Apple CEO Tim Cook hinted that Japan has a big part to play in the company's ongoing development of AI, as he continued his travels around the country via bullet train on Monday. Speaking to Nikkei Asian Review, Cook revealed that Apple's new advanced R&D center in Yokohama, currently scheduled for completion in December, would focus on "deep engineering" and would be "very different" from the R&D base Apple is building in China, without giving away specifics. Photo via Tim Cook However, Cook intimated that one of its main focuses would be on developing Apple's artificial intelligence services – which recently drew some criticism in the press – and emphasized that the company wanted to leverage specifically Japanese expertise in the field. "AI is horizontal in nature, running across all products, and is used in ways that most people don't even think about," said Cook. "We want the AI to increase your battery life, to recommend music to Apple Music subscribers... [to] help you remember where you parked your car."Japan's robotics heritage is legendary, coming on the back of years of successfully building industrial robots, however the state of its AI research remains ambiguous, given its relative lack of investment in deep learning from large amounts of analyzed data, which U.S. companies like Facebook and Google are already heavily researching. To improve on this front, Japan has just opened a Center for Advanced Integrated Intelligence Research in Tokyo (RIKEN), which specifically aims to develop systems of AI that will be able to solve problems using "Big Data".

The University of Cambridge has opened a 10 million research centre to explore the impact of artificial intelligence, Wired reports. The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence -- first announced last December and funded with a research grant from the Leverhulme Trust -- will study the impacts of this "potentially epoch-making technological development, both short and long term." The centre's new website details a list of projects that its researchers will look at. The centre also writes on its website that its aim is to build a new interdisciplinary community of researchers, with strong links to technologists and the policy world. Led by Cambridge philosophy professor Huw Price, the centre, which opened on Monday, will work in conjunction with the university's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), which is funded by Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn and looks at emerging risks to humanity's future including climate change, disease, warfare, and artificial intelligence.

As any veteran of online dating knows, photos can make or break your chances on Tinder. Tinder has pointed out that not smiling, covering a part or all of your face, being in a group photo, and wearing hats or glasses are deal-breakers. With the popular dating app's latest feature, it's analyzing the effectiveness of individual users' photos and adjusting what's shown in their profiles based on which of their photos get more people to swipe right. A new feature called Smart Photos launched Thursday (Oct. Tinder is using machine learning to identify which photos work and which don't.

The legal AI market has another new cognitive engine: UK-based Cognitiv, which is a system designed to review documents and contracts, while also cross-referencing them with the latest regulation in order to provide a compliance tool. Based in King Cross, London, Cogntiv is the brainchild of CEO Vasilis Tsolis and CTO Achilleas Michos. Artificial Lawyer had a chat with Tsolis about how the company came about, where it's headed and how he sees the legal AI market evolving. Vasilis Tsolis is an engineer, but also has a law degree. He says he found himself having to deal with a lot of procurement and contract review issues in his previous jobs.

That's how XTX Markets Ltd. is using superior smarts to beat the faster speeds of many computerized traders to become a force in market making. Already, London-based XTX Markets Ltd. earlier this year was declared the world's fourth-largest spot currency trader with 7.6% of the spot FX market, according to a detailed story in Bloomberg. Now that it's become a major player in currencies, it's now eyeing expanding into the bond, commodities and stock markets. The firm describes itself as "a leading quantitative-driven electronic market-maker," for the purpose of providing "liquidity in the Equity, FX, Fixed Income and Commodity markets." As an electronic market maker, XTX has taken human decision-making out of trading, according to the company's Co-Chief Executive Officer Zar Amrolia.

President Barack Obama's administration believes that artificial intelligence can be a positive force in the United States, vastly improving specialized areas within health care, transportation, education and policing over the coming decades. In two reports released today, one day ahead of the White House Frontiers Conference, the Obama administration calls for long-term investments in AI research and a broad range of investigation into the ethics, security and uses of AI. The report also emphasizes the current limits of AI, noting that narrow AI systems have rapidly advanced over the past few years, but general-intelligence systems -- machines that learn and respond as humans do -- are decades away.

Apple will celebrate the iPhone's 10th anniversary next year, but in chief executive Tim Cook's view, the technology is anything but mature. The Nikkei Asian Review caught up with Cook aboard a bullet train last week and asked him about artificial intelligence, his plans for Asia, and the experience of succeeding Steve Jobs. Cook, who was visiting Japan for the first time as CEO, said Apple will open a research and development base in Yokohama, near Tokyo, later this year. The facility -- the first of its kind outside the U.S. -- will develop AI and other technologies. Cook described it as a center for "deep engineering" and said it will be "very different" from the R&D base Apple plans to build in China. "I cannot tell you the specifics," he said.

You can star alongside Leo when cinema enters its'karaoke' phase The blockbuster era will come to a close in about 2042 with the colossal failure of Jedi Transformers V Jurassic Avengers 12: Revenge Of The Minions, an expensive crossover epic that bankrupts all the Hollywood studios simultaneously. By that time, the idea of "going to the movies" will have evolved anyway. Films will no longer involve two hours sitting in a cinema, predicted futurologist Faith Popcorn in The Hollywood Reporter: "They'll be gameified and will unfold in real time all around you. You pay for a time slot, tune in your technology, and literally become one with the action. Endings and events will be changed as you go; smells, tastes, sensations will all be experienced live. Casts will be comprised of your own avatars; you will be the star."

In the movie Transcendence, Johnny Depp plays Dr Will Caster, a researcher in artificial intelligence at Berkeley trying to build a sentient computer. Stuart Russell is Will Caster's real life equivalent. He works on artificial intelligence at the University of California at Berkeley, and is co-author of the definitive textbook on AI. He has also been very vocal about the risks of research in AI succeeding. Earlier this year, Google's DeepMind taught a computer program to play a wide variety of Atari video games at a superhuman level in a matter of hours.

An automatic system is being developed to disseminate information to the various sections of any industrial, scientific or government organization. This intelligence system will utilize data-processing machines for auto-abstracting and auto-encoding of documents and for creating interest profiles for each of the "action points" in an organization. Both incoming and internally generated documents are automatically abstracted, characterized by a word pattern, and sent automatically to appropriate action points. This paper shows the flexibility of such a system in identifying known information, in finding who needs to know it and in disseminating it efficiently either in abstract form or as a complete document. The premise of BI systems has remained pretty much the same: to collect an organization's data from disparate sources and process it in the best possible way to produce useful information to -- and perhaps this is the most important part -- help decision makers to make the best informed decision for the benefit of an organization.