As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions -- sights, sounds, textures, tastes -- are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it -- or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion -- we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain's best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn't, wouldn't evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it's really like. Not so, says Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality.

As the average age of farmers globally creeps higher and retirement looms, Japan has a solution; robots and driverless tractors. The Group of Seven agriculture ministers began their two-day meeting in Niigata on Saturday for the first time in seven years to discuss how to meet increasing food demand as aging farmers retire without successors. With the average age of Japanese farmers now 67, agriculture minister Hiroshi Moriyama will outline his idea of replacing retiring growers with Japanese-developed autonomous tractors and backpack-carried robots. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has warned that left unchecked, aging farmers could threaten the ability to produce the food the world needs. The average age of growers in developed countries is now about 60, according to the United Nations.

A team from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln flew an unmanned aircraft over the prairie at the Homestead National Monument of America on Friday, dropping ping pong-like balls filled with a chemical mixture to ignite brush-clearing grass fires. Local and federal officials are interested in the technology because it could help clear overgrown vegetation in rugged, hard-to-reach terrain, said Michael Johnson, a spokesman for the National Park Service. The balls are filled with a chemical powder, potassium permanganate, before they're loaded into the drone. During flight, the aircraft pierces the ball with a needle and injects it with another chemical, glycol, before releasing it. The technology is already used by helicopters to start controlled burns, but researchers note that the drone is cheaper and more portable.

To support public health reporting, the use of computers and machine learning can better help with access to unstructured clinical data--including in cancer case detection, according to a recent study. Often, the unstructured free text data made available by electronic health records is obtained by means that are "resource intensive, inherently complex and rely on structured clinical data and dictionary-based approaches," according to the authors of the study, published in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics. The researchers, from the Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis, used about 7,000 pathology reports from the Indiana health information exchange to attempt to detect cancer cases using already available algorithms and open source machine learning tools. "We think that its no longer necessary for humans to spend time reviewing text reports to determine if cancer is present or not," Shaun Grannis, M.D., interim director of the Regenstrief Center of Biomedical Informatics, said in an announcement. "We have come to the point in time that technology can handle this. A human's time is better spent helping other humans by providing them with better clinical care."

A group of MIT researchers has sketched out a way to address a gap in cybersecurity that exists between human and machine. Human-made rules, which are meant to alert the system of an attack, don't work unless an attack exactly matches one of those rules. Machine-learning measures typically rely on anomaly detection. Consequently, false alarms aren't uncommon and the system starts to distrust itself. Combine these two forces - man and machine - and that's when magic can happen, according to a group of researchers out of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).

CALIFORNIA: Internet giant Google has asserted that its Artificial Intelligence(AI) and cloud computing is the most lucrative and promising businesses in the tech industry. That AI type of service-based business is fast becoming the new way to reap profits in the tech industry, the California-based tech giant said. "We've always been doing cloud, it's just that we've been consuming it all internally at Google. But as we have grown, really matured in how we handle our data center investments and how we can do this at scale, we have definitely crossed over to the other side to where we can thoughtfully serve external customers," Google CEO Sundar Pichai said. "We have been investing in machine learning and AI for years, but I think we're at an exceptionally interesting tipping point where these technologies are really taking off. That is very, very applicable to businesses as well. So thoughtfully doing that externally we view as a big differentiator we have over others," Pichai added.

China's Nasdaq-listed internet search engine giant Baidu Inc. said Friday it has formed a team in Silicon Valley dedicated to its self-driving car efforts. The announcement comes as Chinese officials rush to set up a road map for incorporating highway-ready, self-driving cars within three to five years. Baidu's Silicon Valley team will grow to more than 100 researchers and engineers, focused on research, development and testing, by the end of 2016, the company said in a statement Friday. The Beijing-headquartered firm is looking to work on areas "integral to self-driving car development, including planning, perception, control and systems." The team in Silicon Valley will be part of the company's newly created Autonomous Driving Unit.

Google made headlines earlier this year when its AlphaGo AI defeated world champion Lee Se-Dol in the ancient board game Go. But a group of researchers want to push the boundaries and see how a computer might fare in a first-person shooter deathmatch. The 2016 Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG) Conference will host a competition to determine the best bot that's capable of winning a multiplayer round of Doom, while playing the way a human does. Our biggest ever edition of TNW Conference is fast approaching! That means that unlike enemy AI in video games, which have a complete overview of the level's map, locations of powerups and weapons, the bots will have to rely only on raw visual input that mimics what a human gamer sees when they play a game. The Visual AI Doom Competition will pit bots against each other in two tracks: the first one will see them playing a map known to their programmers with only rocket launchers and health boosts, while the other will feature an undisclosed map with all weapons and items available.

What may have started as a science fiction speculation--that perhaps the universe as we know it is a computer simulation--has become a serious line of theoretical and experimental investigation among physicists, astrophysicists, and philosophers. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium, hosts and moderates a panel of experts in a lively discussion about the merits and shortcomings of this provocative and revolutionary idea. The 17th annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate took place at The American Museum of Natural History on April 5, 2016. In his memory, the Hayden Planetarium is honored to host the annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate -- generously endowed by relatives, friends, and admirers of Isaac Asimov and his work -- bringing the finest minds in the world to the Museum each year to debate pressing questions on the frontier of scientific discovery. Proceeds from ticket sales of the Isaac Asimov Memorial Debates benefit the scientific and educational programs of the Hayden Planetarium.

Staffers at McCann Erickson Japan in Tokyo recently met their new colleague: AI-CD? The concept was sparked by an idea at South by Southwest, and data-driven success stories -- including Netflix's and Buzzfeed's approaches in creating targeted original content -- helped to trigger the development of AI-CD beta. To set AI-CD beta apart as an advertising prodigy (albeit, a robotic one), it initially analyzed and categorized the winners of the All Japan Radio & Television Commercial Confederation annual CM Festival for the past 10 years, which celebrates creative excellence in TV advertising in Japan. Depending on the creative challenge, it mines patterns including how weather, location or current events have affected an existing campaign, or how related commercials have performed historically on YouTube. This logic-based direction then results in a targeted strategy for a product or brand, which is actually written out using a brush attached to a robotic arm.