A small robot with a clip-like hand and enough smarts to know which drinks are popular is part of an effort to make convenience stores even more convenient. On a recent day in Tokyo, the robot named TX SCARA slid back and forth behind the refrigerated shelves in the back of a FamilyMart store. The hand on the end of its mechanical arm grasped a bottle or can from the stacks to the side, then the robot slithered to the right spot and placed the drink on the shelf -- in a place chosen after its artificial intelligence and tiny cameras matched the kind of beverage to what's running short. TX SCARA is filling a needed role in Japan's "conbini," as the ubiquitous tiny stores selling snacks, drinks and knick-knacks are called. Most such stores are open 24-seven, filled with 3,000 kinds of products, but have relatively few workers.

We propose a method for online news stream clustering that is a variant of the non-parametric streaming K-means algorithm. Our model uses a combination of sparse and dense document representations, aggregates document-cluster similarity along these multiple representations and makes the clustering decision using a neural classifier. The weighted document-cluster similarity model is learned using a novel adaptation of the triplet loss into a linear classification objective. We show that the use of a suitable fine-tuning objective and external knowledge in pre-trained transformer models yields significant improvements in the effectiveness of contextual embeddings for clustering. Our model achieves a new state-of-the-art on a standard stream clustering dataset of English documents.

Artificial intelligence – AI for those in the technological know – gets a bad rap and Anshumali (Anshu) Shrivastava came to the Lake Houston Chamber's October luncheon to clear the air and tell business leaders how AI is changing their business landscape. "The best way I can describe artificial intelligence is to use the example of self-driving cars," Shrivastava said at the Oct. 29 meeting at the Clubs of Kingwood. "When you're driving, there's lots to think about. And driving on the highway is certainly different than driving on a busy city street."

Artificial intelligence – AI for those in the technological know – gets a bad rap and Anshumali (Anshu) Shrivastava came to the Lake Houston Chamber's October luncheon to clear the air and tell business leaders how AI is changing their business landscape. "The best way I can describe artificial intelligence is to use the example of self-driving cars," Shrivastava said at the Oct. 29 meeting at the Clubs of Kingwood. "When you're driving, there's lots to think about. And driving on the highway is certainly different than driving on a busy city street."