Activist fund Palliser Capital has taken a stake in Japanese washlet maker Toto, and is urging the company to boost promotion of its little-known chip parts business. Activist fund Palliser Capital has taken a stake in Japanese washlet maker Toto and is pushing the firm to ramp up promotion of its little-known chip parts business in a bid to unlock value from the artificial intelligence boom. The U.K.-based fund sent a letter to Toto's board last week calling for more disclosure about its advanced ceramics segment. The segment produces electrostatic chucks used in the manufacturing of NAND memory chips, and Palliser views the toilet maker as "the most undervalued and overlooked AI memory beneficiary," the documents show. A representative for Toto declined to comment. Insatiable demand for AI infrastructure has sent memory prices skyrocketing in recent months, boosting shares of chipmakers such as Kioxia Holdings to record highs.

Preserving linguistic diversity is necessary as every language offers a distinct perspective on the world. There have been numerous global initiatives to preserve endangered languages through documentation. This paper is a part of a project which aims to develop a trilingual (Toto-Bangla-English) language learning application to digitally archive and promote the endangered Toto language of West Bengal, India. This application, designed for both native Toto speakers and non-native learners, aims to revitalize the language by ensuring accessibility and usability through Unicode script integration and a structured language corpus. The research includes detailed linguistic documentation collected via fieldwork, followed by the creation of a morpheme-tagged, trilingual corpus used to train a Small Language Model (SLM) and a Transformer-based translation engine. The analysis covers inflectional morphology such as person-number-gender agreement, tense-aspect-mood distinctions, and case marking, alongside derivational strategies that reflect word-class changes. Script standardization and digital literacy tools were also developed to enhance script usage. The study offers a sustainable model for preserving endangered languages by incorporating traditional linguistic methodology with AI. This bridge between linguistic research with technological innovation highlights the value of interdisciplinary collaboration for community-based language revitalization.

This technical report describes the Time Series Optimized Transformer for Observability (Toto), a new state of the art foundation model for time series forecasting developed by Datadog. In addition to advancing the state of the art on generalized time series benchmarks in domains such as electricity and weather, this model is the first general-purpose time series forecasting foundation model to be specifically tuned for observability metrics. Toto was trained on a dataset of one trillion time series data points, the largest among all currently published time series foundation models. Alongside publicly available time series datasets, 75% of the data used to train Toto consists of fully anonymous numerical metric data points from the Datadog platform. In our experiments, Toto outperforms existing time series foundation models on observability data. It does this while also excelling at general-purpose forecasting tasks, achieving state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on multiple open benchmark datasets.

Three challenges limit the progress of robot learning research: robots are expensive (few labs can participate), everyone uses different robots (findings do not generalize across labs), and we lack internet-scale robotics data. We take on these challenges via a new benchmark: Train Offline, Test Online (TOTO). TOTO provides remote users with access to shared robotic hardware for evaluating methods on common tasks and an open-source dataset of these tasks for offline training. Its manipulation task suite requires challenging generalization to unseen objects, positions, and lighting. We present initial results on TOTO comparing five pretrained visual representations and four offline policy learning baselines, remotely contributed by five institutions. The real promise of TOTO, however, lies in the future: we release the benchmark for additional submissions from any user, enabling easy, direct comparison to several methods without the need to obtain hardware or collect data.

If you think they've thought of everything, what about a toilet that costs $8,000? It could come to a loo near you by the end of 2019. What could possibly make a bit of porcelain worth that much money? It might just become priceless if its smart technology can identify a health problem before its too late. Here is how artificial intelligence is being used for toilets.

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.

Nintendo Co. is bringing together the magnetic appeal of Pokemon, smartphones and the Switch console to create an interlinked gaming experience. "Pokemon: Let's Go Pikachu" and "Pokemon: Let's Go Eevee" were unveiled by the Kyoto-based video-game maker on Wednesday. They're designed to capitalize on the blockbuster success of the smartphone game "Pokemon Go" and a solid year of sales for the Switch tablet-hybrid gaming machine. The two new games go on sale Nov. 16 at ¥5,980 ($55) apiece. Along with a new Switch controller in the shape of a Poke Ball, the variety of gaming scenarios involving the various gadgets and games might risk befuddling many adults, but will make perfect sense to kids and Pokemon-generation gamers.

Nintendo expects to sell 10 million units of the new Switch game console over the next year, the company said Thursday, as it bets big on the successor to its poor-selling Wii U. The forecast came as Nintendo reported its net profit in the just ended business year soared more than sixfold, though operating profit and revenue fell from a year ago. That gain in the bottom line is largely owed to the sale of a major stake in the Seattle Mariners baseball team, worth $661 million. The creator of the iconic Super Mario character launched the Switch in March and said it sold 2.74 million of the consoles in that month alone. Serkan Toto, industry analyst with Kantan Games, said what is now certain is that the Switch is the company's "bread-and-butter product for the video game business." Nintendo's fiscal year to March net profit came in at ¥102.6 billion ($921 million), compared with ¥16.5 billion a year ago.

Blizzard is legendary for keeping old games alive, but it's going the extra mile this time around. The studio has unveiled StarCraft: Remastered, an overhaul that drags the 1998 real-time strategy game into the modern era. It's getting the obligatory fresh coat of paint, including higher-resolution graphics and improved audio. The team is also using this as an excuse to'fix' the game by adding content and features you take for granted. Multiplayer fans will see features that have been a staple of newer Blizzard titles, including "advanced" matchmaking, ladder play and social features.

Every year, throngs of industry insiders swarm Las Vegas to explore the future of consumer electronics at the annual CES show. After almost a decade of attending the largest electronics trade show, I've developed a pretty good track record of being able to tell the hype from the real growing buzz. So this year, there's real change on the horizon -- a change that's bound to find its way into your living room, driveway and even pocket in the year ahead. Automotive: CES is now so auto-centric that insiders now call it the "Car Electronics Show." And one thing is certain: in 2017 Self-driving cars will be everywhere.