Tag Archives: Hitachi

AI (artificial intelligence) and logical dialogue in Japanese

Hitachi Corporation has been exciting some interest with its announcement of the latest iteration of its artificial intelligence programme’s and its new ability to speak Japanese (from a June 5, 2016 news item on Nanotechnology Now),

Today, the social landscape changes rapidly and customer needs are becoming increasingly diversified. Companies are expected to continuously create new services and values. Further, driven by recent advancements in information & telecommunication and analytics technologies, interest is growing in technology that can extract valuable insight from big data which is generated on a daily basis.

Hitachi has been developing a basic AI technology that analyzes huge volumes of English text data and presents opinions in English to help enterprises make business decisions. The original technology required rules of grammar specific to the English language to be programmed, to extract sentences representing reasons and grounds for opinions. This process represented a hurdle in applying system to Japanese or any other language as it required dedicated programs correlated to the linguistic rules of the target language.

By applying deep learning, this issue was eliminated thus enabling the new technology to recognize sentences that have high probability of being reasons and grounds without relying on linguistic rules. More specifically, the AI system is presented with sentences which represent reasons and grounds extracted from thousands of articles. Learning from the rules and patterns, the system becomes discriminating of sentences which represent reasons and grounds in new articles. Hitachi added an attention mechanism” which support deep learning to estimate which words and phrases are worthy of attention in texts like news articles and research reports. The “attention mechanism” helps the system to grasp the points that require attention, including words and phrases related to topics and values. This method enables the system to distinguish sentences which have a high probability of being reasons and grounds from text data in any language.

They have plans for this technology,

The technology developed will be core technology in achieving a multi-lingual AI system capable of offering opinion. Hitachi will pursue further research to realize AI systems supporting business decision making by enterprises worldwide.

The June 2, 2016 Hitachi news release which originated the news item can be found here.

Canada’s National Institute of Nanotechnology gets first Hitachi H-95000 microscope outside of Japan

Canada’s National Institute of Nanotechnology (NINT) has just opened a facility (which was mentioned as a future project in my July 20, 2009 posting) with three new Hitachi microscopes in a $15M funding partnership. From the July 13, 2011 article by Dave Cooper for the Edmonton Journal,

The Hitachi Electron Microscopy Products Centre [HEMiC; Note: This was formerly called the Hitachi Electron Microscopy Products Development Centre] at NINT opened Tuesday, a $15-million partnership between the federal and provincial governments and Hitachi, that marks the entry of Edmonton as the North American microscope leader.

One of the three new machines -the H-9500 environmental transmission electron microscope -is so new it is only the second in the world after one at a Toyota research centre in Japan.

“This technology suite (of three new microscopes) has enabled Alberta and Canada to establish a centre that will be the leading edge of nanotechnology research and development for many years to come,” Hidehito Obayashi, chairman of Hitachi High Technologies, said Tuesday.

I found some more information about the H-9500 microscope in this July 13, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,

The Hitachi H-9500 Environmental transmission electron microscope (ETEM) can study in-situ chemical reactions of samples in liquids and gases. It will offer a very low background pressure (in the 10-8 torr region) ensuring low sample contamination rate and low effect of background gases on the in-situ experiment. Its capabilities include the possibility to heat the sample to temperatures exceeding 1500° C while exposed to various gases or study liquid samples at temperatures exceeding 300° C. The analytical capabilities of the instrument include electron energy loss spectroscopy and energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry for chemical analysis. This instrument offers standard TEM imaging and diffraction capabilities allowing the investigation of sample structure and morphology.

As for the HEMiC facility (more from the news item on Nanowerk),

HEMiC will have two streams of activity: the provision of a wide range of electron microscopy services to industrial and academic clients; and a research collaboration between NINT and Hitachi researchers that will develop new electron microscope tools and techniques. The Centre will also be a Hitachi reference site, allowing Hitachi to showcase its latest microscopes, giving potential clients from North America an opportunity to gain hands-on experience with new instruments and techniques before buying.

I have mused on this before but I really do wonder what happens when there’s a scheduling conflict between research interests and commercial interests. In other words, what happens when you need to use the microscope for research purposes at the same time the sales people want to show it to potential customers? What is the protocol and who decides?