BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories will mark 25 years of innovation in a day long celebration on June 2 at Norton's Woods at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in Somerville, Massachusetts. Keynote addresses by Dr. Matthew E. Brand of Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs and Prof. Dimitris Bertsimas of Sloan School of Management and Massachusetts Institute of Technology will highlight the invitation-only event, which will also feature panel sessions and a research showcase. The showcase will feature eleven of the latest achievements by Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories' researchers, and includes such breakthrough technologies as: Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, located in Cambridge, conducts corporate research and development for the group of companies ultimately owned by Mitsubishi Electric Corporation in North America as well as for Mitsubishi Electric Corporation itself. MERL is home to some of the world's leading experts in such areas as electronics and communications, multimedia, data analytics, computer vision, mechatronics, and algorithms. As one of the world's longest-running research labs, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs has earned 1,120 patents.

There are supposedly some some serious ethical concerns at play here. For one, 15,000 images from inmates and folks who've been arrested were given to third parties to further test outside algorithms. Many of these tattoos apparently had personally identifying information in the frame along with the ink itself (think: names of loved ones, faces and birthdates). The trial run was based on 15,000 images (Tatt-C), but the next phase (Tatt-E) will be comprised of over 100,000 photos pulled from Florida, Michigan and Tennessee law enforcement and correctional facilities when it starts this summer. The EFF also says that the NIST has unfairly and inappropriately targeted religious groups as part of their study.

If someone asked you to define'intelligence,' how would you respond? The question elicits significantly different answers based on whom you ask. Ask people to define'artificial intelligence' and the conflicting answers only multiply. Not only are there multiple schools of thought within the field of AI, but the term itself stands on a word that we're still only beginning to understand. This was the elephant in the room at the Applied Artificial Intelligence Conference last week in San Francisco.

Depending on whom you ask, your car will be driving you in less than two years – or more than 15. The Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, who is never shy about beating his chest, on Wednesday declared it to be just two years away . In doing so, he made one of the most confident predictions to date about how soon consumers can stop worrying about passing their driver's tests. "I really consider autonomous driving a solved problem," he said. "I think we are probably less than two years away."

The analytics community has long been discussing whether analytics is about art or science. Analytics is more an art than a science in its ability to form conditions to drive business toward an action that is based on the confidence that the action will improve business performance. This ability to be actionable have recognized recently as the most important aspect in analytics [1]. The concept is known as Prescriptive Analytics [2] shares some similar statements with Actionable Analytics, but some meaningful differences are present as well. Classification rules plays a significant role in practical predictive analytics.

On Thursday at the Recode Code Conference in Los Angeles, Tinder CEO Sean Rad announced that the dating app has plans to make its services more inclusive to transgender and gender nonconforming communities. Tinder -- which has been accused of having a transphobia problem -- will be "working with leading LGBTQ experts and organizations, including GLAAD, to help them address these needs and continue revolutionizing the ways by which ALL people, across the globe, connect," according to a statement from Tinder's PR team. One challenge we face at Tinder is making sure our tens of millions of users around the world have the same user experience. No matter who you are, no matter what you're looking for, you should get quality matches through the Tinder experience. There's an important transgender (and gender nonconforming) community on Tinder who haven't had that experience... yet.

If you still think Minecraft is a PC game--well, you're flat wrong. According to new numbers released by Mojang and Microsoft, the original version for the PC is the least popular platform, in almost every region worldwide. Microsoft said Thursday that Minecraft has sold more than 106,859,714 copies to date across all platforms--which would represent the twelfth most populous nation in the world, right behind Japan. Four copies have even been sold into Antarctica. But if you dig into Microsoft's numbers, they reveal that far, far more users are buying Minecraft on platforms other than the PC.

Dr. Kuansan Wang is the Managing Director for Microsoft Research Outreach, responsible for overseeing research and innovation in the area of academic services. Progress in AI research and applications is exploding, and that explosion extends to our own team working on academic services. Continuing our work supercharging Bing and Cortana, we are also applying new technologies to Microsoft Academic, which serves the research community. If you're not familiar with Microsoft Academic, this online destination helps researchers connect with the papers, conferences, people, and ideas that are most relevant, using bots that read, understand, and deliver the scientific news and papers researchers need to further their work. Designed by and for researchers like myself, the site puts the broadest and deepest set of scientific information at your fingertips, with the ability to go beyond keywords to the contextual meaning of the content.

Nasdaq Inc. is trying to identify would-be white-collar criminals by using artificial intelligence systems originally built to track terrorists and sex traffickers. The exchange is testing systems that analyze data about trading activity against what traders say on their corporate chat and email accounts, in an effort to spot potential insider trading, market manipulation and other crimes faster and more accurately than current surveillance systems can. Parsing the chatter of traders in the time before, during and after transactions -- and matching those findings with trading data -- provides "holistic surveillance," said Bill Nosal, vice president of business development for market technology at Nasdaq NDAQ, -0.69% . "This can show what was happening in the trader's head," Nosal said. The work comes as New York Attorney General Preet Bharara and other state and federal officials step up efforts to prosecute financial crimes.

As I write this, I'm listening to music written and performed by a robot that was built by Brain.fm to help me focus. I think it might be working, giving me a tiny buzz. It could of course be a placebo effect. In fact, the fact that I even wrote that last three-word sentence should tell you something about the attitude in which I approached Brain.fm's Brain.fm is a new audio startup out of Chicago that produces music written by artificial intelligence that promises to get your brain into one of several desired states, from deep sleep to focused work.