Amazon Locker is a self-service delivery or pickup location where customers can pick up packages and drop off returns. A basic first-come-first-served policy for accepting package delivery requests to lockers results in lockers becoming full with standard shipping speed (3-5 day shipping) packages, and leaving no space left for expedited packages which are mostly Next-Day or Two-Day shipping. This paper proposes a solution to the problem of determining how much locker capacity to reserve for different ship-option packages. Yield management is a much researched field with popular applications in the airline, car rental, and hotel industries. However, Amazon Locker poses a unique challenge in this field since the number of days a package will wait in a locker (package dwell time) is, in general, unknown. The proposed solution combines machine learning techniques to predict locker demand and package dwell time, and linear programming to maximize throughput in lockers. The decision variables from this optimization provide optimal capacity reservation values for different ship options. This resulted in a year-over-year increase of 9% in Locker throughput worldwide during holiday season of 2018, impacting millions of customers.

A California start-up called View, which has raised a whopping 500 million from investors including Corning, General Electric and Khosla Ventures, is making high-tech windows that have the potential to bring to buildings what high-resolution touchscreens did for smartphones. View's windows eliminate glare, change hue, moderate internal temperature -- and at some point, could show entirely different views of the outside world -- via a process that uses a pane of glass sprayed with electrochromic material, which alters light transmission. The result is smart glass that increases energy efficiency and promises better worker productivity, via technology accessed through an app. "When you look at smart glass, the only smart surface we saw was on our phones," says Ben Bajarin, an analyst for Creative Strategies who follows the industry. "Now, we believe consumers are moving toward an age where smart glass can do almost anything -- for example, project images of the sun on your windows during a rainy day or viewing data on the window." While elements of the technology have been around on a smaller scale, such as car windows, View is the first company to commercially produce such glass at a large scale.