In March 1975, The Eagles' Best of My Love, was the number one song, the top box office movie was The Godfather Part II, and All in the Family was the most popular TV show. However, I was most excited about the MITS Altair 8800 microcomputer, arguably the first PC. At Gordon French's garage in Menlo Park, California on March 5, 1975, a small group of electronic enthusiasts gathered to look at the computer for the first time and the world would never be the same again. Little did they know that this modest meeting would spark a technological revolution that would change the world. The Homebrew Computer Club, founded by French and Fred Moore, quickly became a nexus for innovation, collaboration, and the democratization of computing technology.

This paper introduces a novel approach to improving Genetic Algorithms (GA) in large or complex problem spaces by incorporating new chromosome patterns in the breeding process through border trade activities. These strategies increase chromosome diversity, preventing premature convergence and enhancing the GA's ability to explore the solution space more effectively. Empirical evidence demonstrates significant improvements in convergence behavior. This approach offers a promising pathway to addressing challenges in optimizing large or complex problem domains.

Weblogs, comprised of records detailing user activities on any website, offer valuable insights into user preferences, behavior, and interests. Numerous recommendation algorithms, employing strategies such as collaborative filtering, content-based filtering, and hybrid methods, leverage the data mined through these weblogs to provide personalized recommendations to users. Despite the abundance of information available in these weblogs, identifying and extracting pertinent information and key features from them necessitate extensive engineering endeavors. The intricate nature of the data also poses a challenge for interpretation, especially for non-experts. In this study, we introduce a sophisticated and interactive recommendation framework denoted as InteraRec, which diverges from conventional approaches that exclusively depend on weblogs for recommendation generation. InteraRec framework captures high-frequency screenshots of web pages as users navigate through a website. Leveraging state-of-the-art multimodal large language models (MLLMs), it extracts valuable insights into user preferences from these screenshots by generating a textual summary based on predefined keywords. Subsequently, an LLM-integrated optimization setup utilizes this summary to generate tailored recommendations. Through our experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of InteraRec in providing users with valuable and personalized offerings. Furthermore, we explore the integration of session-based recommendation systems into the InteraRec framework, aiming to enhance its overall performance. Finally, we curate a new dataset comprising of screenshots from product web pages on the Amazon website for the validation of the InteraRec framework. Detailed experiments demonstrate the efficacy of the InteraRec framework in delivering valuable and personalized recommendations tailored to individual user preferences.

In this work, we proposed a new dynamic distributed planning approach that is able to take into account the changes that the agent introduces on his set of actions to be planned in order to take into account the changes that occur in his environment. Our approach fits into the context of distributed planning for distributed plans where each agent can produce its own plans. According to our approach the generation of the plans is based on the satisfaction of the constraints by the use of the genetic algorithms. Our approach is to generate, a new plan by each agent, whenever there is a change in its set of actions to plan. This in order to take into account the new actions introduced in its new plan. In this new plan, the agent takes, each time, as a new action set to plan all the old un-executed actions of the old plan and the new actions engendered by the changes and as a new initial state; the state in which the set of actions of the agent undergoes a change. In our work, we used a concrete case to illustrate and demonstrate the utility of our approach.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) delayed deciding whether Waymo could expand its service to include a portion of a major California highway and also Los Angeles and San Mateo counties, pending "further staff review," according to the regulator's website. While Waymo said the delay is a part of the commission's "standard and robust review process," the postponement comes as officials from other localities fear becoming like San Francisco -- where self-driving cars have disrupted emergency scenes, held up traffic and frustrated residents who are learning to share public roads with robot cars.

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has put a pause on self-driving car company Waymo's plans to expand its autonomous taxi service in the state. The announcement comes a week after Waymo admitted that not one but two of its self-driving taxis crashed into the very same truck in Arizona back in December. Waymo, which is owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, has had fully autonomous taxis operating in San Francisco since 2022, alongside rival Cruise. The company had requested permission to deploy its fleet of driverless taxis beyond San Francisco in the Bay Area, as well as in Los Angeles. But as of Wednesday, the CPUC has suspended that plan for at least 120 days.

Another California community is raising concerns about plans to unleash the Waymo self-driving vehicle in its jurisdiction, following several incidents involving autonomous ride-hailing cars that resulted in injuries. San Mateo County, in the San Francisco Bay Area, has requested more information from state regulators before allowing Google-owned Waymo to operate its driverless vehicles in the county. San Mateo County made the request after Waymo submitted a letter Jan. 19 to the California Public Utilities Commission, asking the agency to approve its proposed expansion of its Automated Vehicle Passenger Services into portions of the San Francisco Peninsula, which includes San Mateo County, as well as the southwest region of Los Angeles County. The company has already been serving a portion of San Francisco, from Lands End to Bernal Heights. The autonomous car began offering rides for a limited time in November in Santa Monica, Century City, West Hollywood, Mid-City Koreatwon and downtown L.A., giving residents a chance at testing the driverless ride.

Undeterred by its many detractors, Meta is still trying to make the metaverse happen. This week, the company held its annual Connect developer conference at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage to announce a new mixed reality headset, the Meta Quest 3, as well as new smart glasses made by Ray-Ban that let the wearer livestream videos and interact with an AI-powered voice chatbot. Meta also showed off an array of celebrity-infused AI chatbots that can mimic big-name folks like Snoop Dogg and Kendall Jenner. You'd be forgiven for thinking all this feels a little bit like an episode of Black Mirror.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the tech giant's Connect developer conference on Wednesday with new AI products for consumers, including smart glasses that can answer questions and stream directly on Facebook, as well as bots that create photo-realistic images and an updated virtual-reality headset. Standing in a courtyard at his company's Menlo Park, California, headquarters, Zuckerberg told the audience of developers, employees and journalists that Meta is "focused on building the future of human connection" – and painted a near-future where people interact with hologram versions of their friends or coworkers and with AI bots built to assist them. Zuckerberg described the products as bringing together virtual and real worlds and underscored that part of what Meta offered was low-cost or free AI that could be integrated into daily routines. "Soon the physical and digital will come together in what we call the'metaverse'," he said. The company unveiled the next version of its virtual-reality headset, the Quest 3. It will cost $499 and begin shipping on October 10.

The Product Security Threat Analysis and Security Standards team is responsible for the structured security analysis of Zoox products and the judicious application of security standards to the System Development Life Cycle at Zoox. The ideal candidates will have a strong general systems engineering background and demonstrated passion and concrete expertise in cybersecurity. A demonstrated skill in turning the analysis into high-quality written deliverables (such as TARA). Carry out security analysis, threat modeling, and risk assessment for a complex product ecosystem consisting of a custom-designed and built vehicle fleet as well as a portfolio of cloud services. Produce high-quality, readable, structured artifacts such as TARAs that reflect the security analysis performed (previous bullet) and help guide the company's efforts in the cybersecurity domain.