It will not be the first experiment with advanced pizza delivery technology. Australia-based Domino's Pizza Enterprises, the Ann Arbor-based company's largest independent franchisee, has tested delivery to customers in New Zealand via drone and self-driving robot.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is already revolutionizing domains such as manufacturing, automobiles and healthcare. But the real value of IIoT will be realized only when Machine Learning (ML) is applied to the sensor data. This article attempts to highlight how ML augments IIoT solutions by bringing intelligent insights. Cloud computing has been the biggest enabler of connected devices and enterprise IoT. Cheaper storage combined with ample computing power is the key driver behind the rise of IIoT.

A new feature allows users to ask Amazon's voice assistant Alexa to play "baby making jazz music." FILE - This file photo provided by Amazon shows models of the Amazon Echo Show. With Echo Show, Amazon has given its voice-enabled Echo speaker a touch screen and video-calling capabilities as it competes with Google's efforts at bringing "smarts" to the home. Amazon has been ramping up efforts to get more people to shop using the Alexa voice assistant on Echo speakers and other Amazon devices. NEW YORK -- In the name of convenience, Amazon and Walmart are pushing people to shop by just talking to a digital assistant.

ABOARD THE USS NIMITZ -- High above the Persian Gulf, an Iranian drone crosses the path of American fighter jets lining up to land on the USS Nimitz. The drone buzzes across the sky more than a mile above the massive aircraft carrier and is spotted by the fighters. But for the senior Navy commanders on the ship, the presence of the enemy drone so close is worrying. Their biggest fear is the surveillance aircraft will start carrying weapons, posing a more direct threat to U.S. vessels transiting one of the world's most significant strategic and economic international waterways. "It's just a matter of time before we see that," said Navy Rear Adm. Bill Byrne, commander of the carrier strike group that includes the Nimitz.

Early in August, NYU professor Siddharth Garg checked for traffic, and put a yellow Post-it onto a stop sign outside the Brooklyn building in which he works. When he and two colleagues showed a photo of the scene to their road-sign detector software, it was 95 percent sure the stop sign in fact displayed a speed limit. The stunt demonstrated a potential security headache for engineers working with machine learning software. The researchers showed it's possible to embed silent, nasty surprises into artificial neural networks, the type of learning software used for tasks such as recognizing speech or understanding photos. Malicious actors can design that behavior to emerge only in response to a very specific, secret, signal, as in the case of Garg's Post-it.

Gaurav Chakravorty, co-founder of AI investment advisors qplum, likes to use sporting analogies to illustrate changing trends within finance. The way high frequency trading (HFT) seemed to work like magic in the old days reminds him of Manchester United under Sir Alex Ferguson. Between 1993 and 2013 Manchester United won the English Premier League 13 times, an incredible record. The truth was Ferguson used a machinery that other clubs had not yet happened upon. He would scout clubs in Europe for talented youngsters and be willing to pay top dollar for young stars without a proven track record at a big club.

Amazon isn't synonymous with high fashion yet, but the company may be poised to lead the way when it comes to replacing stylists and designers with ever-so-chic AI algorithms. Researchers at the e-commerce juggernaut are currently working on several machine-learning systems that could help provide an edge when it comes to spotting, reacting to, and perhaps even shaping the latest fashion trends. The effort points to ways in which Amazon and other companies could try to improve the tracking of trends in other areas of retail--making recommendations based on products popping up in social-media posts, for instance. And it could help the company expand its clothing business or even dominate the area. "There's been a whole move from companies like Amazon trying to understand how fashion develops in the world," says Kavita Bala, a professor at Cornell University who took part in a workshop on machine learning and fashion organized by Amazon last week.

In a corner of Alphabet's campus, there is a team working on piece of software that may be the key to self-driving cars. No journalist has ever seen it in action until now. They call it Carcraft, after the popular game World of Warcraft. The software's creator, a shaggy-haired, baby-faced young engineer named James Stout, is sitting next to me in the headphones-on quiet of the open-plan office. On the screen is a virtual representation of a roundabout.

Despite the fact that he does not see very well, Alexei Efros, recipient of the 2016 ACM Prize in Computing and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has spent most of his career trying to understand, model, and recreate the visual world. Drawing on the massive collection of images on the Internet, he has used machine learning algorithms to manipulate objects in photographs, translate black-and-white images into color, and identify architecturally revealing details about cities. Here, he talks about harnessing the power of visual complexity. You were born in St. Petersburg (Russia), and were 14 when you came to the U.S. What drew you to computer science?

As excited as we are about the forthcoming generation of social home robots (including Jibo, Kuri, and many others), it's hard to ignore the fact that most of them look somewhat similar. They tend to feature lots of shiny white and black plasticky roundness. That's for admittedly very good reasons, but it comes at the cost of both uniqueness and visual and tactile personality. Guy Hoffman, who is well known for the fascinating creativity of his robot designs, has been working on a completely new kind of social robot in a collaboration between his lab at Cornell and Google ZOO's creative technology team in APAC. The robot is called Blossom, and we'd describe it for you, except that it's designed to be handmade out of warm natural materials like wool and wood so that every single one is a little bit different.