Information & Communications Technology

Sony Corp. said Wednesday it will start a new service of enabling users of its “aibo” robot dog to watch over their children or elderly family members at home from remote places through videos sent to their smartphones from the pet robot.

Japan will lead the Group of 20 major advanced and emerging economies in focusing on worldwide data governance under the World Trade Organization when the country hosts the G20 summit in June, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Wednesday.

IT engineering is a field in which there are a lot of opportunities for non-Japanese who possess sufficient skills to work in Japan. There are 28,000 non-Japanese IT engineers working in Japan currently, comprising about 3 percent of all IT engineers in Japan, according to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

The government is preparing a national sweep of some 200 million network-connected devices for cybersecurity lapses ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, an official said Tuesday.

Earlier this month, Japan and the United States began sharing fingerprint data among their law enforcement agencies under a bilateral agreement.

Sapporo radio personality Kazuya Yonezawa takes to the airwaves once a month, speaking to his listeners in a calm and low voice. But the 60-year-old’s words aren’t coming from his vocal cords.

Japan has taken a step toward policing foreign technology companies under the same communication privacy rules that govern domestic companies, responding to a string of personal data breaches around the globe.

The Japanese government will revise cybersecurity guidelines for 14 areas of infrastructure, including electricity grids and waterways, by this spring. The review had been planned for after the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, but increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks have prompted officials to bring forward the change.

Regularities seen in the calls of frogs can be used to improve radio communications systems, according to the findings of a Japanese scientific team led by Ikkyu Aihara, an assistant professor at the University of Tsukuba.

The Yomiuri ShimbunA bill aimed at expanding and improving barrier-free reading environments for the visually impaired and other disabled people, through such measures as increasing the number of braille materials and recorded books available in public libraries, will be submitted to the Diet by a suprapartisan group of lawmakers.