Uber has unveiled plans to trial autonomous'sidewalk robots' to deliver food to people's doorsteps. The US ride-hailing giant announced the idea as part of a raft of new features and services for its customers. These included an option for those in certain cities to specifically request a ride in an electric car, which Uber said was part of its global commitment to becoming a zero-emissions mobility platform by 2040. Comfort Electric is now available in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Dubai, with more cities to come soon. The sidewalk robot concept is one of two autonomous delivery pilot programs being trialled in California.

Uber Eats is launching not just one but two autonomous delivery pilots today in Los Angeles, TechCrunch has reported. The first is via an autonomous vehicle partnership with Motional, originally announced in December, and the second is with sidewalk delivery firm Serve Robotics, a company that spun out of Uber itself. The trials will be limited, with deliveries from just a few merchants including the Kreation juicery and organic cafe. Serve will do short delivery routes in West Hollywood, while Motional will take care of longer deliveries in Santa Monica. "We'll be able to learn from both of those pilots what customers actually want, what merchants actually want and what makes sense for delivery," an Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Your next trip to the dentist might offer a taste of AI. Pearl, a West Hollywood startup, provides AI for dental images to assist in diagnosis. It landed FDA clearance last month, the first to get such a go-ahead for dentistry AI. The approval paves the way for its use in clinics across the United States. "It's really a first of its kind for dentistry," said Ophir Tanz, co-founder and CEO of Pearl.

Paramount Global is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate owned and operated by National Amusements and headquartered at One Astor Plaza in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, United States.

This is the web version of dot.LA's daily newsletter. Sign up to get the latest news on Southern California's tech, startup and venture capital scene. Earlier this week, West Hollywood-based startup Pearl announced that its Second Opinion product had become the first AI-enabled device cleared by the Food and Drug Administration to read dental x-rays. Using the power of artificial intelligence, Second Opinion is meant to help dentists find maladies they'd otherwise miss through the eye test. Getting FDA clearance is not easy, especially because Pearl had to prove its device could detect a variety of dental conditions (most medical devices have to prove only one capability).

A dataset of COVID-19-related scientific literature is compiled, combining the articles from several online libraries and selecting those with open access and full text available. Then, hierarchical nonnegative matrix factorization is used to organize literature related to the novel coronavirus into a tree structure that allows researchers to search for relevant literature based on detected topics. We discover eight major latent topics and 52 granular subtopics in the body of literature, related to vaccines, genetic structure and modeling of the disease and patient studies, as well as related diseases and virology. In order that our tool may help current researchers, an interactive website is created that organizes available literature using this hierarchical structure.

The initiatives, overseen by information technology executives, are aimed at helping hotels dig out of what has been a dire season, with steep declines in occupancy, staff layoffs and a fear among some guests of contracting Covid-19. "Without technology, there's no way those companies recover fully," said Les Ottolenghi, who was chief information officer at Caesars Entertainment Corp. until last November. Caesars merged last month with Eldorado Resorts Inc. The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team. U.S. hotel occupancy collapsed from about 60% in February to roughly 22% in April, according to data analytics firm STR, owned by CoStar Group Inc.

This volume contains the Late-Breaking Abstracts submitted to the Evo* 2020 Conference, that took place online, from 15 to 17 of April 2020. These papers where presented as short talks and also at the poster session of the conference together with other regular submissions. All of them present ongoing research and preliminary results investigating on the application of different approaches of Bioinspired Methods (mainly Evolutionary Computation) to different problems, most of them real world ones.

In addition to random celebrity sightings, residents of West Hollywood, CA will soon be spotting autonomous delivery robots in their neighborhood. Last night the West Hollywood city council approved the use of delivery robots on its city streets (hat tip to WeHoVille). A trial of the program will start next month with Postmates' Serve robot and run for 90 days. Serve is a cooler-sized robot that scurries around on four wheels, and while it can run autonomously using sensors and cameras to avoid people and obstacles, the city council is requiring a human chaperone during the trial. Additionally, only three robots can be in operation at once, they can only run during the day, and they aren't allowed on sidewalks deemed substandard.

Chinese gaming company Beijing Kunlun Tech Co Limited is seeking to sell Grindr, the popular gay dating app it has owned since 2016, after a US government national security panel raised concerns about its ownership, according to people familiar with the matter. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has informed Kunlun that its ownership of West Hollywood, California-based Grindr constitutes a national security risk, the two sources told Reuters. CFIUS's specific concerns and whether any attempt was made to mitigate them could not be learned. The United States has been increasingly scrutinizing application developers over the safety of personal data they handle, especially if some of it involves US military or intelligence personnel. Kunlun had said last August it was preparing for an initial public offering (IPO) of Grindr.