Kyoto University center launches memorial website for'genius' chimpanzee Ai, a chimpanzee known as a genius for her cognitive abilities, died on Jan. 9 at Kyoto University's Center for the Evolutionary Origins of Human Behavior. Ai was a research partner who taught me many things about the minds and existence of chimpanzees, as well as about humans, said Ikuma Adachi, 47, associate professor at the university, who worked with the chimpanzee for 18 years. Born in Africa, Ai arrived at the center in Inuyama, Aichi Prefecture, in 1977 at the age of 1. Adachi said she was curious and adapted well to a human-made environment. The Ai Project started in 1978 to investigate chimpanzees' thinking and language abilities. In 1985, a paper on Ai was published in the British scientific journal Nature. In 1989, she left the center using a key found nearby, drawing public attention.

Parallelisation in Bayesian optimisation is a common strategy but faces several challenges: the need for flexibility in acquisition functions and kernel choices, flexibility dealing with discrete and continuous variables simultaneously, model misspecification, and lastly fast massive parallelisation. To address these challenges, we introduce a versatile and modular framework for batch Bayesian optimisation via probabilistic lifting with kernel quadrature, called SOBER, which we present as a Python library based on GPyTorch/BoTorch. Our framework offers the following unique benefits: (1) Versatility in downstream tasks under a unified approach.

Mitsubishi Electric Corp., a supplier of air-to-air missiles to Japan's armed forces, is looking to adapt the technologies it originally developed for military use to help autonomous driving cars detect obstacles and avoid collisions. Components such as millimeter-wave radar, sonar, sensors and cameras -- some of which were developed to guide missiles -- are being adapted for use in self-driving vehicles that will hit the roads by 2020, Katsumi Adachi, senior chief engineer at Mitsubishi's automotive equipment division, said in an interview. It has received orders for automatic braking systems and instruments that help a vehicle keep to its lane, he said. The Japanese supplier is seeking to catch up with Continental AG, Denso Corp. and Hitachi Automotive Systems Ltd. in providing assistance technologies that are becoming increasingly standard offerings in new vehicle models. While its competitors have a head start, Adachi says Mitsubishi will be able to offer superior systems next year that will benefit from its expertise in high-precision sensors and electric-power steering systems.