OSAKA – Japanese opposition party Osaka Ishin no Kai decided Tuesday to change its name by removing "Osaka," as the party tries to gain wider support from across the country. The party, which has its base in Osaka Prefecture, made the decision at a meeting of its executives in the city of Osaka. It will formally adopt a new party name at an extraordinary party convention to be held in the city on Aug. 23. In Sunday's election for the House of Councilors, in which half of the chamber's 242 seats were contested, Osaka Ishin won only seven seats -- three in prefectural constituencies and four under the nationwide proportional representation system. The three constituency seats it won are in Osaka and neighboring Hyogo Prefecture.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), approved at the end of April and scheduled to enter into force in 2018, does not only deal with EU citizens' privacy. One of the measures included in the new bill aims to restrict so-called "automated individual decision-making." Such restrictions can be applied to algorithms using machine-learning tools that are becoming more and more widespread among the world's tech giants. The regulation will legally prevent these programs to take decisions that "significantly affect" EU nationals: for instance, these algorithms will not be used to evaluate somebody's "performance at work, economic situation, health, personal preferences, interests, reliability, behavior, location, or movements." As AI and machine-learning are going through a worldwide boom, GDPR's wet blanket rule is unlikely to go down well in the tech circles. But what could be even more worrisome for AI fans is another part of the bill: a measure dubbed "right to explanation."

During the next five years, messaging will become the preferred path for customer and stakeholder interaction, ultimately displacing call centers and replacing or augmenting mobile apps. For commercial brands and government programs looking to extend and expand their customer base, they must satisfy this customer demand for next-gen messaging channels and rapid response. Booz Allen Hamilton (NYSE: BAH) and Conversable announced today a joint strategic focus to advance, test, and deliver world-class automated interactive messaging, tools, services, and experiences that fundamentally enhance and transform customer care in all channels. The days of commercial brands and federal programs spending millions of dollars and many years to launch an essentially single-use mobile application are coming to an end. Leading brands and programs will increasingly look to bots and automation in messaging to better analyze and understand customer requests, and reach out to new consumers who are rapidly becoming more adept and comfortable with executing commerce through more robust, tailored, responsive and secure messaging platforms.

Society is caught between blind faith in technology and resistance to progress, between technological possibilities and fears that it has a negative impact. Increasingly Artificial Intelligence, the latest buzzword for everything software related, is stirring up much of the fears. In an interesting paper: Is This Time Different? The Opportunities and Challenges of Artificial Intelligence, Jason Furman, Chairman of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers sets out his belief that we need more artificial intelligence but must find a way to prevent the inequality it will inevitably cause. Despite the labor market challenges we may need to navigate, Furman's bigger worry is that we will not invest enough in AI.

The use of a robot to deliver an explosive device and kill the Dallas shooting suspect has intensified the debate over a future of "killer robots". "Other options would have exposed our officers to greater danger," the Dallas police chief said. Remote killing is not new in warfare. Technology has always been driven by military application, including allowing killing to be carried out at distance - prior examples might be the introduction of the longbow by the English at Crecy in 1346, then later the Nazi V1 and V2 rockets. More recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones such as the Predator and the Reaper have been used by the US outside of traditional military battlefields.

In the middle of the DRC Finals last year, SRI's DURUS robot slowly and steadily spent over two and a half hours walking 2 kilometers on a single battery charge. This was a Big Deal: DARPA had recognized from the beginning that the original version of ATLAS was horrendously impractical (at least in terms of locomotion), so they funded two different teams, one from SRI and one from Sandia, to design a humanoid robot that could walk 20x more efficiently. SRI's DURUS came very, very close to this goal, achieving a cost of transport of just 1.5 through an innovative combination of hardware, software, and especially gait control. The guy whose job it is to play with this robot is Professor Aaron Ames, who spent much of the last year moving his Advanced Mechanical Bipedal Experimental Robotics Lab from Texas A&M to Georgia Tech, which is why we haven't heard anything exciting about DURUS since the DRC. It sounds like they just got everything up and running a few months ago, and they're now ready to share an impressive new behavior: DURUS can now walk just like a human, while wearing normal (and stylish) human shoes. You may remember that back at the DRC Finals, we asked Ames what he was hoping to do next with DURUS.

DARPA is soliciting innovative research proposals in the area of semi-automated discovery of machine learning and statistical models and processing pipelines. Proposed research should investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems. Specifically excluded is research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice.

People are worried about robots taking over the world, like they have been fantasized to do in various Hollywood films over the years. Even Professor Stephen Hawking said that AI could lead to the end of the human race. Does that mean we should throw away this idea of artificial intelligence? AI has already impacted human life in a positive way, that much is obvious. Technology itself is made to better human life, to create a certain convenience for people. As AI evolves we will be in control over it (for now), during that time we will see and begin to fully understand the powerful things AI can do and solve for us.

Tor is one of the world's most used anonymity networks, and offers a safe haven for internet users in oppressive regimes as well as criminals operating in cyberspace. The development of Tor was partly founded by the US government to help dissidents in countries with extreme internet censorship. The FBI however allegedly harassed a Tor developer after it started being used for criminal activities. Tor is one of the most used ways for users to hide their identity online. However, the Tor network can be compromised because of vulnerabilities in the network.

Federal safety investigators are asking electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc. for details on how its Autopilot system works and why it failed to detect a tractor-trailer that crossed its path in a Florida crash. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in a letter to Tesla posted Tuesday, also requests data on all crashes that happened because Tesla's system did not work as expected. The agency is investigating the May 7 crash in Williston, Fla., that killed 40-year-old Joshua Brown, of Canton, Ohio. Tesla has said the cameras on Brown's Model S sedan failed to distinguish the white side of a turning tractor-trailer from a brightly lit sky and didn't automatically brake. The agency gave Tesla until Aug. 26 to fully comply with its request.