Controlling the departure time of the trucks from a container hub is important to both the traffic and the logistics systems. This, however, requires an intelligent decision support system that can control and manage truck arrival times at terminal gates. This paper introduces an integrated model that can be used to understand, predict, and control logistics and traffic interactions in the port-hinterland ecosystem. This approach is context-aware and makes use of big historical data to predict system states and apply control policies accordingly, on truck inflow and outflow. The control policies ensure multiple stakeholders satisfaction including those of trucking companies, terminal operators, and road traffic agencies. The proposed method consists of five integrated modules orchestrated to systematically steer truckers toward choosing those time slots that are expected to result in lower gate waiting times and more cost-effective schedules. The simulation is supported by real-world data and shows that significant gains can be obtained in the system.

This week, guest host Zak Rosen from The Best Advice Show and Slate's Mom and Dad Are Fighting podcast talks to Liza Bielby and Richard Newman of the Detroit-based theater company The Hinterlands. They talk about how The Hinterlands' latest production Will You Miss Me? came into being, their influences, their rehearsal process, and the importance of deadlines After the interview, Zak and co-host June Thomas chat about collaboration, how to kill your darlings, and how Zak implements Julia Cameron's concept of the "artist's date." Send your questions about creativity and any other feedback to working@slate.com or give us a call at (304) 933-9675.

Yi Yake and his boyhood friends grew up in a farming village in central China, swinging sickles to harvest the family wheat crop. Yi got a job marketing computer games. His friend worked in a fireworks store. Today Yi drives a white BMW and, along with two childhood buddies, employs over 200 people in what is quickly becoming a boom industry in China -- artificial intelligence. Their company, located in a city near their parents' village in Henan province, provides an essential early service in the AI process, labeling images and videos to help make computers smarter.

Their company, located in a city near their parents' village in Henan province, provides an essential early service in the AI process, labeling images and videos to help make computers smarter. Before a self-driving car can learn to avoid hitting people or trees, it must learn what people and trees look like -- by digesting thousands of images labeled by thousands of humans. Demand for labeling is exploding in China as large tech companies, banks and others attempt to use AI to improve their products and services. Many of these companies are clustered in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, but the lower-tech labeling business is spreading some of the new-tech money out to smaller towns, providing jobs beyond agriculture and manufacturing. The science is mired in controversy in China, where the ruling Communist Party is using AI to help it identify and track people in mass-surveillance programs, most prominently in the largely Muslim province of Xinjiang, according to Human Rights Watch.