For most people, there's no such thing as an essential Roomba if you can work your own vacuum cleaner. They're nice to have, and do a job, but you'll get better results if you can put the work in yourself. They also require more management than Rosie the Robot from The Jetsons or Red Dwarf's Kryten. You'll come to earth with a bump when you see this oversized hockey puck crashing itself into your baseboards, wondering where the future we were promised disappeared to. But, if you judge the new Combo J7 on its own merits, it makes a far better case for itself than many of its rivals.

His Excellency Mattar Mohammed Al Tayer, Director-General, Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors of Roads and Transport Authority (RTA), revealed that RTA's precautionary measures and initiatives applied to the scheduling and the operation of public buses, marine transit means and taxis had accelerated the recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. He stated that such measures contributed to restoring the growth of public transport ridership to 70% of the pre-Covid-19 levels. They also contributed to reducing the number of kilometres travelled by 18%, improving bus on-time arrival by 6%, and cutting carbon emissions by 34 metric tons. "In cooperation with Alibaba Cloud, RTA has recently started trialling the'City Brain' system to manage traffic in urban areas using artificial intelligence and advanced algorithms. The system analysis a massive number of big data received from nol cards, operating buses and taxis as well as the Enterprise Command and Control Centre. Then it converts the data into useful information that could be used in sending instant notifications and improving bus schedules and routes. The system is expected to improve the bus ridership by 17%, average waiting time by 10%, and the journey time and the average bus usage by 5%," stated Al Tayer.

Imagine if we could call out to our living room TV to access a show or movie, get step-by-step cooking directions, watch YouTube clips on demand, have it double as a digital photo frame, look up anything in the world, make phone calls and run your home automation system. How cool would that be? That's the promise of Google's new Home Hub, a $149 talking speaker that is taking on Amazon's $229 Echo Show in what's expected to be one of the biggest marketing battles of the holidays. How small is the Google Home Hub? So tiny that the Amazon Echo dwarfs it, and Mr. Jinx the cat towers over it.

At the Empa and Eawag NEST building in Dübendorf, eight ETH Zurich professors as part of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Digital Fabrication are collaborating with business partners to build the three-storey DFAB HOUSE. It is the first building in the world to be designed, planned and built using predominantly digital processes. Robots that build walls and 3D printers that print entire formworks for ceiling slabs – digital fabrication in architecture has developed rapidly in recent years. As part of the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Digital Fabrication, architects, robotics specialists, material scientists, structural engineers and sustainability experts from ETH Zurich have teamed up with business partners to put several new digital building technologies from the laboratory into practice. Construction is taking place at NEST, the modular research and innovation building that Empa and Eawag built on their campus in Dübendorf to test new building and energy technologies under real conditions.