For trend-conscious corporate executives in Japan, a connected world is not a distant future in the making but a reality. A growing number of Japanese companies are waking up to the need to sharpen their business strategies and boost investment as the hunt for the next big thing intensifies. The prospect of an aging Japan and a shrinking domestic market is also giving them the opportunity of pondering how they can help solve social and business issues as the country gravitates toward connecting everything from home appliances to cars and factories to the internet. The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, for its part, is pinning hopes on the benefits of the so-called internet of things and artificial intelligence, hoping that they will become a growth driver rather than a stumbling block at a time when the world's third-largest economy continues to struggle. "I've wanted to do something that will make an industrial change, now that we have IoT, big data, and AI," said Yosuke Okada, the 27-year-old chief executive officer of startup ABEJA Inc. "Japan has many researchers in the field of AI … but there seems to be little interest in solving the kinds of challenges we face in society by monetizing AI-based businesses," Okada said in a recent interview.

From Collecting Flies to Putting Pants on Rats, Here Is This Year's Ig Nobel-Winning Research Have Hackers Posted Michelle Obama's Passport Scan Online? Mel Brooks Might Have Just Tried to Pull Down President Obama's Pants Tesla Sues Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder to Sell Cars in the State

Edward Snowden has given a stark warning not to use Google's new Allo messaging app, which launched this week. The NSA whistleblower claims that the the'smart' messaging app which integrates Google's virtual assistant does not feature important privacy measures that the tech firm said it would have. Speaking in a series of tweets, the security expert said that the app should be completely avoided. Government whistleblower Edward Snowden (pictured) says that people should not use Google's Allo app if they care about their privacy Google has been criticised for not including the promised end-to-end encryption in the app when it first launched and reportedly storing messages indefinitely. Allo is'A Google app that records every message you ever send and makes it available to police upon request,' said Snowden.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Next time around, it will be one small step for a robot, one giant leap for software coders. For decades sci-fi movies have predicted that people will someday travel on enormous spaceships to distant stars. But in the age of robotic landers and explorers, the argument for sending people into space is becoming weaker. Not only is it highly risky, it's also astronomically expensive and galactically difficult to create the life support systems needed for interplanetary travel. It's much easier to send a robotic explorer that needs no oxygen or food, never goes to the bathroom and can hibernate for years while travelling to distant celestial bodies. And if that's not enough, NASA is actually working on a robotic astronaut.

Video-game developer James Romine of Yuma has filed a lawsuit seeking to sue 100 anonymous online commenters. After asking for help and being turned away by the FBI and the Yuma County Sheriff's Office, a video-game developer in Yuma has sued in federal court over what he calls relentless online harassment that has lasted more than 1 1/2 years. Brothers James and Robert Romine founded Digital Homicide Studios LCC in Arizona in 2014 and have since created more than 60 small PC games. Their largest distributor was Steam, a wildly popular online platform owned by Valve Corporation that lets users digitally buy and play video games. The Romines contend that criticism of their work, which started with a video from a popular YouTube personality, has escalated beyond appropriate critique into harassment.

As autonomous technology continues to evolve, the Pentagon finds itself being pulled in two directions, enticed by the capabilities that autonomous systems could provide while also insistent it always be subservient to humans, and a set of human morals and mindsets. That tension was on full display Aug. 25, when a new report from a key Pentagon advisory group called for an acceleration of autonomous systems within the US military at the same time the country's second highest ranking uniformed officer warned that there will need to be limits on how the technology is used in order to avoid the dreaded killer-robot scenario. Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Gen. Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, laid out his concerns with the "Terminator Conundrum," the idea that a fully autonomous system could be created with the capability to make decisions about when and where to inflict violence. While noting that technologists in the Pentagon believe that capability is still a decade away, Selva noted that 15 years ago he was told a digital rendering of the world would be impossible and never happen, before dryly telling the audience" "So I guess Google Earth is an impossibility." He also threw his support behind the idea of a treaty or global convention against the creation of wholly autonomous systems that can operate without a man in the loop controlling it, saying: "I do think we need to examine the bodies of law and convention that might constrain anyone in the world from building that kind of a system.

We consider sequential or active ranking of a set of n items based on noisy pairwise comparisons. Items are ranked according to the probability that a given item beats a randomly chosen item, and ranking refers to partitioning the items into sets of pre-specified sizes according to their scores. This notion of ranking includes as special cases the identification of the top-k items and the total ordering of the items. We first analyze a sequential ranking algorithm that counts the number of comparisons won, and uses these counts to decide whether to stop, or to compare another pair of items, chosen based on confidence intervals specified by the data collected up to that point. We prove that this algorithm succeeds in recovering the ranking using a number of comparisons that is optimal up to logarithmic factors. This guarantee does not require any structural properties of the underlying pairwise probability matrix, unlike a significant body of past work on pairwise ranking based on parametric models such as the Thurstone or Bradley-Terry-Luce models. It has been a long-standing open question as to whether or not imposing these parametric assumptions allows for improved ranking algorithms. For stochastic comparison models, in which the pairwise probabilities are bounded away from zero, our second contribution is to resolve this issue by proving a lower bound for parametric models. This shows, perhaps surprisingly, that these popular parametric modeling choices offer at most logarithmic gains for stochastic comparisons.

When we talk about artificial intelligence, many imagine a world of science fiction where robots dominate. In reality, artificial intelligence is already improving current technologies such as online shopping, surveillance systems, and many others. In the area of cybersecurity, artificial intelligence is being used via machine learning techniques. Indeed, the machine learning algorithms allow computers to learn and make predictions based on available known data. This technique is especially effective for daily process of millions of malware.

Self-driving cars are grabbing headlines lately, and the military is also making inroads with similar tech-- but these vehicles are mounted with weapons like machine guns. General Dynamics created MUTT, aka Multi-Utility Tactical Transport, to help dismounted small units. This is a smart robot designed to help lighten the load for Marines and other warfighters. MUTT looks like a futuristic spin on the sort of quad you might have fun driving around your farm. Rectangular shaped, it is 5 feet long and 4.5 feet wide and weighs 750 pounds.