Toshiba Corporation has developed the world's most accurate highly versatile Visual Question Answering (VQA) AI, able to recognize not only people and objects, but also colors, shapes, appearances and background details in images. The AI overcomes the long-standing difficulty of answering questions on the positioning and appearance of people and objects, and has the ability to learn information required to handle a wide range of questions and answers. It can be applied to a wide range of purposes without any need for customization. In experiments using a public dataset comprising a large volume of images and data text, the VQA AI correctly answered 66.25% of questions without any pre-learning and 74.57% with pre-learning. For example, the AI can find a worker standing in a designated place by asking questions like, "is the person on a black mat?" which requires recognition of the individual, position, shape and color.

As a disruptive technology, artificial intelligence has the potential to impact every sector and education is no exception. While innovation in AI is still climbing the hype curve, we're already seeing its use cases begin to proliferate. Education Secretary Damian Hinds' call for innovative technologies such as AI to be implemented to relieve pressure on teachers is the latest recognition of the potential benefits which can be gained. By deploying AI and automation solutions to non-teaching tasks such as marking, admin and planning, time will be freed up for the UK's educators to focus on the'human' side of teaching. The increase in hands-on time in the classroom will not only benefit those in education, but also raise teachers' job satisfaction by allowing them to focus on the more fulfilling aspects of the job.

OITA – With forestry workers growing older, Oita Prefecture has embarked on a "smart forestry" initiative to reduce workloads, partly through the use of drones. Forests cover 72 percent of the prefecture, with most of them cultivated plantations. Despite the use of mechanization for cutting down trees, planting still involves hard physical work, including climbing mountain slopes while carrying nursery trees weighing up to 30 kg. Forestry association workers are currently the local industry's main workforce, but 44 percent of them are 60 or older. Young people are reluctant to join their ranks, due partly to the physical labor.