, there are few types of greens that need to be a lot of precision. Iceberg lettuce is one such crop that grows relatively flat to the ground, and can easily be damaged, posing a challenge for harvesters.

Elon Musk doesn't think his newest endeavor, revealed Tuesday night after two years of relative secrecy, will end all human suffering. At a presentation at the California Academy of Sciences, hastily announced via Twitter and beginning a half hour late, Musk presented the first product from his company Neuralink. It's a tiny computer chip attached to ultrafine, electrode-studded wires, stitched into living brains by a clever robot. And depending on which part of the two-hour presentation you caught, it's either a state-of-the-art tool for understanding the brain, a clinical advance for people with neurological disorders, or the next step in human evolution. The chip is custom-built to receive and process the electrical action potentials--"spikes"--that signal activity in the interconnected neurons that make up the brain.