CHICAGO and SAN FRANCISCO--Grubhub is now offering orders delivered via a robot on college campuses across the U.S. The food-delivery company is partnering with Starship Technologies, an autonomous delivery service, to provide the robot deliveries. The service is available at the University of Kentucky, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), Wayne State University, Southern Methodist University and Fairfield University. Grubhub says the robot deliveries will be available at multiple other college campuses later this year. More than 170,000 students will have access to robot deliveries across these campuses, says Grubhub. Starship's robots offer deliver at over 25 schools across the U.S. through its global fleet of over 2,000 robots.

We propose a method to easily modify existing offline Recommender Systems to run online using Transfer Learning. Online Learning for Recommender Systems has two main advantages: quality and scale. Like many Machine Learning algorithms in production if not regularly retrained will suffer from Concept Drift. A policy that is updated frequently online can adapt to drift faster than a batch system. This is especially true for user-interaction systems like recommenders where the underlying distribution can shift drastically to follow user behaviour. As a platform grows rapidly like Grubhub, the cost of running batch training jobs becomes material. A shift from stateless batch learning offline to stateful incremental learning online can recover, for example, at Grubhub, up to a 45x cost savings and a +20% metrics increase. There are a few challenges to overcome with the transition to online stateful learning, namely convergence, non-stationary embeddings and off-policy evaluation, which we explore from our experiences running this system in production.

Uber's firing of thousands more of its employees this week, starting Monday, will bring the number of people it has dismissed from responsibility over the past year to more than 10,000, according to some estimates. Uber's previous round of job cuts saw it remove 3,700 people, or 14% of its total global workforce, in the first week of this month. Sources inside Uber, cited by Business Insider, said surviving employees are bracing for the latest round of mass layoffs, which will definitely run into thousands. Ahead of the layoffs, Uber last week told employees to be fired that they'd received 10 weeks' salary plus paid healthcare until the end of 2020. Employees to be fired this week will come from freight and the self-driving car unit and Advanced Technologies Group.

All Matt Maloney wanted to know was whether Chicago-style deep dish pizza is better than New York-style thin crust. If he were anyone else, Maloney would have had to get violently anecdotal. Deep dish, while delicious, is obviously not so much a pizza as a casserole; conversely, if you want to put pizza toppings on a cracker, why not just order a flatbread? Maloney felt like he should be able to literally answer the question. "Given the volume of transactions I do on a daily basis," Maloney says, "I should be able to tell you, objectively, which is better." Because broadly, Maloney is of course right.

Siri may be able to find restaurants and make witty remarks, but she's got nothing on'Viv.' The creators behind Apple's virtual assistant have now developed a next-generation AI that's said to be capable of much more than Siri and current competitors. The team will be unveiling Viv publicly for the first time at a'major industry conference' this coming Monday, according to The Washington Post. The creators behind Apple's virtual assistant have now developed a next-generation AI called Viv, that's said to be capable of much more than Siri and current competitors. The team will be unveiling Viv publicly for the first time at a'major industry conference' this coming Monday Viv analyses the nouns in a sentence when a person speaks into a smartphone. For example, if someone told Siri that they are on their way to their brother's house and need to pick up cheap wine to go with lasagne, they would probably get no response, or at best would see one useful place marked on a map.