Many of us take access to clean water for granted. But at least 2 billion people around the world use unsanitary water and 785 million people don’t even have a basic drinking water service, according to the World Health Organization. For developing countries, water sanitation can be an expensive challenge, but one Japanese startup is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to make it quicker and cheaper.....

East of Tokyo, the fields of Chiba Prefecture recently played host to an intriguing experiment: To determine whether robots can play a useful role on farms facing labor shortages. As Japan’s population continues to shrink, rural areas are being hit hard by an aging and shrinking farming community. To combat this trend, a team of researchers from Tokyo is developing robots that take on some jobs around the farm.....

How has software development become like a peanut-filled chocolate bar? People are the peanuts and automation is the chocolate, according to Kohsuke Kawaguchi, known as the creator of Jenkins, a free and open-source software automation project that’s looking to boost productivity. Kawaguchi recently spoke about the role of open-source tools in software development at the Rakuten Technology Conference in November 2019.....

How do you coordinate a global workforce spread out across 30 countries and even more locations? Kaoru Tanaka is tackling this collaboration conundrum head on as executive officer and general manager of Rakuten’s Corporate IT department. She spoke on a panel at the recent Rakuten Technology Conference in Tokyo about the logistical, cultural and linguistic challenges companies face when operating across borders, and how Rakuten is thriving in a globalized world.