Latest news with #HiroshiIshiguro
Hi Dubai
21-05-2025
- Business
- Hi Dubai
AVITA joins UAE's NextGen FDI initiative to drive AI innovation
AVITA, a leading Japanese technology firm known for its generative AI and avatar-based solutions, has joined the UAE's NextGen FDI initiative, marking a significant step in the country's push to become a global hub for artificial intelligence. The Ministry of Economy announced the move, highlighting AVITA's decision to establish operations in the UAE as a strategic win for the nation's innovation ecosystem. The company's arrival is expected to support economic diversification and elevate the UAE's standing in the global tech arena. AVITA's suite of AI-driven tools — including the AVACOM customer-support platform and Ava Training — leverages lifelike avatars to enhance service delivery, streamline operations, and foster human-like interactions across industries. These solutions are particularly valuable in addressing challenges such as labour shortages while opening new avenues for digital engagement. Hiroshi Ishiguro, AVITA's CEO and a recognised authority in human-robot interaction, has already been involved in AI research in the UAE through a collaboration between Dubai Future Lab and Japan's Science and Technology Agency. He was previously honoured with the Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Knowledge Award in 2015. Dr. Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi, Minister of State for Foreign Trade, welcomed the collaboration, calling it a reflection of the UAE's commitment to attracting 'visionary companies that push the boundaries of technology.' AVITA joins over 100 companies that have entered the UAE under the NextGen FDI program, which offers a suite of incentives and infrastructure aimed at enabling global firms to scale from the Emirates. Cofounder Shogo Nishiguchi described the UAE as both a gateway to the region and a springboard for international growth. News Source: Emirates News Agency
Zawya
21-05-2025
- Business
- Zawya
Japanese AI pioneer AVITA joins UAE's NextGen FDI initiative
The Ministry of Economy has announced that AVITA, a Japanese advanced technology firm that specialises in generative AI and avatar-based solutions, has become the latest enterprise to join the NextGen FDI initiative, which seeks to attract pioneering companies from around the world to the UAE through a package of market-entry fundamentals. Their decision to establish a presence in the UAE will greatly enhance the country's technological landscape and support national ambitions to become a regional and global hub for artificial intelligence. AVITA, which is driven by its mission of 'evolving humanity with avatars', is using a range of AI tools to improve customer service, enhance operational efficiency, reduce costs and increase sales. AVITA's customer-support platform AVACOM and its educational tool Ava Training utilise avatars that can act as digital representations of real-life individuals, allowing businesses and employees to overcome physical limitations and fostering stronger connections with customers through human-like interactions. AVITA's CEO Hiroshi Ishiguro is a leading authority in human-robot interaction and received the Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Knowledge Award in 2015. He has already been conducting various research initiatives and pilot projects at a research institute in the UAE established by Dubai Future Lab and the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST). Dr. Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi, Minister of State for Foreign Trade, said, 'The integration of AVITA into the NextGen FDI initiative underscores our commitment to attracting visionary companies that push the boundaries of technology. Their groundbreaking work in avatar solutions not only addresses current challenges such as labour shortages but also paves the way for new job opportunities and innovative business practices. This collaboration will play a crucial role in our ambition to cultivate a diverse, knowledge-driven economy in the UAE that is prepared for the future.' Shogo Nishiguchi, Cofounder and Chief Operating Officer of AVITA, stated that the UAE is not only a gateway to the Middle East but also a strategic hub for global expansion. AVITA joins a cohort of more than 100 companies operating in sectors such as renewable energy, advanced manufacturing, and robotics.
Japan Times
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Japan Times
Want to see the future at Expo Osaka? Get in line.
The car pulls into Yumeshima Station with a shhh, and the gleaming doors with a trim of neon green lights open onto a brand new train platform. I'm headed to the Osaka Expo 2025, a six-month world fair that wants to 'design future society for our lives,' and though I expect a whisper-quiet entrance to match the train ride, my first thought is that the future is very loud and full of rules. As the doors open, I'm hit with a wall of sound. As if in anticipation of waves of lost people in uncontrollable crowds, the expo has stationed attendants every few meters, each armed with a megaphone, each shouting instructions at the same time, but out of sync. The blare reverberates in the metro tunnel, bouncing against the ceiling of an expansive hall and atrium, the layered intensity and crisscrossing directives ultimately making it impossible to decipher any message at all. Welcome to the Osaka Expo. Hiroshi Ishiguro's exhibit imagines a world in which androids have become fully integrated into human society. | Thu-Huong Ha The world expo is a strange event, in that it seeks to show the public a vision of the future, yet the way we primarily interact with it is by looking back. What's interesting about them is what has stuck: The Eiffel Tower, sewing machines, the telephone, steam locomotion — to the modern ear, world expos mainly seem old-timey and quaint. As I walk around the artificial island of Yumeshima in Osaka Bay, I can't help but think this imagined future looks like something cooked up by Hollywood in the 1990s. I get in line — this is Japan's vision of the future, after all, where constant queueing is still de rigueur — for one of the buzzy marvels inside the pavilion hosted by Pasona. The HR company's exhibition, under the disproportionately humble theme 'Thank You, Life,' personified by Astro Boy, contains roomfuls of gadgets and predictions. On a hypothetical timeline of Earth's history, 'Birth of the internet' and 'Rise of social networks' are somehow each just as important as 'Cambrian explosion' and 'Humans appear,' and from there it escalates quickly: Bees go extinct, then in the next phase, so does all life on Earth. I'm more intrigued by the exhibit's 'future sleep' bed prototypes, which adjust to your weight, movements, breath and heart rate to create optimal sleep conditions. I am desperate to crawl into one of the pods, but, ah, of course, the future is by reservation only. What I've come to see, though, is an 'iPS heart,' a little flash of something in a clear vessel filled with blood-red liquid in the middle of one of the exhibition rooms. This is not really a heart, but a cluster of heart cells created from human-induced pluripotent stem cells in the shape of a heart. And just like a heart, these cells can beat. A presentation showing the likes of Thomas Edison and Hippocrates flash in the background, with quotes by these great men meant to make us feel that we're witnessing the future of medicine. In 2012, Shinya Yamanaka won a Nobel Prize in medicine for his development of induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells. His lab reprogrammed mature, specialized mouse skin cells to make immature, pluripotent ones, meaning they could grow into different types of cells in the body; later, his team was able to do the same thing with human cells. This was a breakthrough in understanding cells themselves, and could have wide-ranging significance, including the potential for tissue replacement using a patient's own cells, which reduces reliance on embryos and lowers the risk of the body rejecting someone else's cells. Here in this room in Osaka, the implications of a beating iPS heart developed by Yoshiki Sawa of medical start-up Cuorips are not clear, a fact that is clearly irrelevant. The spectacle is more Mona Lisa than flying car: Not only is this a mysterious celebrity of murky provenance and meaning, but no one seems to care. The backs of people's heads block the 3.5-centimeter object, their hands pressing phones and long telephoto lenses to the case, intent on capturing what they've waited in line to see. In the future, just like in the present, proof of witnessing trumps understanding. Pics of the future, or it won't happen. An 'iPS heart' at HR company Pasona's pavilion represents the promise of lab-grown human heart cells. | Reuters That night, standing in a queue under a blast of cold rain, I'm told that all the slots for the exhibition I want to see are full for the day, but I can join the wait list. (The future, by the way, is also full of QR codes.) I check my phone. It's 7 p.m., and ''Future of life,' by Ishiguro,' has 829 people in its virtual line. I am very keen to see a me-sized avatar, but I'm running out of time to catch my train back to Tokyo, at which point I wonder if press credentials still work in the future. They do, and soon I'm being adorned with a heavy headset and pushed in with a group through an hour-long guided show. The exhibition by renowned roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University is an impressively produced multistage, multifloor robot extravaganza. Three android tarento (TV personalities), including a likeness of Matsuko Deluxe, chat like they're on a variety show. Across the way, android Natsume Soseki sits at a desk with some books splayed open; the author of 'I Am a Cat' puts his hand to his brow and looks unconsolable, in a pretty convincing imitation of what it looks like to be a writer. In the final stage, three androids from 1,000 years in the future give a musical performance that's a Bjork-'Minority Report' mash-up fever dream. The exhibit's main story centers on a narrative just 50 years in the future, by which time androids have been fully integrated into human society. We enter a room and ride a train to a futuristic city called Yumeshima, which means Dream Island, accompanied by a robot boy who spends the whole ride twitching in response to no apparent stimuli. A projection shows a little girl and her grandmother discussing the girl's android classmate, who's rumored to have the memories of his grandfather. After a bad diagnosis, the elder woman is given a choice: She can pass naturally or upload her memories to an android. 'In that body, will I still be able to think about the people I love?' she asks. 'It's as close as you can get,' the doctor replies with the chilling compassion of a disc jockey. One of the arguments for making lifelike androids is that the more they look and move like us, the more we'll trust and relate to them. Human-like smiles and eye contact can create the feeling that the robots have empathy, which has applications for caregiving and education. It's an urgent issue in Japan, where researchers are focused on robot solutions to address their aging population and labor crisis. But as I envision a future with a robot sitting at my kitchen table with all my mother's memories, I struggle to grasp what I, or my mother, would gain. My real (very alive) mother does like to talk about the past, but the way we spend time is beyond conversation, lying instead in service, in warmth, the feel of her rounded shoulder, just below mine, as she shrugs my hand off because she's trying to flip a deep-fried spring roll and I'm in the way. Latest advancements in robotics show androids doing human things and how human they look while doing them — taking selfies, playing air guitar, tossing popcorn into their mouths. Behold, how they look like us. And in AI, what gets the most attention is how closely generated art can mimic human art — it looks just like a Studio Ghibli movie, or sounds just like metafiction. But it's worth at least a few seconds of contemplation: Why exactly are we so intent on making our technology in our own likeness? Because, really, are humans so great? The final beat of the exhibit is a quote from Ishiguro: 'We can design the future and live the life we want.' Technologists believe they push humanity forward by seeking solutions to alleviate physical pain and cure disease. But I confess I'm not as skilled at looking to the future — maybe because the present is so distracting: how intractable it seems, how we seem to be sliding backward, how we've destroyed our home, how corruption, greed, subjugation and power lock the world into conflicts that look unsettlingly similar to ones from a century ago. At the expo, where Israel's booth is placed under the umbrella group theme 'Saving lives,' where the U.S. pavilion is designed as a 'gateway for all visitors' with the ridiculous exhortation to 'Imagine what we can create together' scrawled in neon, where Russia didn't even bother to show up, where China and the U.S. passive-aggressively battle it out for who has the better moon rock, the entire endeavor to present a utopian vision of global peace and cooperation starts to look like nationalist vaudeville. Modern developed societies have a tendency to look forward, thinking we are barreling toward progress and a better future, when these past few years have shown what is really broken, and where the real disease lies.
Yahoo
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Expo 2025 Osaka offers culture and innovation to visitors to Japan
Japan's Expo 2025 Osaka is open to visitors, offering a swathe of exhibits all about the climate and sustainability from 160 countries through to mid-October. More than 160 countries, regions and international organizations are showcasing their ideas in pavilions addressing "Designing Future Society for Our Lives." The show is located on the artificial island of Yumeshima and the site is surrounded by the spectacular Grand Ring, a wooden structure some 2 kilometres long and 20 metres high, the largest in the world, say the organizers. The structure symbolizes the concept of the Expo - diversity and unity - at a time of geopolitical tension. Afterwards, the plan is to recycle the beams. Sustainability is at the heart of the exhibition in the Japanese hosts' pavilion, where visitors may learn about the role of seaweed in absorbing carbon dioxide, in a story told through traditional Japanese aesthetics, modern pop culture and innovation. Meanwhile in an installed biogas plant, waste from the Expo site is converted into energy, aided by microorganisms. There's a rather gloomy vision of the future in the black pavilion "Future of Life" by famous Japanese robotics researcher Hiroshi Ishiguro. With 50 androids and dozens of robots and avatars, he shows how humans and androids will coexist in 50 years' time and says they may be indistinguishable from each other in 1,000 years' time. Elsewhere, the theme of the Australia Pavilion is 'Chasing the Sun.' The building design celebrates the eucalyptus blossom and was built using reusable and repurposed materials from previous major international events, highlighting sustainability. The Singapore Pavilion, called 'Dream Sphere', is an immersive space where visitors explore how Singapore turns dreams into reality through immersive art installations, performances and local food, that stimulates the five senses. Inspired by a child's toy building blocks, the British Pavilion aims to show little ideas that have the power to combine into world-changing innovations. Every idea, just like every simple building block, has the potential to grow into something great. The German Pavilion, consisting of circular wooden buildings symbolizing the circular economy, is all about the future of modern life and conserving resources. Visitors may explore ideas of a city of the future on interactive displays and find out what German companies offer in terms of sustainability. It seeks to encourage people to think about what they themselves can contribute to a sustainable future, says Christopher Hecker, director of the pavilion. The Expo's organizers hope such attractions and ideas will attract around 28 million visitors in the six months until it closes on October 13. So far, there has been little interest among Japan's population. Some criticize the costwhich according to reports has almost doubled to $1.6 billion. Osaka has hosted the Expo once before, in 1970 - drawing more than 64 million visitors.
