In various decision making settings, from recommendation systems to hiring processes, often a sequence of decisions are made by a group. A naive approach to decision-making in such scenarios is to select the alternative with the highest supporters in each round. However, this method can lead to unrepresentative outcomes, where a majority dictates all decisions, potentially disincentivizing participation from minority groups. Consider the following example where a group of friends (voters) want to hang out together weekly. They have diverse choices for the activities (alternatives) they approve of every week (round), but only one activity can be chosen as the decision (i.e., the activity which the whole group ends up pursuing even if some don't like it).

Kurt "The Cyberguy" Knutsson explains how facial recognition technology can help you find your perfect match. Doing fun, exciting things with your partner is a great way to keep love alive. Especially once you've been dating for a long time, coming up with new date ideas can get a little more challenging, but it's important. "One of the things that I always say for keeping the love alive is doing new things, novel activities," said Jaime Bronstein, a relationship therapist from Illinois as well as a coach. She previously spoke to Fox News Digital in a phone interview.

Last month, a young woman went to work at Sarzamineh Shadi, or Land of Happiness, an indoor amusement park east of Iran's capital, Tehran. After a photo of her without a hijab circulated on social media, the amusement park was closed, according to multiple accounts in Iranian media. Prosecutors in Tehran have reportedly opened an investigation. Shuttering a business to force compliance with Iran's strict laws for women's dress is a familiar tactic to Shaparak Shajarizadeh. She stopped wearing a hijab in 2017 because she views it as a symbol of government suppression, and recalls restaurant owners, fearful of authorities, pressuring her to cover her head. But Shajarizadeh, who fled to Canada in 2018 after three arrests for flouting hijab law, worries that women like the amusement park worker may now be targeted with face recognition algorithms as well as by conventional police work.

Amusement parks, baseball clubs and other entertainment businesses in Japan are increasingly adopting dynamic ticket pricing in a bid to avoid creating crowds amid the COVID-19 pandemic while stabilizing revenue. Those businesses hope that dynamic pricing will help bring in more customers as tickets are cheap on days with low demand. The ticket sales market in Japan in the year ended in February 2021 shrank to a quarter of that of before the pandemic, according to Pia Research Institute, an arm of ticketing agency Pia Corp. Meanwhile, the total value of dynamically priced tickets sold in the country is expected to grow by 1.5-fold to around ¥6.2 billion in the year ending this month from the previous year, according to Dynamic Plus Co., a Mitsui & Co. unit that uses artificial intelligence to offer dynamic pricing services. Under a dynamic pricing plan, prices are changed depending on demand until the day of the event.

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has warned staff not to be complacent, claiming the firm'is not too big to fail' At an all-hands meeting last Thursday in Seattle, days before the firm announced the winners of its HQ2 contest, Bezos was asked about the recent failures of giant retailers like Sears. 'Amazon is not too big to fail,' Bezos said, in a recording of the meeting CNBC said it had heard. 'In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years.' Bezos told the meeting the key to survival is to'obsess over customers'.

Robots are no strangers to the Japanese, but the sight of a motion-sensing dinosaur greeting you at the reception of a hotel is likely to startle even the most ardent automaton aficionado. It might be one the weirdest check-in experiences possible, but that's exactly the point at the Henn na chain - whose name means'weird' - which bills itself as offering the world's first hotels with mechanical staff. The first Henn na Hotel opened in Nagasaki in 2015, and was certified the following year by Guinness World Records as the world's first hotel with robots on its staff. The travel agency group that operates the chain now runs eight hotels across the country, all with robots on the staff, some of them dinosaurs, but others taking a more humanoid shape. Robots are no strangers to the Japanese, but the sight of a motion-sensing dinosaur (pictured) greeting you at the reception of a hotel is likely to startle even the most ardent automaton aficionado.

One day, on my way past the outskirts of Kabukichō – Tokyo's red-light district, infamously depicted in the Yakuza games – I spot a curious advertisement. At first glance, it looks like nothing out of the ordinary: a woman cheerfully donning a VR headset, with kanji lettering welcoming passersby to come in and try the technology for themselves. As my eyes wander to the logo in the corner, I realise that the poster is promoting Soft On Demand – one of Japan's biggest porn, or "AV" (adult video), companies. A stone's throw away is Bandai Namco's massive VR Zone complex, an indoor, 38,000 sq ft all-VR theme park that opened just over a year ago. And further south, on the artificial island of Odaiba, Sega recently cleared out a massive room in its Joypolis amusement park to make space for Zero Latency VR, a "warehouse scale, free-roam, multiplayer virtual reality entertainment" where a team of zombie hunters are equipped with "military-grade" motion-tracking backpacks and let loose on the undead with an arsenal of plastic firearms.

In the original film "Westworld" (1973), written and directed by an up-and-coming novelist named Michael Crichton, the Delos corporation operates a kind of Disney World for depraved adults, a series of amusement parks where they can interact with uncannily lifelike robots in various environments. The parks include Medievalworld and Romanworld, but the bulk of the movie's action takes place in Westworld, where visitors are invited to shoot at android attractions like the Gunslinger (Yul Brenner) without fear of retaliation. All that changes when a technical glitch spreads through the parks like a virus, and suddenly the hosts are attacking the guests, not the other way around. Of the many differences between Crichton's "Westworld" and the HBO version, which started its second season last Sunday, the most telling is the hands. For all their technical brilliance, the engineers in Crichton's film could never get the hands right: If visitors needed to tell who is and isn't a robot, they could look at the conspicuous silicon rings around the joints and know they weren't about to shoot (or otherwise violate) a human being.

A SoftBank Group Corp. subsidiary and two other firms have developed a prototype of a two-seat humanoid robot that can transform into a car for use in amusement parks, the companies said Thursday. Invoking the heroes from the "Transformers" movies, the experimental J-deite Ride can go from humanoid mode to vehicle mode in about a minute. The 3.7-meter, 1.6-ton robot can lumber on two legs at an agonizingly slow pace of 100 meters per hour but go 60 kph in vehicle mode. The electric car can be driven both manually and by remote control, according to a press release from the companies. The robot was developed by SoftBank's software subsidiary Asratec Corp., Tokyo-based start-up Brave Robotics Inc. and Sansei Technologies Inc., an Osaka-based game machine maker.

It is the year 2050, sex bots have ruined human relationships, clothes are sprayed on your body and you spend your weekends at a lawless adult amusement park. Although the scenarios sound like the plot of a science fiction film, they are among many predictions futurologists have made about life just 33 years from now. The project, called Earth 2050, highlights predictions for cities around the globe and different artefacts people could encounter in the not-so-distant future. The interactive multimedia project was created by Kaspersky Lab, a global cybersecurity firm, in honor of its 20 years in the market. To create Earth 2050, the team collaborated with futurologists such as Ian Pearson, other researchers and spoke with artists and scientists in order to capture a realistic view of what is yet to come.