Rent application denials, Japanese-only recruitment and racist taunts are among the most rampant forms of discrimination faced by foreign residents in Japan, according to the results of the country's first nationwide survey on the issue, released Friday. The unprecedented survey of 18,500 expats of varying nationalities at the end of last year paints a comprehensive picture of deeply rooted discrimination in Japan as the nation struggles to acclimate to a recent surge in foreign residents and braces for an even greater surge in tourists in the lead-up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. It also represents the latest in a series of fledgling steps taken by Japan to curb racism, following last year's first-ever video analysis by the Justice Ministry of anti-Korea demonstrations and the enactment of a law to eradicate hate speech. In carrying out the survey, the Justice Ministry commissioned the Center for Human Rights Education and Training, a public foundation, to mail questionnaires to non-Japanese residents in 37 municipalities nationwide. Of the 18,500, 4,252 men and women, or 23.0 percent, provided valid responses.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are dominating insurtech start-up spending according to a report from research firm Accenture. The report, titled "The Rise of InsurTech", said AI and IoT now account for almost half of total investment in insurance technology (insurtech) startups globally. "We've seen a rapid acceleration of investment into and deal activity around intelligent automation and IoT start-ups over the last 12 months," said co-author of the report and Accenture's digital & innovation lead in the company's financial services practice in the UK and Ireland, Roy Jubraj. The research, which includes new analysis of CB Insights data on 450 insurtech deals over the last three years, found deals based on AI and IoT rose by 79 per cent last year. Even though the two technologies represented only one-quarter (24 per cent) of the 216 insurtech deals globally last year, they accounted for 44 per cent or US$711 million of total insurtech investment – compared with just 10 per cent of global insurtech investment in 2015.

The trend towards digital transformation of the enterprise, regardless of industry or sector, will accelerate in 2017 from the already significant levels seen last year. We identify the following seven digital technology trends as game changers for software-driven enterprises. The crumbling of the barriers to entry for machine intelligence – driven by the availability of high-quality open-source software components; cloud platforms from all major providers; and the availability of wildly popular and high-quality introductory courses on MOOC platforms – will drive growing mainstream adoption of machine intelligence as a differentiating and foundational technology layer in the digital transformation stack for identifying and closing new revenue opportunities, customizing user experience, driving operational efficiencies, and predicting failures. Also expect to see acceptance and greater adoption of advanced machine learning techniques for delivering closed-loop actionable insights in domains such as the Industrial Internet of Things and cybersecurity. The fully distributed, transparent, tamper-resistant, and auditable shared ledger technology known as blockchain is particularly powerful in settings where multiple parties need to reconcile without a central intermediary, or need to track provenance of assets across organizational boundaries, or need to establish and enforce contracts between untrusting parties and speed up reconciliation with a secure and verifiable audit trail.

The world is going to change more over the next five years than it has over the last fifteen. That, at least, is the opinion of Jeremy Waites, who describes himself as just a lowly storyteller, traveling around to telling tales about cool stuff. Officially that makes him an evangelist, and the'cool stuff' on which he evangelises is IBM's AI system, Watson. I met up with him at the recent Cloud Expo in London to discuss some of the wider issues about where AI fits in the business and wider world, what it can bring to those parties, and what impact it might have on the way work changes – or indeed continues to exist. Like a growing number of people in the AI business Waites is keen to stress that the'A' does not stand for'Artificial', but rather for'Augmented', on the basis that the former carries with it all those scary, sci-fi connotations.

AI is rapidly creeping its way into the software we use on a daily basis. Everything from CRM to Account Based Marketing (ABM) to marketing automation is getting "smarter." The promise of AI powered systems to suggest qualified leads to a B2B sales person is very exciting. One aspect of AI that is very exciting is its ability to tap into unstructured data to learn more about prospects as they engage with a brand's digital channels. Examples of unstructured data include online engagement such as tweets, comments, likes, shares, etc. Think about the potential for smarter systems to reduce much of the heavy lifting associated with identifying qualified sales opportunities.

The research, which includes new analysis of CB Insights data on 450 insurtech deals over the last three years, appears in a new Accenture report titled "The Rise of InsurTech." The report was released today in conjunction with Accenture's Fintech Innovation Lab in London, which for the first time includes a dedicated insurtech stream comprising leading industry startups. According to the report, the combined number of deals across AI (including automation) and the IoT (including connected insurance) increased 79 percent in 2016. Even though the two technologies represented only one-quarter (24 percent) of the 216 insurtech deals globally last year, they accounted for 44 percent or US$711 million of total insurtech investment -- compared with just 10 percent of global insurtech investment in 2015. "We've seen a rapid acceleration of investment into and deal activity around intelligent automation and IoT start-ups over the last 12 months," said Roy Jubraj, a co-author of the report and Accenture's Digital & Innovation lead in the company's Financial Services practice in the U.K. and Ireland.

Marketers have been swamped for years now with emerging technologies which help them better identify prospects, target and re-target them, personalize campaigns and squeeze every ounce of value out of every advertising dollar spent. The trend isn't limited to the world of digital advertising: it's consistent across all owned and paid channels -- the web, email, social, ecommerce, OOH and everything in between. Every web page, every email, every social post, every ad is being personalized. However, the rise of machine learning promises to deliver personalization at a whole new level of precision and at unprecedented scale. The question marketers need to start asking is not, what do I do with all that data -- machine learning is already solving this -- but rather do I have the right message(s)?

We review the 2016 International Competition on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling (ICKEPS), the fifth in a series of competitions started in 2005. ICKEPS series focuses on promoting the importance of knowledge engineering methods and tools for automated Planning and Scheduling systems.

AI applications have been deployed and used for industrial, government, and consumer purposes for many years. The experiences have been documented in IAAI conference proceedings since 1989. Over the years, the breadth of applications has expanded many times over and AI systems have become more commonplace. Indeed, AI has recently become a focal point in the industrial and consumer consciousness. This article focuses on changes in the world of computing over the last three decades that made building AI applications more feasible. We then examine lessons learned during this time and distill these lessons into succinct advice for future application builders.

This issue features expanded versions of articles selected from the 2016 AAAI Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence held in Phoenix, Arizona. We present a selection of three articles that describe deployed applications, two articles that discuss work on emerging applications, and an article based on the 2016 Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture.