AI

Commentary / Japan Nov 13, 2019

Cheap power the key to AI-based business

by Takamitsu Sawa

It is imperative that Japan reform its power industry to make electricity more affordable for industries relying on AI.

Asia Pacific / Science & Health Nov 8, 2019

In search of the next chord: Scientists reveal a secret to great songwriting

What makes some music so enjoyable, and can science help us engineer the perfect pop song? A group of researchers who statistically analyzed tens of thousands of chord progressions in classic U.S. Billboard hits say they have found the answer, and it lies in the ...

Business / Corporate Nov 7, 2019

Toshiba to tie up with University of Tokyo in global race to secure more AI engineers

Toshiba Corp. said Thursday it will team up with the University of Tokyo to nurture specialists in artificial intelligence as part of efforts to secure talent in the hot next-generation technology. The electronics giant aims to nearly triple its AI engineers to 2,000 by March ...

Business / Tech Oct 30, 2019

Keeping privacy in mind, Apple resumes human reviews of Siri audio with iPhone update

Apple is resuming the use of humans to review Siri commands and dictation with the latest iPhone software update. In August, Apple suspended the practice and apologized for the way it used people, rather than just machines, to review the audio. While common in the tech ...

Asia Pacific / Politics Oct 29, 2019

AI startup SenseTime among the many Chinese firms scrambling to survive Trump's blacklist

The co-founder of China's SenseTime Group Ltd. was visiting New York to encourage more collaboration with the U.S. on artificial intelligence when he heard the news: The Trump administration had blacklisted his company. So much for more cooperation. Xu Bing, the 29-year-old co-founder, knew SenseTime ...

Asia Pacific Oct 23, 2019

Hong Kong police have AI facial recognition tech — are they using it against protesters?

by Blake Schmidt

Hong Kong law enforcement authorities have access to artificial intelligence software that can match faces from video footage to police databases, but people familiar with the matter say it is unclear if the technology is being used to quell the pro-democracy protests. Police have been ...

Business / Tech Oct 16, 2019

Translation by the numbers: Facebook AI puts words into multidimensional spaces

Designers of machine translation tools still mostly rely on dictionaries to make a foreign language understandable. But now there is a new way: numbers. Facebook researchers say rendering words into figures and exploiting mathematical similarities between languages is a promising avenue — even if a ...

Business Oct 10, 2019

Hopes dim as U.S. and China resume high-stakes trade talks

President Donald Trump and China's Xi Jinping have plenty of reasons to call off their trade war. Both face weakening economies that would likely further deteriorate if their conflict escalates. Both are up against a formidable adversary that shows no inclination to yield. Both are tangled in ...

Business Oct 8, 2019

U.S. blacklisting threatens to derail $1 billion Chinese tech IPO

by Lulu Yilun Chen and Gao Yuan

U.S. President Donald Trump's latest salvo against China threatens to derail a $1 billion coming-out party for a prominent startup backed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., while curtailing the country's broader ambitions of leading artificial intelligence in the coming decade. The U.S. placed eight Chinese ...

Business Oct 1, 2019

Japan firms fight the frugal retail psyche with AI-driven pricing and other tricks

by Kaori Kaneko

After years of soggy inflation and a long reign by Japan's tightfisted shoppers, businesses are adopting new methods to lift prices, from artificial intelligence to simple packaging tweaks. Despite many rounds of stimulus, policymakers have failed to jolt households out of the deflationary mindset that ...

Business / Tech Sep 26, 2019

Toward 'Blade Runner': Future robots will look and think like us, Japanese android maker predicts

by Alastair Himmer

Set in 2019, cult '80s movie "Blade Runner" envisaged a neon-stained landscape of bionic replicants genetically engineered to look just like humans. So far that has failed to materialize, but at a secretive research institute in western Japan, wild-haired roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro is fine-tuning technology ...