While the convenience of getting groceries delivered to doorsteps is enticing, it tends to be a costly luxury. The vast majority of Americans are still strolling down store aisles themselves to check items off their shopping lists. And it's this demographic that startup Basket is targeting. The company is highlighting price transparency to helping people discover the best priced items at local stores. It does so by leveraging the power of the crowd. Basket has built up a database of grocery store items and their prices by tasking shoppers with capturing that information.

This insightful, well written work deserves a read, especially the chapter on bees! Elon Musk says that AI is summoning the demon. This book provides a definite insight to prepare us for AI and the changes upon us.

This fall, customers cruising the aisles of Lowe's home improvement stores in the San Francisco Bay Area may see a new type of employee taking inventory and assisting shoppers. You won't find a nametag on this worker, but you won't confuse it with other employees, either. The new kid in town is the LoweBot, an autonomous retail service robot that scans and audits store inventory on the floor. It uses voice recognition to identify products for customers and lead them to the right shelf -- in multiple languages. The retailer is deploying LoweBots at 11 of its Bay Area stores over a seven-month period using NAVii robots made by Fellow Robots, following a successful two-year pilot program of a first-generation robot called OSHbot that was tested at one of Lowe's Orchard Supply Hardware stores.

Will smart automation, intelligent software bots and brainy robots take away our jobs anytime soon? Pose this question to any Indian working in a company where unions are strong, or to any Indian who has a government job, or to the majority of Indians who work in the unorganized sector--those who drive taxis, trucks pull handcarts, hawk goods on footpaths or are employed as maids--and you will, in all probability, be looked at askance or even dismissed as an uninformed prophet of doom. The reaction may not be surprising in emerging countries like India, given that a majority of such employees would never have heard about the Industrial Revolution, or terms like disguised unemployment, cloud computing, machine learning, deep learning, automation or artificial intelligence (AI)-driven software bots. They would perhaps have also never heard of drones taking photographs and doing surveillance; of robots delivering pizzas and packages; of assistive robots taking care of the elderly; of robots making hamburgers and others like the Roomba robots that mop floors; of software bots writing articles and movie scripts; of three-dimensional or 3D printing revolutionizing the manufacturing sector; of driverless cars and trucks--all of which would make it very hard for them to imagine the future impact of these technologies that have not yet directly touched their lives or their jobs. They would have surely seen humanoid robots in sci-fi films like actor Rajnikant's Enthiran in Tamil or Robot in English, or a movie like Terminator or Transformers.

It happens only seldom that one is able to keep in one's hands a new book depicting a pivotal moment in the development of computer software. I recall my first books on web services and then on Ajax. Such works are rather inspirational tour guides through exciting new ideas than encyclopedias or standard textbooks. This is also the case with "Apache Mahout: Beyond MapReduce" by D. Lyubimov and A.Palumbo. In 216 pages, this book packs in a crash course style introduction to analyzing distributed datasets using Mahout - a front-end to Apache Spark (a cluster computing framework) - steering through mathematical case studies with fully coded examples.

Artificial intelligence helps profits surge at Shop Direct Very.co.uk generated sales of more than 1 billion for the first time as parent company Shop Direct announced a 44 per cent increase in profits before tax. Liverpool-based Shop Direct grew underlying profit to 150.4 million as sales increased by 4.3 per cent to 1.86bn. The 12-month period to June 30 represented its first full financial year as a pureplay digital retailer, having ceased catalogue production in January 2015. The group, which also operates digital department stores VeryExclusive.co.uk, That was realised on the back of new features such as push notifications and touch ID to its MyVery app, which is nearing a million downloads.

A few years ago, a young man named Kyle Behm took a leave from his studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He was suffering from bipolar disorder and needed time to get treatment. A year and a half later, Kyle was healthy enough to return to his studies at a different university. Around that time, he learned from a friend about a part-time job. It was just a minimum-wage job at a Kroger supermarket, but it seemed like a sure thing. His friend, who was leaving the job, could vouch for him. For a high-achieving student like Kyle, the application looked like a formality. But Kyle didn't get called in for an interview. When he inquired, his friend explained to him that he had been "red-lighted" by the personality test he'd taken when he applied for the job. The test was part of an employee selection program developed by Kronos, a workforce management company based outside Boston.

Visitors walk past the showroom of LG Electronics during the Auto China 2016 show in Beijing, China April 26, 2016. SEOUL South Korea's LG Electronics Inc said on Friday it is partnering with Amazon.com LG said in a statement Alexa will work with its SmartThinkQ Hub, an LG device used to connect with home appliances over the internet, to allow users to control the South Korean firm's home appliances via voice-recognition technology. Dash feature on its SmartThinQ Sensors, which enabled so-called "smart" features on appliances that cannot communicate with other devices on their own, to allow users to quickly order household items such as laundry detergent or drinks. "We will work with a wide range of partners to deliver differentiated smart-home solutions to customers," said Jo Seung-jin, head of LG's appliances business, in the statement.

AI in the real world: Tech leaders consider practical issues.

Three years ago, Jeff Bezos announced that drones are eventually going to deliver Amazon orders. In the past year, he brought out Amazon's Alexa artificial intelligence service, which understands speech well enough that you can say, "Alexa, I really need a waffle cone maker," and she'll put one in your Amazon online shopping cart, even though nobody needs a waffle cone maker. Both of these technologies--drones and cloud AI--are exciting today, yet still wobbly works in progress. But in coming years, Amazon or some other company is going to put them together. And that, finally, will evolve into a technology that could become as significant to humans as domesticated dogs.