Digitization is transforming business and society. In my last article, I introduced four technology trends that NTT DATA has identified as the most influential. Here are another four groundbreaking developments that are set to disrupt entire industries in the near future. Technology trends have already brought us huge advancements in healthcare, helping humans live longer than ever before. However, society will struggle to sustain an aging population.

It was just two years ago that artificial intelligence seemed to burst onto the government agenda. In August 2016 then-President Barack Obama was the guest editor for an issue of Wired magazine and spoke with head of the MIT Media Lab Joi Ito about AI and its implications. "Early in a technology, a thousand flowers should bloom," Obama said. "And the government should add a relatively light touch, investing heavily in research and making sure there's a conversation between basic research and applied research." Two months later, the Obama administration released a report on AI, A broad overview of the emerging technology, the report dedicated just a few pages to how the government could benefit from AI.

I sent Dr. Reina Reyes a Mashable article which posited that "Mission: Impossible" movies are more successful the more Tom Cruise runs. It claimed positive correlation between quality (Rotten Tomatoes review scores) and distance run (estimated at 14.6 feet per second of screen time). Before "M:I-Fallout," Cruise ran over 3,000 feet in both top-rated M:I movies, "M:I-III" and "Ghost Protocol." Reyes quickly distilled it into a scatter plot on Facebook, complete with a still of Cruise running. I am blessed with friends who continually teach me data visualization and big data's other languages.

Real-world data sets often provide multiple types of information about the same set of entities. This data is well represented by multi-view graphs, which consist of several distinct sets of edges over the same nodes. These can be used to analyze how entities interact from different viewpoints. Combining multiple views improves the quality of inferences drawn from the underlying data, which has increased interest in developing efficient multi-view graph embedding methods. We propose an algorithm, C-RSP, that generates a common (C) embedding of a multi-view graph using Randomized Shortest Paths (RSP). This algorithm generates a dissimilarity measure between nodes by minimizing the expected cost of a random walk between any two nodes across all views of a multi-view graph, in doing so encoding both the local and global structure of the graph. We test C-RSP on both real and synthetic data and show that it outperforms benchmark algorithms at embedding and clustering tasks while remaining computationally efficient.

Given a text description, most existing semantic parsers synthesize a program in one shot. However, in reality, the description can be ambiguous or incomplete, solely based on which it is quite challenging to produce a correct program. In this paper, we investigate interactive semantic parsing for If-Then recipes where an agent can interact with users to resolve ambiguities. We develop a hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) based agent that can improve the parsing performance with minimal questions to users. Results under both simulation and human evaluation show that our agent substantially outperforms non-interactive semantic parsers and rule-based agents.

Nefarious actors on social media and other platforms often spread rumors and falsehoods through images whose metadata (e.g., captions) have been modified to provide visual substantiation of the rumor/falsehood. This type of modification is referred to as image repurposing, in which often an unmanipulated image is published along with incorrect or manipulated metadata to serve the actor's ulterior motives. We present the Multimodal Entity Image Repurposing (MEIR) dataset, a substantially challenging dataset over that which has been previously available to support research into image repurposing detection. The new dataset includes location, person, and organization manipulations on real-world data sourced from Flickr. We also present a novel, end-to-end, deep multimodal learning model for assessing the integrity of an image by combining information extracted from the image with related information from a knowledge base. The proposed method is compared against state-of-the-art techniques on existing datasets as well as MEIR, where it outperforms existing methods across the board, with AUC improvement up to 0.23.

Finite State Controllers (FSCs) are an effective way to compactly represent sequential plans. By imposing appropriate conditions on transitions, FSCs can also represent generalized plans (plans that solve a range of planning problems from a given domain). In this paper we introduce the concept of hierarchical FSCs for planning by allowing controllers to call other controllers. This call mechanism allows hierarchical FSCs to represent generalized plans more compactly than individual FSCs, to compute controllers in a modular fashion or even more, to compute recursive controllers. The paper introduces a classical planning compilation for computing hierarchical FSCs that solve challenging generalized planning tasks. The compilation takes as input a finite set of classical planning problems from a given domain. The output of the compilation is a single classical planning problem whose solution induces: (1) a hierarchical FSC and (2), the corresponding validation of that controller on the input classical planning problems.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is, by and large, the newest, most influential technology advancement currently affecting everything and everyone in the digital world. Developers and companies around the globe are engineering new ways to implement some machine-learning-based function in every software, platform and tool out there. It's a rather obvious consequence, then, that AI is affecting security (and cybersecurity) in many positive and negative ways since it's a potent tool in the hands of both security specialists and hackers, in a never-ending game of cops and robbers. Being a cybersecurity professional is anything but simple. IT professionals are some of the most hardworking employees around, with strenuous work shifts of up to 52 hours a week.

As artificial intelligence (AI) develops and its uses continue to grow, there's still the discussion to be had around how to use AI in a trustworthy and ethical way. Businesses need to lead the process, creating an honest, global conversation about the benefits of AI not only for the industry but also governments and society enlarge, finds a Sage Group report on building a competitive yet ethical AI economy. "The next challenge will be to move the global conversation away from AI as a threat, or replacement for humans, and towards encouraging businesses to approach AI as a complement to human ingenuity," states the report. According to the study that Sage conducted with a group of international business executives and United Kingdom government officials, the key is for industry leaders, businesses and C-suite executives to define ethical principles that will guide AI development. This discussion comes at a time when the global AI market is hitting its stride, the International Data Corporation (IDC) reports industries are aggressively investing in AI and cognitive systems and that worldwide spending on these systems will increase by 54 per cent from 2017, reaching $19.1 billion this year.

Japan is planning to accept a greater number of caregivers from three Southeast Asian countries having bilateral free trade agreements with Tokyo as part of efforts to address a labor shortage in the country, sources familiar with the matter said Sunday. By easing some restrictions on the number of caregivers from Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, the government will allow more caregivers with high Japanese language skills to work in Japan from next April, the sources said. Under the current terms with the three countries, Japan will accept up to 300 caregivers from each country a year. The government aims to treat such foreign workers with high language proficiency separately from the current quota of 300. The number of people in the three countries who want to work as caregivers in Japan has recently been increasing.