A consortium of companies is offering foreign visitors in Tokyo a taste of autonomous driving, in the world's first demonstration of a project that uses both an airport shuttle bus and a self-driving taxi to provide smooth travel from the airport to the Marunouchi shopping district near Tokyo Station. The Mobility as a Service experiment, which allows reservations by smartphone, is to be operated from Jan. 20 to Feb. 1. Foreign nationals are able to reserve a shuttle bus from Haneda or Narita airport to Tokyo City Air Terminal, and then ride an autonomous taxi from there on the around 3 kilometers leg to Marunouchi. They will also be able to ride in a fully autonomous single-seat vehicle for free on select days, and use a tablet to choose their destination within the Marunouchi area. The autonomous taxi will have a backup driver for safety reasons. Reservations for foreign nationals via smartphone app began on Dec. 2 and will run until Jan. 9.

A consortium of companies is offering foreign visitors in Tokyo a taste of autonomous driving in the world's first demonstration of a project utilizing both an airport shuttle bus and a self-driving taxi to smoothly travel from the airport to the Marunouchi shopping district near Tokyo Station. The Mobility as a Service experiment that will allow smartphone users to make a reservation is to be held from Jan. 20 to Feb. 1. Foreign nationals can reserve a shuttle bus from Haneda or Narita airport to Tokyo City Air Terminal and from there ride an autonomous taxi for about 3 kilometers to Marunouchi. They can also ride in a fully autonomous single-seat vehicle for free on select days and use a tablet to move to their destination of choice within the Marunouchi area. The autonomous taxi will have a backup driver for safety reasons. Reservations via smartphone app started on Dec. 2 and will run until Jan. 9.

NEC Corp. gave a demonstration of its facial recognition system at its headquarters in Tokyo on Friday that it says will help passengers board planes faster without having to present passports or boarding passes. Narita will be the first airport in the country to deploy the system, called OneID, ahead of an expected spike in foreign arrivals for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games. In the media presentation, NEC showed how the system streamlined the boarding procedure. First, at the self check-in machine, passenger consent was obtained, then their passport was scanned and a barcode on their smartphone screen provided the flight details. A camera was used to capture their facial image during the process.

Microsoft this week announced its facial-recognition system is now more accurate in identifying people of color, touting its progress at tackling one of the technology's biggest biases. But critics, citing Microsoft's work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, quickly seized on how that improved technology might be used. The agency contracts with Microsoft for a set of cloud-computing tools that the tech giant says is largely limited to office work, but which can also include face recognition. Columbia University professor Alondra Nelson tweeted, "We must stop confusing'inclusion' in more'diverse' surveillance systems with justice and equality." Today's facial-recognition systems more often misidentify people of color because of a long-running data problem: The massive sets of facial images they train on skew heavily toward white men.

Immigration officials have abandoned their pursuit of a controversial machine-learning technology that was a pillar of the Trump administration's ''extreme vetting'' of foreign visitors, dealing a reality check to the goal of using artificial intelligence to predict human behavior. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told tech-industry contractors last summer that they wanted a system for their ''extreme vetting initiative'' that could automatically mine Facebook, Twitter, and the broader Internet to determine whether a visitor might commit criminal or terrorist acts or was a ''positively contributing member of society.'' But ICE quietly dropped the machine-learning requirement from its request in recent months, opting instead to hire a contractor that can provide training, management, and human personnel who can do the job. Federal documents say the contract is expected to cost more than $100 million and be awarded by the end of the year. After gathering ''information from industry professionals and other government agencies on current technological capabilities,'' ICE spokeswoman Carissa Cutrell said, the focus of what the agency now calls its Visa Lifecycle Vetting program ''shifted from a technology-based contract to a labor contract.''

Federal immigration officials have abandoned their pursuit of a controversial machine-learning technology that was a pillar of the Trump administration's "extreme vetting" of foreign visitors, dealing a reality check to the goal of using artificial intelligence to predict human behavior. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told tech-industry contractors last summer they wanted a system for their "Extreme Vetting Initiative" that could automatically mine Facebook, Twitter and the broader Internet to determine whether a visitor might commit criminal or terrorist acts or was a "positively contributing member of society." But ICE dropped the machine-learning requirement from its request in recent months, opting instead to hire a contractor that can provide training, management and human personnel who can do the job. Federal documents say the contract is expected to cost more than $100 million and be awarded by the end of the year. After gathering "information from industry professionals and other government agencies on current technological capabilities," ICE spokeswoman Carissa Cutrell said, the focus of what the agency now calls its Visa Lifecycle Vetting program "shifted from a technology-based contract to a labor contract."

Federal immigration officials have abandoned their pursuit of a controversial machine-learning technology that was a pillar of the Trump administration's "extreme vetting" of foreign visitors, dealing a reality check to the goal of using artificial intelligence to predict human behavior. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told tech-industry contractors last summer they wanted a system for their "Extreme Vetting Initiative" that could automatically mine Facebook, Twitter and the broader Internet to determine whether a visitor might commit criminal or terrorist acts or was a "positively contributing member of society." But ICE dropped the machine-learning requirement from its request in recent months, opting instead to hire a contractor that can provide training, management and human personnel who can do the job. Federal documents say the contract is expected to cost more than $100 million and be awarded by the end of the year. After gathering "information from industry professionals and other government agencies on current technological capabilities," ICE spokeswoman Carissa Cutrell said, the focus of what the agency now calls its Visa Lifecycle Vetting program "shifted from a technology-based contract to a labor contract."

Hitachi Ltd. started trials of its EMIEW3 humanoid robot at Tokyo's Haneda airport on Friday to aid foreign visitors to Japan. During the trials through December in the airport's domestic Terminal 2, the robot will communicate with passengers in Japanese and English at a designated information center as well as display information. The industrial conglomerate is hoping to enable the 90-centimeter-tall humanoid robot with autonomous capabilities to guide users to destinations starting around December. At a demonstration on Friday morning, a female foreign passenger asked EMIEW3 for directions to a foreign exchange counter. The humanoid robot at the information center called another EMIEW3 robot to take her to the location.