If you think that it's hard to remember where all your favorite products are in the local grocery store, well … it's not just you. In the case of large supermarkets carrying thousands of goods, even employees can have trouble remembering where everything is. That's why Toronto's 4D Retail Technology Corp. developed the stock-taking, store-mapping 4D Space Genius robot. In less than an hour, the self-guiding Segway-based Space Genius can reportedly move along every aisle of an average-sized (43,000 sq ft/3,995 sq m) supermarket or other large store, scanning all of the products and barcodes on display in HD and 3D as it does so. First and foremost, this allows it to create an interactive 3D map of the store, in which the location of every item is indicated.

Learning to code may be almost as important now as learning to read. A new robot makes things more interesting: AntBo, which looks like an ant, is simple enough to program that kids can learn to code while they play with it. "We believe in the philosophy of learning through play … Seeing an ant-shaped robot come to life is definitely more interesting than reading code on a computer screen," says Ricky Ye, CEO of DFRobot, the Shanghai-based DIY robot company that designed the robot. Younger children can use visual programming tools like Scratch to make simple commands, like telling the robot to follow lines on the ground, react to a voice, or even simulate emotions. Once kids are old enough to code traditionally, they can also program the robot with Arduino IDE.

Stock-taking is one of those awful jobs that robots are primed to take. A Toronto-based company is working hard to make that happen, with a Segway-based robot that rolls down the aisles, scanning as it moves. The "Space Genius" looks like a marginally less threatening Dalek, as it rolls down the aisles of a store, using 3D cameras to scan aisles and record stock. According to the manufacturer, it can inventory a normal supermarket in under an hour, apparently including the precise inventory (although previous attempts at store robots have struggled with that). The data allows the robot to not only replace humans, but go one better.

In 2010, a group of students and faculty members at Carnegie Mellon University in Doha, Qatar, introduced their campus to Hala, the latest in a line of what the school termed "roboceptionists." Consisting of a truncated torso and an LCD screen featuring a blue-skinned female CGI head, Hala was designed to provide students and visitors with instructions, directions, and anecdotes in either formal Arabic or American English. In addition to educating visitors about Qatar, Hala's purpose was to explore human-robot interaction (HRI) in a multicultural setting. The population of Doha is a demographic mosaic; the city is primarily inhabited by expatriates from all over the world (most of whom speak Arabic and/or English). Because of this relative diversity, Hala interacted with visitors from a slew of countries, using features like natural language understanding and facial expressions to conduct, in Carnegie Mellon's words, "culturally appropriate" exchanges.

But those labor savings aren't the only gains to be had from the adoption of driverless trucks. Where drivers are restricted by law from driving more than 11 hours per day without taking an 8-hour break, a driverless truck can drive nearly 24 hours per day. That means the technology would effectively double the output of the U.S. transportation network at 25 percent of the cost. And the savings become even more significant when you account for fuel efficiency gains. The optimal cruising speed from a fuel efficiency standpoint is around 45 miles per hour, whereas truckers who are paid by the mile drive much faster.

The idea of conversational commerce is fairly new. At least if you think about it from a technological level. In reality, conversational commerce has existed since people started buying and selling goods and services thousands of years ago. You walk up to a person, talk to them, exchange currency, information or services, walk away. A conversation took place commerce happened conversational commerce. Somewhere along the way, the Web and apps economies lost the human element of commerce. Customer experience and customer service became a tangled series of browse-and-click, overloaded call centers, chat sessions and frustration.

How big should data be to be called'big'? Big data talk usually centers around those four V's: We say that data is big if it has volume, variety, velocity and veracity. It means a lot and lot of data; much, much more data than what a single server's disk can hold. That means not just numbers (Tendulkar's test and ODI scores), but also text (all that prose and poetry in praise of Tendulkar), video (Tendulkar's straight drive) and audio (Tendulkar exclaiming "Ailaa!"). Data on the trajectory of a launch vehicle, data on the growing spread of the Ebola virus, data about how rapidly some song is going viral on the Internet. Data that is valid, accurate, verifiable, not manipulated and trustworthy. What do you do with all this big data? You use this data to find associations, insights or connections.

Robots have been working at factories, hospitals, schools--and on April 30, 2016, a "handful" of robots named Pepper will join Costa Cruises, a branch of Carnival, as the newest crew members. Pepper is a 4-foot humanoid robot built by Aldebaran, a SoftBank company based in Paris, that is designed to read human emotions. While it is not the first robot seen on a cruise--there have been robo-bartenders, and a small robot named Mel was used at Costa for entertainment--it is the first to interact with vacationers in a broader way, providing directions, information about destinations, entertainment, and general assistance. The world's smartest cities: What IoT and smart governments will mean for you Intelligent cities are at the forefront of the next wave of the Internet of Things. The goals are to streamline communication and improve the lives of citizens. And save a little money along the way.

It's easy to imagine robots as job-stealing nemeses that will ultimately unseat human workers. In an interview with Computerworld Thursday, Tom Davenport, co-author of the forthcoming book Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines, made the case for seeing artificial intelligence and robotics not as a threat in the workplace but as an advantage. As more organizations begin to adopt AI and robotic systems, workers who regard these new technologies not as murderous Cylons to be feared but as tools designed to make them more productive and efficient at their own job will fare best. "I think that in many cases, we'll be working with these machines as colleagues," Davenport told Computerworld. "I think the people who prosper will be the ones who like working with machines." This is where Computerworld trotted out the obligatory eyebrow-raising statistics: The Bank of England warned about robots assuming half of all U.S. and British jobs during the coming 20 years, leaving 95 million people unemployed.

The first season of Mr. Robot was a breakout hit for USA last summer, its cyberpunk hacker storyline running in an eerie parallel to real-life events like the Ashley Madison breach. In the time since, there hasn't been much information on where season 2 might go, other than news that creator Sam Esmail is directing all 10 episodes and the plot will tackle that Apple/FBI iPhone decryption debate. Thankfully though, we now have a few more precious nuggets to huddle over in the dark: Collider reports the show will return July 13, and further directs our attention to two teasers that suggest the world-shattering hacking is far from over. The first briefly revisits Elliot (Rami Malek) sitting in his apartment at the end of the season 1 finale when an urgent knock disrupts his focus. The second, which you can find on Entertainment Weekly, checks in on Darlene (Carly Chaikin), Angela (Portia Doubleday), and Tyrell (Martin Wallström) in addition to Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) himself.