Japan is facing a dementia crisis - can technology help? Last year, more than 18,000 older people living with dementia left their homes and wandered off in Japan. Almost 500 were later found dead. Police say such cases have doubled since 2012. Elderly people aged 65 and over now make up nearly 30% of Japan's population - the second-highest proportion in the world after Monaco, according to the World Bank.

A research team from the University of Tokyo and Waseda University announced Thursday that it has developed the largest-ever "biohybrid" hand that includes parts made of cultivated human tissue. Led by Xinzhu Ren and Shoji Takeuchi from the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, and Yuya Morimoto, an associate professor at Waseda University's Faculty of Science and Engineering, the team engineered a multijointed robotic hand with movement powered by living muscle tissue, measuring 18 centimeters long, with a palm size of 6 centimeters -- around the same size as a newborn's -- and five fingers capable of independent motion. The team's findings were published in the online edition of Science Robotics.

Predicting the future is hard and risky. But predicting the future in the computer industry is even harder and riskier due to dramatic changes in technology and limitless challenges to innovation. At the beginning of my term as 2014 president of IEEE Computer Society, with help from more than a dozen technology leaders, we set out to survey 23 potential technologies that could change the landscape of computer science and industry by the year 2022. With the IEEE CS 2022 Report, we created a comprehensive document that outlines future disruptive technologies, helps scientists and researchers understand the impact of technologies in the future, and provides the general public with an idea of how technology is evolving, along with its implications for society. At the foundation of the report is our understanding that by 2022, we will be well into a phase where intelligence becomes seamless and ubiquitous to those who can afford and use state-of-the-art information technology.

Predicting the future is hard and risky. But predicting the future in the computer industry is even harder and riskier due to dramatic changes in technology and limitless challenges to innovation. At the beginning of my term as 2014 president of IEEE Computer Society, with help from more than a dozen technology leaders, we set out to survey 23 potential technologies that could change the landscape of computer science and industry by the year 2022. With the IEEE CS 2022 Report, we created a comprehensive document that outlines future disruptive technologies, helps scientists and researchers understand the impact of technologies in the future, and provides the general public with an idea of how technology is evolving, along with its implications for society. At the foundation of the report is our understanding that by 2022, we will be well into a phase where intelligence becomes seamless and ubiquitous to those who can afford and use state-of-the-art information technology.

A high school teacher in a black coat enters the classroom. "Good morning," he says to the students before starting his lecture, with his right hand busily scribbling something on a blackboard and his left holding a physics textbook. Then, while holding the chalk and the textbook, he points at a female student and asks a question. "OK, that's correct," he says, giving her the OK sign with his third hand. The 28-second YouTube video titled "Three-handed Sensei" (jtim.es/OFd530aIiZV),

It's half the size of the Statue of Liberty, has flashing eyes and steam rising from its body as it towers over puny humans by Tokyo Bay. This 18-meter statue has attracted millions of fans since it was built in 2009 to honor the famous machine from anime, which looks like a futuristic suit of samurai armor. But a consortium of Gundam devotees and companies says it isn't satisfied with a mere statue. It wants to build another six-story Gundam--a robot version that can actually move. The backers haven't decided whether locomotion for the giant would be possible, though it seems unlikely.

It's been over five years since disaster struck at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, but fear of the event's long-term effects is still present, as is the memory of the faulty response on the part of government and corporate entities. Future nuclear incidents might be prevented by avoiding dangerous energy sources altogether; however, it is impossible to prevent other nonnuclear disasters from striking vulnerable populations. The WAREC-1 robot is designed to navigate a disaster area through unique movements. This is particularly true given the increase in extreme weather events related to climate change, and it is particularly true for Japan, one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world. In an effort to respond to such disasters as the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown, one team of researchers at Waseda University in Tokyo has developed a one-of-a-kind robot capable of traversing hazardous terrain to perform emergency safety procedures and rescue operations.

And the process it uses to color them isn't what you might expect. We've seen before how artificial intelligence is already on its way to beating humans at playing Go and giving dating advice, but now it seems like there's another area that machines will soon take us over in: colorizing old photographs. Waseda University recently showed off some old Japanese photos that have been fully-colorized by AI that learned the colorization process through analyzing large data sets full of categorized photos. That's the really cool part: the AI is coloring photos based on previous photos that are similar to it. The AI will color it similarly to other birthday photos.

A team out of Waseda University in Japan has unveiled some pretty cool images from the first half of the 20th century, given new depth with full colorization thanks to an artificial intelligence. Unlike colorizing black and white photos using software, which can be a lengthy process of repeated cleaning and coloring – this AI samples similar photos and applies those colors and tones to the photo at hand. So, for example, if you have an old black and white photo of your grandparent's house – and that house is still standing today – you can take a photo of it and the AI will learn how to color the old photo based on the tones and levels from the modern day one. Similarly, if you have an old photo of an area or people that don't exist, the program can still learn and adapt those colors from similarly colored images. The more photos and images it has to pull from, the greater detail and true to color matching it will be able to provide.

Intelligent-agent technology is one of the most exciting, active areas of research and development in computer science and information technology today. The First Asia-Pacific Conference on Intelligent- Agent Technology (IAT'99) attracted researchers and practitioners from diverse fields such as computer science, information systems, business, telecommunications, manufacturing, human factors, psychology, education, and robotics to examine the design principles and performance characteristics of various approaches in agent technologies and, hence, fostered the cross-fertilization of ideas on the development of autonomous agents and multiagent systems among different domains.