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The World’s First Autonomous Ship Just Finished Its First Run in Japan

After 22 weeks of data gathering.

The demonstration test of the world’s first fully autonomous ship navigation system was successfully carried out in Japan on January 17, according to a press release.

The large ferry has autonomously navigated over a 149 mile (240 km) stretch of Japan’s Iyonda Sea at the speed of 26 knots (30 mph or 48 kph) and also performed the docking procedures at the end of its voyage.… See more.


The Soleil, mounted with Mitsubishi’s autonomous ship navigation system has successfully completed its first demonstration.

Do Electric Trains Dream Of Autonomous Mobility? Yes, They Do

Parallel Systems bursts out of stealth mode with a SpaceX pedigree and a plan for launching the nation’s railways into the space age with autonomous electric railcars.


Electric trains have been much in the news lately. Adding to all the hoopla today is the US startup Parallel Systems, which has just busted out of stealth mode with a recipe for replacing thousands of trucks on the highways with zero emission short-haul autonomous electric railcars. The company sports a leading lineup of three former SpaceX electronics and battery experts, so let’s see what all the fuss is about.

Autonomous Electric Railcars

The idea of electric locomotives is beginning to catch on, but Parallel Systems is calling its version a “rail vehicle” because it has no resemblance to a locomotive. Think of it as a train without locomotives, and the picture comes into sharper focus.

Thread robot is designed to remove blood clots in brain

MIT team develops steerable soft thread-like robot capable of navigating tiny blood vessels

Snake robots are among the most familiar type of mechanical device for working in confined spaces. Flexible, tubular robots have been used for applications such as working in the interior of nuclear reactors, water distribution systems and inside the human body to aid surgery. The MIT team, mechanical engineers affiliated to the institution’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, have downsized the snake paradigm to the scale of a thread half a millimetre in diameter, which can be remotely controlled by magnetic fields to worm its way through the convoluted blood vessels of the brain to deliver clot-busting drugs or devices to break up and remove the blockage. Such robots have the potential to quickly treat a stroke and prevent damage to the brain, the team claims.

AI is the key to fixing identity security, ForgeRock CEO says

For enterprises that are looking to bring a zero trust approach as a way to better secure identities and permissions, leveraging advanced AI is now essential in order to achieve accuracy and scalability, ForgeRock CEO Fran Rosch told VentureBeat.

While traditionally, zero trust decision-making has relied mostly upon rules–for instance, rejecting a user request based on an impossible geographic location– ForgeRock adds in AI algorithms that enable far greater accuracy, Rosch said. This accuracy equates to dramatically enhanced security, he said–citing an example of a recent customer that increased its entitlement rejections by 300% after deploying ForgeRock.

“Because it was previously all done by these rules, and people were rubber-stamping these entitlement requests, they were letting these things go that they should never have approved,” Rosch said in a recent interview. “That was increasing the risk to the company. Because there were people who had no business accessing HR data, and no business accessing sales data, that were getting that information. So by leveraging the AI, a 300% increase in request rejections really tightened up the security of the organization.”

Chinese Property Giant Said Its Employee of The Year Was Not a Human, But an AI Program

At first glance, Cui is depicted as a beautiful young professional in her 20s who joined Vanke’s accounting department in February 2021 and is the recipient of the company’s Best Newcomer Award. Cui has a 91.44 percent success rate in collecting overdue payments. In December 2021, Baixin Bank launched its first virtual employee named AIYA, and Jiangnan Rural Commercial Bank launched its VTM digital employees. Earlier in April 2019, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank introduced its first AI-powered digital employee named Xiaopu, capable of serving its bank users at different posts Notably, China’s first “meta-human” AYAYI made its debut on Chinese e-commerce platform Xiaohongshuin in May 2021. The hyper-realistic digital human garnered three million views on its first post.

According to a 2019 report compiled by Deloitte, a global professional services network, experts predict that using AI at a larger scale will add as much as $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030.Deloitte’s report shows that from 2015 to 2020, the average annual compound growth rate of the global artificial intelligence market was 26.2 percent, while the growth rate of the Chinese AI market during the same period was 44.5 percent. Another report by Deloitte suggests that in 2025 the scale of China’s artificial intelligence industry will exceed $85 billion.

Presently, there are about 2,600 artificial intelligence companies in China. Most located in Beijing’s Haidian District technology hub, The Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), a U.S. think tank, estimated the CCP’s total R&D investment in artificial intelligence in 2018 was between $2 billion and $8.4 billion.


From news anchors to company employees, AI-powered virtual humans have quickly taken over human posts in China.

In December 2021, China’s property giant Vanke said its employee of the year was not a human.

According to The Paper, a Chinese state-owned media, the company declared an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered debt collector named “Cui Xiaopan” as its employee of the year. The virtual employee was created by Vanke’s in-house team using the Xiaoice Framework, an AI system developed by Microsoft Asia.

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