Even before he leveled up to Nintendo's top U.S. job, Reggie Fils-Aimé knew how to make strategic moves. While interviewing in 2003 to join Nintendo and head its U.S. sales and marketing efforts, Fils-Aimé asked to meet with Satoru Iwata, who had recently been made Nintendo president. Fils-Aimé got the meeting and the job, but years later learned it was "a massive breach of protocol." The request almost "precluded me from even getting the job offer," Fils-Aimé told USA TODAY, "But I knew enough about the company that for me to be successful, I needed to have a strong relationship with Mr. Iwata. This conversation (they had) was supposed to be about 30 minutes and ended up being much longer than that. And as they say, the rest is history."

Fujifilm India is eyeing double-digit growth every year from now, against the 9-10 per cent growth it has been clocking over the past few years, largely driven by an expansion of its medical products business. This would entail a shift in focus to offering medical solutions through Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled products. While the company has not invested in any manufacturing facility at the moment, it may consider setting up one here in the future for IoT- and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled medical products, considering the huge potential in India, Haruto Iwata, Managing Director, Fujifilm India, told BusinessLine. Some of the company's IoT application software is already being developed in India, he added. Going forward, Fujifilm India's primary focus will be on offering healthcare solutions through AI and IoT, he said.

A wearable "third arm" for construction workers is among the latest innovations under development in Panasonic Corp.'s burgeoning collaboration with academia to make robots an increasing part of people's lives in aging Japan. Panasonic already has know-how in using robots in manufacturing but has reached out to academia on robots that can safely assist with everyday human tasks, given the wide range of technologies involved, such as image analysis, voice recognition and artificial intelligence. "Robots previously had the purpose of facilitating automation in the manufacturing sector but are now expected to expand their role to enlarging human capabilities … amid the rapid aging of society and the labor shortage," Executive Officer Tatsuo Ogawa said at the opening of the Robotics Hub, a new site in Tokyo for the company's collaboration with academia. "We lack a lot of knowledge when it comes to robots used in interaction with humans," said Ogawa, who leads Panasonic's manufacturing innovation division. "We want to work with academia to speed up the development of robots that humans can cohabitate with and to lower the barrier for their implementation."

The iconic scene in "The Graduate" when, amid the hubbub of a cocktail party, Benjamin Braddock is given profound career advice summed up in the single emphatic word "Plastics!" was reflected in real life a few weeks ago on stage at the Business Marketing Association's (BMA's) Masters of B2B Marketing Conference. If a career in plastics was a virtual guarantee of success in the 1960s or 1970s, what is the equivalent for the age of artificial intelligence -- i.e., 2017 onward? The BMA moment was precipitated by an audience question put to Jon Iwata, IBM's senior vice president, marketing and communications, after his presentation about the imminent impact of AI on marketing, in general, and of Watson, in particular. The query: "Knowing what you now know about data and artificial intelligence, what would you do differently if you were starting your career today?" Iwata paused long enough to get some sympathy chuckles from the audience, since in that pause you could nearly see the smoke rising, as my grandpa used to say.

The video-game designer Shigeru Miyamoto once called the land of Hyrule "a miniature garden that you can put into a drawer and revisit anytime you like." Miyamoto conceived Hyrule, the setting for Nintendo's Legend of Zelda series, in 1986, and though its layout has changed often in the intervening decades, its ambiance of bucolic, occasionally threatening whimsy hasn't. Neither has the company's understanding of Zelda's essential purpose: to bring the great outdoors--the rollicking hills, the whispering caves, all that breezy, alfresco escapade--indoors. In recent years, Miyamoto, who is now sixty-four, has retreated to the position of Zelda's overseer, relinquishing control to younger directors inside the clandestine, Willy Wonka-esque factory that is Nintendo's Kyoto headquarters. But Hyrule remains indelibly his.

Nintendo Creative Fellow and game design luminary Shigeru Miyamoto is renowned for his work on foundational franchises like Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. But there are a few things you may not know about the 64-year-old gaming celeb, like what he thinks of artificial intelligence or what he's been doing in his spare time. TIME spoke with Miyamoto mid-January, just after the Nintendo Switch hands-on for press in New York City. TIME: A question that goes back to the beginning, about Nintendo designer Gunpei Yokoi's idea of "lateral thinking with seasoned technology." Shigeru Miyamoto: As a company, we take in all different kinds of new technologies as they become available.

A little over a year ago, TIME engaged Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima in a wide-ranging conversation about the company's fledgling mobile strategy, its struggles with the Wii U, the rise of its toys-to-life Amiibo figurines and a mystery-cloaked next-gen platform then known only as "NX." Three mobile apps and a sold-out "classic" version of its 1980s NES console later, with a $299 hybrid/TV games console dubbed Nintendo Switch due on March 3, TIME caught up with Nintendo's principal figure to talk Switch, mobile profitability, how he's liking the job so far and more. Here, following our recent chats with Nintendo EPD director Shinya Takahashi and Nintendo Switch general producer Yoshiaki Koizumi, is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation with Kimishima. Tatsumi Kimishima: Mr. Takahashi started out as a designer, and then as far as his career at Nintendo, he really worked with various development teams, where he worked as a coordinator for different environments. He was the guy they would bring in to pull all of these disparate things together. That was his main job while working with development teams. One thing that's a little bit different between [Donkey Kong and Mario creator] Mr. Miyamoto, say, and Mr. Takahashi, is that Mr. Miyamoto is of course known as the father of Mario, as well as for the characters and games he's helped develop. Mr. Takahashi, by contrast, is someone who really covers everything.

A funny thing happened during Nintendo's January presentation to show off the Switch, its upcoming games console. So intent were viewers on gleaning details about the company's mystery-shrouded new system--a portable game device that can dock with televisions--that they may have missed another kind of "switch" being presented. Amid the psychedelic lasers and quirky presentational humor, the storied company trotted out not one, not two, but six Nintendo executives and creative luminaries. None were familiar faces, though all bore impressive titles plucked from the company's inner sanctum. The company was effectively reversing years of precedent in which its front-facing communiques, dubbed "Nintendo Directs," had been shepherded by icons like late Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, Donkey Kong creator Shigeru Miyamoto and Nintendo of America boss Reggie Fils-Aimé. Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima led with the Switch's price ($299) and launch date (March 3), as if to clear the table for what followed. Next up was Nintendo Director Shinya Takahashi, who offered a historical montage of Nintendo platforms designed to cast Switch as the culmination of the company's decades of unorthodox bets.

From fuel cell vehicles to self-driving cars, new technologies for next-generation autos are gaining traction. In a move likely to accelerate this, the United Nations World Forum for Harmonization of Vehicle Regulations, which consists of major car-producing nations and sets international safety and environmental standards on vehicles, said in November it will allow carmakers worldwide to replace side and rear mirrors with camera monitor systems. Following the U.N. panel's decision, the transport ministry will from June allow mirrorless cars on to the nation's roads. A mirrorless car does not have rear-view and side-view mirrors. Instead, the car is equipped with a sophisticated camera monitor system that shows drivers surrounding views on small screens positioned in front of them.

We propose an indexing scheme for top-k shortest-path distance queries on graphs, which is useful in a wide range of important applications such as network-aware search and link prediction. While considerable effort has been made for efficiently answering standard (top-1) distance queries, none of previous methods can be directly extended for top-k distance queries. We propose a new framework for top-k distance queries based on 2-hop cover and then present an efficient indexing algorithm based on the simple but effective recent notion of pruned landmark labeling. Extensive experimental results on real social and web graphs show the scalability, efficiency and robustness of our method. Moreover, we demonstrate the usefulness of top-k distance queries through an application to link prediction.