Starship Technologies is pulling 1,200 delivery robots from U.S. college campuses to focus on grocery delivery in cities across the United States and Europe.

The Starship Technologies six-wheelers have been roaming the streets of the city for more than eight years. The Starship Technologies six-wheelers have been roaming the streets of the city for more than eight years. D riving down an endless string of identical roundabouts in the dead heat with hardly a human in sight, you see robots roving around on grassy pavements, whizzing past obstacles to hurriedly reach their final destination. The robots aren't a new arrival to the Buckinghamshire city, the UK's largest new town and a longtime marvel for city planning enthusiasts fascinated by its American-influenced layout and postwar history. They've roamed its streets since 2018 - and could soon be coming to a town or city near you.

'We had to get out of the way': The backlash over delivery robots The first time Chicago resident John Roberts saw a delivery robot trundling down the sidewalk on his street he was impressed. I actually thought they were kind of neat - it felt futuristic, he says. But his attitude started to change when, soon after, he was out for a walk with his family. As another robot approached, they found themselves having to dodge it. To us it felt a little off - the fact that we were on the one strip reserved for walking, and we were having to get out of the way, says Roberts.

Cybersecurity was already under strain before AI entered the stack. Now, as AI expands the attack surface and adds new complexity, the limits of legacy approaches are becoming harder to ignore. This session from MIT Technology Review's EmTech AI conference explores why security must be rethought with AI at its core, not layered on after the fact. A prolific inventor and internationally recognized authority in knowledge representation, inference calculus, and AI planning, Tarique has spent his career applying autonomously collaborative AI to solve complex, ultra-high-scale challenges across cybersecurity, data security, and compliance -- with deep expertise spanning Data Classification, DLP, and DSPM industries. His groundbreaking innovations and multiple USPTO patents have earned him global recognition, including frequent invitations to deliver keynote addresses at prestigious international security conferences and forums. At GCCybersecurity, Tarique architected the core AI algorithms powering the company's 4th and 5th generation fully autonomous data leak protection and exfiltration platform -- among the most advanced platform of its kind.

Companies are taking control of their own data to tailor AI for their needs. The challenge lies in balancing ownership with the safe, trusted flow of high quality data needed to power reliable insights. This conversation from MIT Technology Review's EmTech AI conference examines how AI factories unlock new levels of scale, sustainability, and governance--positioning data control as a strategic imperative for governments and enterprises. Chris Davidson is Vice President of HPC & AI Customer Solutions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. He leads HPE's global strategy for AI Factory solutions and Sovereign AI, working with governments, enterprises, and research institutions to build secure, scalable national-and enterprise-grade AI capabilities. He also directs Product Management and Performance Engineering across HPE's HPC and AI portfolio, including large-model training platforms and Cray exascale systems.

This startup's new mechanistic interpretability tool lets you debug LLMs Goodfire wants to make training AI models more like good old-fashioned software engineering. The San Francisco-based startup Goodfire just released a new tool, called Silico, that lets researchers and engineers peer inside an AI model and adjust its parameters--the settings that determine a model's behavior --during training. This could give model makers more fine-grained control over how this technology is built than was once thought possible. Goodfire claims Silico is the first off-the-shelf tool of its kind that can help developers debug all stages of the development process, from building a data set to training a model. LLMs contain a LOT of parameters. The company says its mission is to make building AI models less like alchemy and more like a science.

Watch subscriber-only discussion unveiling a new list capturing 10 key technologies in AI that you need to know about in 2026. Subscribers saw a special edition of Roundtables simulcast live from EmTech AI, MIT Technology Review's signature conference for AI leadership. Subscribers got an exclusive first look at a new list capturing 10 key technologies, emerging trends, bold ideas, and powerful movements in AI that you need to know about in 2026. Grace Huckins, AI reporter, hosted this session as Amy Nordrum and Niall Firth, executive editors, unveiled the list onstage. Want to understand the current state of AI? Check out these charts. Exclusive: Niantic's AI spinout is training a new world model using 30 billion images of urban landmarks crowdsourced from players.

Transcranial focused ultrasound is a noninvasive way to stimulate the brain and see how it functions. How does the physical matter in our brains translate into thoughts, sensations, and emotions? It's hard to explore that question without neurosurgery. But in a recent paper, MIT philosopher Matthias Michel, Lincoln Lab researcher Daniel Freeman, and colleagues outline a strategy for doing so with an emerging tool called transcranial focused ultrasound. This noninvasive technology reaches deeper into the brain, with greater resolution, than techniques such as EEG and MRI. It works by sending acoustic waves through the skull to focus on an area of a few millimeters, allowing specific brain structures to be stimulated so the effects can be studied.

Technology Robots'Pokémon Go' players have been unknowingly training delivery robots The massive crowdsourcing effort could use real-world to help robots deliver pizza. A woman holds up her cell phone as she plays the Pokémon Go game in Lafayette Park in front of the White House in Washington, DC on July 12, 2016. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Nearly a decade ago, turned the real world into a digital scavenger hunt, with virtual creatures hiding in plain sight. The early augmented reality smartphone app prompted hundreds of millions of players to wander into parks, parking lots, and even dimly lit alleyways, peering through their phone cameras in search of Pikachus and Charizards that the app superimposed onto their surroundings.

Walkability is a key component of sustainable urban development. In walkability studies, collecting detailed pedestrian infrastructure data remains challenging due to the high costs and limited scalability of traditional methods. Sidewalk delivery robots, increasingly deployed in urban environments, offer a promising solution to these limitations. This paper explores how these robots can serve as mobile data collection platforms, capturing sidewalk-level features related to walkability in a scalable, automated, and real-time manner. A sensor-equipped robot was deployed on a sidewalk network at KTH in Stockholm, completing 101 trips covering 900 segment records. From the collected data, different typologies of features are derived, including robot trip characteristics (e.g., speed, duration), sidewalk conditions (e.g., width, surface unevenness), and sidewalk utilization (e.g., pedestrian density). Their walkability-related implications were investigated with a series of analyses. The results demonstrate that pedestrian movement patterns are strongly influenced by sidewalk characteristics, with higher density, reduced width, and surface irregularity associated with slower and more variable trajectories. Notably, robot speed closely mirrors pedestrian behavior, highlighting its potential as a proxy for assessing pedestrian dynamics. The proposed framework enables continuous monitoring of sidewalk conditions and pedestrian behavior, contributing to the development of more walkable, inclusive, and responsive urban environments.