Last year, China said it plans to be a world leader in AI by 2030. Now its capital is building a massive campus to house the AI firms that will power that rise, according to local media outlet Beijing News (link in Chinese). Authorities in Beijing's Mentougou district will build the tech campus along with Zhongguancun Development Group, a company that has built several similar technology parks in China. They plan to invest 13.8 billion yuan (about $2.1 billion) in the 548,700 square-meter park, and hope to to attract over 400 enterprises. Construction will be completed within three to five years. The park, which will count on 5G telecom and have a supercomputer, will focus on developing areas such as high-speed big data, cloud computing, biometric identification, deep learning, state-run news agency Xinhua added.

Starship's delivery robots collect food or drinks from a business park's canteen before bringing it to the front door of a particular building. Srivathsan Canchi is one of "thousands" of office workers at the sprawling headquarters of technology firm Intuit who has been ordering his coffee from a robot. There's no need for the product manager to stand in line anymore, all the more useful since he injured his foot. Instead he opens the Starship Technologies app on his phone, and orders his caffeinated drink. Around 15 minutes later, a dog-sized robot on wheels rolls around the corner to meet Canchi at the front of his building.

California is one step closer to making driverless cars a reality. A bill signed on Thursday gives self-driving vehicles the freedom to travel on public roads without steering wheels, brake pedals or accelerators and most importantly, without human drivers. However, the new legislation only applies to a pilot project by the Contra Costa Transportation Authority, who has chosen two sites in California for testing. A bill signed on Thursday gives self-driving the freedom to travel on public roads without steering wheels, brake pedals or accelerators and more importantly, without human drivers - such as the two shown testing Google' self-driving car A bill signed on Thursday gives self-driving vehicles the green light to travel on public roads without steering wheels, brake pedals or accelerators and most importantly, without human drivers. However, it only applies to a pilot project by the Contra Costa Transportation Authority, which has designated two sites for testing.

There is something special happening in a generic office park in an uninspiring suburb near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Inside, amid the low gray cubicles, clustered desks, and empty swivel chairs, an impossible 8-inch robot drone from an alien planet hovers chest-high in front of a row of potted plants. It is steampunk-cute, minutely detailed. I can walk around it and examine it from any angle. I can squat to look at its ornate underside.

Saving energy is a major concern. Hence, it is fundamental to design and construct buildings that are energy-efficient. It is known that the early stage of architectural design has a significant impact on this matter. However, it is complex to create designs that are optimally energy efficient, and at the same time balance other essential criterias such as economics, space, and safety. One state-of-the art approach is to create parametric designs, and use a genetic algorithm to optimize across different objectives. We further improve this method, by aggregating the solutions of multiple agents. We evaluate diverse teams, composed by different agents; and uniform teams, composed by multiple copies of a single agent. We test our approach across three design cases of increasing complexity, and show that the diverse team provides a significantly larger percentage of optimal solutions than single agents.