Learning-based photometric stereo methods predict the surface normal either in a per-pixel or an all-pixel manner.

Panasonic Holdings has created an artificial intelligence clone of its late founder Konosuke Matsushita based on his writings, speeches, and over 3,000 voice recordings, the company announced Wednesday. Known as Japan's "god of management," the Panasonic icon is one of the most respected by the Japanese business community, and comes back to life in digital form to impart wisdom directly to those he never met in person. "As the number of people who received training directly from Matsushita has been on the decline, we decided to use generative AI technology to pass down our group's founding vision to the next generation," the company said in a statement. Co-developed with the University of Tokyo-affiliated Matsuo Institute, the model can reproduce how a person thinks or talks. The company aims to further develop the digital clone to help make business decisions in the future.

Essence, a global data and measurement-driven agency which is part of GroupM, today [29 April 2020] released a unique report on the future of advertising based on the predictions of experts across academia, business, marketing, technology, publishing, and advertising trade organisations around the world. The study evaluates the likelihood of 15 different scenarios occurring over the next decade and assesses the implications of each for the future of advertising. Each scenario tested explores the influence of a key dynamic or catalyst, from the use of biometric data to personalisation, privacy, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, regulation, payment models, and more. "As an industry we have lots of insight into how technology is likely to evolve over time," said Kyoko Matsushita (pictured below), Global CEO at Essence. "We conducted this study to provide more clarity about what that evolution will mean for advertising and marketing, to identify issues in need of the most urgent attention, and to help companies prioritise their innovation and marketing transformation investment decisions."

OSAKA – With a track record of overcoming past crises by adapting to changing business environments, major electronics maker Panasonic Corp. marked its 100th anniversary last Wednesday. The company was launched by the late Konosuke Matsushita, a legendary corporate manager, together with his wife and his brother-in-law, Toshio Iue, who later founded Sanyo Electric Co., now a Panasonic unit. Panasonic, which in 2008 changed its name from Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., has grown to be a giant corporate group with over 270,000 employees. "We've continued business while adapting to different times," said Akio Tanii, Panasonic's fourth president, who took the helm for seven years from 1986. The company's story began on March 7, 1918, when Konosuke Matsushita established Matsushita Electric Housewares Manufacturing Works at his home in Osaka.

Photometric stereo is a method for estimating the normal vectors of an object from images of the object under varying lighting conditions. Motivated by several recent works that extend photometric stereo to more general objects and lighting conditions, we study a new robust approach to photometric stereo that utilizes dictionary learning. Specifically, we propose and analyze two approaches to adaptive dictionary regularization for the photometric stereo problem. First, we propose an image preprocessing step that utilizes an adaptive dictionary learning model to remove noise and other non-idealities from the image dataset before estimating the normal vectors. We also propose an alternative model where we directly apply the adaptive dictionary regularization to the normal vectors themselves during estimation. We study the practical performance of both methods through extensive simulations, which demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of both methods in the presence of noise.

It was a dark, overcast day, with clouds hovering low. The room was kept at the most appropriate temperatures and humidity, as usual. Yoko sat on a couch in an untidy manner, killing time with a silly game. But she would not talk to me. So begins a short story titled "A day when a computer writes fiction."

Tsukuba Expo '85 is huge, interesting, and fun. The Japanese pavilions are plush and well -organized and contain some impressive artificial intelligence demonstrations. The U.S. pavilion is an embarrassment.