Japan plans to build the world's fastest supercomputer in a bid to arm its manufacturers with a platform for research that could help them develop and improve driverless cars, robotics and medical diagnostics. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry will spend ¥19.5 billion ($173 million) on the previously unreported project, a budget breakdown shows, as part of a government policy to get back Japan's mojo in the world of technology. The country has lost its edge in many electronic fields amid intensifying competition from South Korea and China, which is home to the world's current best-performing machine. In a move that is expected to vault Japan to the top of the supercomputing heap, its engineers will be tasked with building a machine that can make 130 quadrillion calculations per second -- or 130 petaflops in scientific parlance -- as early as next year, sources involved in the project said. At that speed, Japan's computer would be ahead of China's Sunway Taihulight, which is capable of 93 petaflops.

DeepMind, the British AI firm owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, has signed a new five-year deal to use data collected by the UK's National Health Service. The agreement with the NHS Royal Free Hospital Trust in London replaces a previous deal that attracted controversy over its lack of official oversight. Under the terms of the new deal, DeepMind will handle personally identifiable medical records for some 1.6 million patients, including medical history dating back five years. The agreement also includes stricter data regulation, including "technical audits" of DeepMind's systems. Using data from the Royal Free, DeepMind has built an app named Streams that alerts doctors when patients are in danger of developing acute kidney injury (AKI) -- a common but often overlooked condition.

On January 2016, the White House announced its aim to deliver a decade's worth of advances in cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment, in five years with this initiative. This initiative includes the building of an AI framework named CANDLE (Cancer Distributed Learning Environment) being developed by multiple organizations. It will help us change the way we understand cancer. READ MORE 6. "GPU Deep Learning has given us a new tool to tackle grand challenges that have, up to now, been too complex for even the most powerful supercomputers. Together with the Department of Energy and the National Cancer Institute we are creating an AI supercomputing platform for cancer research."

On Friday, June 24, 2016, the world watched in horror as Britain voted to commit economic suicide as a nation. On November 8, 2016, America will vote. Will it also commit economic and political suicide? Increasing inequality is building up great stress in the world economic system. The disenfranchised masses are expressing their anger, including in irrational ways such as the Brexit vote.

Artificial intelligence and robotics are showing up in every part of life, anywhere from driving, to the cellphones we use, how our data is managed in the world, how our homes are going to be built in the future. So given its ubiquity, it really is important to start addressing the strengths and limitations of artificial intelligence. We've seen a lot of breakthroughs in data analytics. The example of Watson -- which is an IBM set of algorithms -- has been very impressive in terms of managing large amounts of data, and how to structure the data so that you can see patterns that may have not emerged otherwise. That has been an important leap.

I've done it a hundred times. Someone called it "a clown car that drove into a gold mine," and like all clown cars, Twitter makes the passengers get out once in awhile. If I go back, it's because I'm addicted. For an information junkie, that little bubble is hard to resist. But Twitter -- and Facebook, for that matter -- is desperately broken in ways that alienate users, spread hate and endanger us as a species.

It may take several years or even decades, but hackers won't necessarily always be human. Artificial intelligence -- a technology that also promises to revolutionize cybersecurity -- could one day become the go-to hacking tool. Organizers of the Cyber Grand Challenge, a contest sponsored by the U.S. defense agency DARPA, gave a glimpse of the power of AI during their August event. Seven supercomputers battled each other to show that machines can indeed find and patch software vulnerabilities. Theoretically, the technology can be used to perfect any coding, ridding it of exploitable flaws.

While robots have the potential to be very intelligent, if there's one thing that books, movies, and even our own experiences have shown, it's that they also can be remarkably dumb. So one sure-fire way for the U.S. to continue leading the robotics world is by investing in education. Not only are these machines getting smarter every day, but so too are other countries, training the kind of workers required to operate robots that can coat cars on assembly lines with paint and produce sneakers faster than ever. That's one takeaway from a new report released Monday by a group of 120 robotics experts. Intended to brief the U.S. government on the state of robotics so that the government can better plan for the future, the Roadmap to Robotics report is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (as well as a few universities) and written by experts from the private sector as well as academic institutions like like Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of California, Berkeley, and Yale.

At a time when India's software services industry is witnessing a slowdown, the State government is now betting big on startups. It is chasing technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence and gaming that will influence consumer behaviour and organisations and also give rise to startups to disrupt the market. Though the IT services sector has been affected, other growth sectors such as startups are doing well and attracting good investments. Bengaluru continues to offer the best ecosystem for tech companies. There were concerns and they affected the industry temporarily. But the brand is back and Bengaluru continues to be a favoured investment destination.

Instead of talking about artificial intelligence (AI) many describe the current wave of AI innovation and acceleration with – admittedly somewhat differently positioned – terms and concepts such as cognitive computing or focus on several real-life applications of artificial intelligence that often start with words such as "smart", "intelligent", "predictive" and, indeed, "cognitive", depending on the exact application – and vendor. Despite the term issues, artificial intelligence is essential for and in, among others, information management, medicine/healthcare, data analysis, digital transformation, security (cybersecurity and others), various consumer applications, scientific advances, FinTech, predictive systems and so much more. The historical issue with artificial intelligence – is cognitive better? There are many reasons why several vendors doubt using the term artificial intelligence for AI solutions/innovations and often package them in another term (trust us, we've been there). Artificial intelligence (AI) is a term that has somewhat of a negative connotation in general perception but also in the perception of technology leaders and firms.