Much has been made of the "food boom" in Pittsburgh, and the city has long had a thriving arts scene. But perhaps the secret, underlying driver for both the economy and the cool factor -- the reason Pittsburgh now gets mentioned alongside Brooklyn and Portland, Ore., as an urban hot spot for millennials -- isn't chefs or artists but geeks. In a 2014 article in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Mayor Bill Peduto compared Carnegie Mellon, along with the University of Pittsburgh, to the iron ore factories that made this city an industrial power in the 19th century. The schools are the local resource "churning out that talent" from which the city is fueled. Because of the top students and research professors at Carnegie Mellon, tech companies like Apple, Facebook, Google and Uber have opened offices here.

Researchers have developed the world's first autonomous, zero-emissions cargo ship. The vessel could dramatically reduce diesel emissions from conventional cargo ships. The vessel, developed by agriculture company Yara International ASA and high-technology systems firm Kongsberg Gruppen, will be loaded and unloaded automatically using electric cranes. Researchers have developed the world's first autonomous, zero-emissions cargo ship: The Yara Birkeland. Developed by agriculture company Yara International ASA and high-technology systems firm Kongsberg Gruppen, will be capable of autonomous mooring and route planning.

South Korea's LG Chem is slated to exclusively provide batteries for Apple's iPhone 9 which is likely to be launched next year, a Korean newspaper reported on Friday. LG Chem has invested hundreds of billions of won in a dedicated line for the purpose and will produce'L-shaped' batteries for next year's iPhone, the Korea Economic Daily reported citing an unnamed chemical industry source. A spokesman for LG Chem said it does not respond to inquiries about client companies. Apple could not be immediately reached for comment. LG Chem has invested hundreds of billions of won in a dedicated line for the Apple project, and will produce'L-shaped' batteries for next year's iPhone, the Korea Economic Daily claims.

We are living in the Age of Plastic. In 2015, the world's industries created 448 million tons of it -- twice as much as it did in 1998. However, our recycling efforts have not matched pace. In fact, according to the EPA, barely 14 percent of plastic products are recycled globally. But a new generation of recycling technology is here to keep the world's plastics in circulation and out of our landfills.

The MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT) is one of the most internationally-renowned academic ecosystems in terms of research, technology and the future. With these credentials, it is not strange that OpenMind has selected it as the perfect setting to ponder: What's the next step? Exponential life, a life marked by the progress of so-called exponential technologies is not science fiction, nor a possible exclusively future scenario because technologies are already among us that transform our lives in very different ways. In this article we have chosen 5 examples, explained by the authors of our latest book, to show why we can say that exponential technologies are already here. Image of the event held at MIT.

Automation has its perks but more or less, people are more concerned about the potential threats and malicious use cases that may lead to disastrous results. Over the years, the influence of machines has increased in our day to day lives. Artificial Intelligence has been the catalyst that pushed it further and now it has gone on to the next level. For instance, now robotic arms are being used for carrying out complex surgical operations. While these machines perform tasks with extreme accuracy, there's always a risk involved that if certain thing goes wrong, it may lead to a catastrophe.

As automation becomes cheaper and robotics innovation accelerates, how we work and who we work with will change. In this excerpt from their new book, "Machine Platform Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future,"(W.W. Norton & Company) MIT Sloan's Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson identify five areas driving automation and consider where humans fit in the new world of work. San Francisco-based fast causal restaurant Eatsa -- where customers order, pay for, and receive meals without encountering any employees -- wants to do more than virtualize the task of ordering meals; it also wants to automate how they're prepared. Food preparation in its kitchens is highly optimized and standardized, and the main reason the company uses human cooks instead of robots is that the objects being processed -- avocados, tomatoes, eggplants, and so on -- are both irregularly shaped and not completely rigid. These traits present no real problems for humans, who have always lived in a world full of softish blobs. Most of the robots created so far, however, are much better at handling things that are completely rigid and do not vary from one to the next. This is because robots' senses of vision and touch have historically been quite primitive -- far inferior to ours -- and proper handling of a tomato generally entails seeing and feeling it with a lot of precision. It's also because it's been surprisingly hard to program robots to handle squishiness -- here again, we know more than we can tell -- so robot brains have lagged far behind ours, just as their senses have.

Farmers spend nearly half of their operational budgets on agrochemicals such as herbicides and pesticides. Unfortunately, they usually apply these to entire fields at a time, which generates high chemical costs and decreases the efficacy of the chemicals. Such widespread application of chemicals harms the environment, endangers human health, and increases the likelihood of chem ical-resistance in weeds, pests, and diseases. And, even with that damaging widespread application, loss to weeds, pests and diseases can range from 20-50%. But manually scouting and sampling to determine the locations of these problems is time-consuming and costly, and cannot easily account for the enormous variety of factors that affect crops.

This is meant to be a practical book. The author's "objective is to provide a thorough discussion of the most useful data-mining tools that goes beyond the typical'black box' description, and to show why these tools work". I think the result of reading and doing the exercises in this book is: 1. I will have acquired some familiarity with regression techniques and a few of the problems they can help with 2. I will have performed the regression techniques in R Over half the text focuses on various kinds of regression. Then there is a little bit on classification, decision trees, clustering, principal components analysis.

Mining company Rio Tinto has 73 of these titans hauling iron ore 24 hours a day at four mines in Australia's Mars-red northwest corner. BHP Billiton, the world's largest mining company, is also deploying driverless trucks and drills on iron ore mines in Australia. Suncor, Canada's largest oil company, has begun testing driverless trucks on oil sands fields in Alberta. The company's driverless trucks have proven to be roughly 15 percent cheaper to run than vehicles with humans behind the wheel, says Atkinson--a significant saving since haulage is by far a mine's largest operational cost.