The Mitsubishi Corporation has set up a joint venture company that will use artificial intelligence (AI) to control on-demand bus services in Japan. The new company, called Next Mobility, has been established by Mitsubishi and the Nishi-Nippon Railroad Company, a major Japanese bus operator. The joint venture will start a one-year trial in April at Island City, in the Higashi-ward of Fukuoka City. In a statement Wednesday, Mitsubishi said that the AI would be used to automatically generate routes, in real time, based on passenger requests that are made through a smartphone app. Deep learning will be used to collate "operational data" on both traffic conditions and passenger destinations.

Amid severe labor shortages, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to perform human tasks is sure to grow, and DJI, the world's biggest drone-maker, is ready to respond, the firm's Japan head said. Drones for industrial uses ranging from agriculture to infrastructure maintenance and security are becoming more popular, said Allen Wu, DJI's head of Japan operations. But he said he is doubtful about the potential for drone-based product delivery. "For quite some time, we've figured that our main market in Japan is industrial, so our team has been focusing on it more," Wu said in an interview Wednesday. Shenzhen-based SZ DJI Technology Co. dominates the global drone market and according to reports is estimated to have a market share of more than 70 percent.

Is Tesla preparing to offer Model 3 leasing? Tesla is finally putting the Y in sexy – or rather S 3 X Y -- its lineup of car models. The electric car maker is unveiling its new Model Y crossover SUV at Thursday at 8 p.m. Pacific Time in Los Angeles. I would be lying if I said I didn't find it alluring. I have long lusted with a protective detachment after the sleek cars that seemed the elusive and unattainable thing I could only dream about.

IBM Corp. researchers reckon they've come up with new algorithms capable of enabling advanced machine learning on quantum computers. In a paper published today on arXiv, a repository for non-peer-reviewed academic papers, IBM's research team describes how it has created a "quantum algorithm" that enables such computers to perform "feature mapping" at a scale that goes far beyond what classical computers can do. Quantum computing takes advantage of the strange ability of subatomic particles to exist in more than one state at any time. Thanks to the way the tiniest of particles behave, operations can be done much more quickly and use less energy than classical computers. In classical computing, a bit is a single piece of information that can exist in two states – 1 or 0. But quantum computing uses quantum bits, or "qubits," that can store much more information than just 1 or 0, because they can exist in any superposition of these values.

A year after the first fatality caused by a fully self-driving car, questions about liability in the event of a death involving the cars are still completely up in the air. Officials announced earlier this week that Uber won't face criminal charges in the death of a pedestrian struck and killed by one of its self-driving cars nearly a year ago in Tempe, Arizona. The Yavapai County Attorney's Office said it conducted a thorough review of the evidence and determined there was no basis for criminal liability against Uber. It did not detail how the decision was made and has declined to answer any questions on the case. The pedestrian was walking a bicycle across a road at night.

European Time Machine is one of six proposals that received funding in a large-scale research initiative from the European Commission. The project focus on using historical big data to design and visualise the historical development of cities across Europe. Amsterdam is one of many cities that now are following in steps of pioneers like Venice and Lausanne to develop a time machine for their city. The technology is based on advanced AI technology to enable the transformation of fragmented data from content ranging from medieval manuscripts and historical objects into historical maps and 3D reconstructions of the city in various periods. Where the goal is to develop it into useable knowledge for European industry and the society in general.

Editor's Note: This post is part of our Big Ideas series, a column highlighting the innovative thinking and thought leadership at IIeX events around the world. Jason Smikle will be speaking at IIeX North America 2019 in Austin, TX. If you liked this article, you'll LOVE IIeX North America. Click here to learn more. A lot of companies are asking right now, how can we use AI to lower costs and make better business decisions.

Inference Studio 6.0 Includes Support for Google Dialogflow NLP and IBM Watson Tone Analyzer Inference Solutions, a global provider of Intelligent Virtual Agents for sales and service organizations, announced general availability of Studio 6.0, which enables service providers to bring a new and more advanced class of service to market. This latest iteration of Inference Studio, which integrates the most advanced natural language processing (NLP) and Conversational AI technologies from Google and IBM, helps businesses eliminate complex IVR menus and elevates the customer experience beyond simple speech-enabled, directed dialog systems. Inference Solutions announces general availability of Studio 6.0, enabling service providers to bring a new and more advanced class of service to market "Adoption by a growing number of businesses is accelerating because the accuracy of core Natural Language Understanding resources has made great strides in the past year," says Dan Miller, lead analyst at Opus Research. "Companies and their customers are becoming more comfortable conversing with Intelligent Virtual Agents." Inference's Virtual Agents are resold by over 35 telecommunications carriers around the world to businesses of all sizes.

TANYA OTT: I'm Tanya Ott and this is the Press Room, where we talk about the issues that are or should be important to your business. In October, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced it's going to spend $1 billion dollars--that's with a big capital B--to create a new college focused on Artificial Intelligence.1 That is a huge investment. MIT says it's already raised two-thirds of the money and plans to start classes next fall. In announcing the school, MIT's president said he wants to "educate the bilinguals of the future."

Tengai is an interview robot being tested in Sweden. Its makers hope it will remove unconscious biases from the interview process, because it doesn't make judgements based on skin colour, ethnicity, accent or gender.