A four-story parking structure has collapsed in the United States city of New York on Tuesday, killing at least one worker and injuring five others who were in the building, authorities said. Emergency personnel deployed robotic devices after firefighters were pulled back from the fallen structure because of unstable conditions. Those robots continued to check the site for any further casualties, but authorities said they believed everyone who was in the building had been accounted for. No foul play was suspected. "We have no reason to believe that it was anything other than a structural collapse," City Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell told reporters.

New York (CNN Business)Talk of a possible Apple car is back. Apple (AAPL) hasn't commented publicly on its plans for the project, nicknamed Titan, so it's not clear exactly what will come of the effort. Some who follow the company think it could release a whole Apple-branded, electric, self-driving car. Others think it's more likely Apple will partner with existing automakers to sell an operating system (iDrive, maybe?), self-driving tools or other technology. There are some clues available, though.

This work reconsiders the concept of community-based trip sharing proposed by Hasan et al. (2018) that leverages the structure of commuting patterns and urban communities to optimize trip sharing. It aims at quantifying the benefits of autonomous vehicles for community-based trip sharing, compared to a car-pooling platform where vehicles are driven by their owners. In the considered problem, each rider specifies a desired arrival time for her inbound trip (commuting to work) and a departure time for her outbound trip (commuting back home). In addition, her commute time cannot deviate too much from the duration of a direct trip. Prior work motivated by reducing parking pressure and congestion in the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan, showed that a car-pooling platform for community-based trip sharing could reduce the number of vehicles by close to 60%. This paper studies the potential benefits of autonomous vehicles in further reducing the number of vehicles needed to serve all these commuting trips. It proposes a column-generation procedure that generates and assembles mini routes to serve inbound and outbound trips, using a lexicographic objective that first minimizes the required vehicle count and then the total travel distance. The optimization algorithm is evaluated on a large-scale, real-world dataset of commute trips from the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan. The results of the optimization show that it can leverage autonomous vehicles to reduce the daily vehicle usage by 92%, improving upon the results of the original Commute Trip Sharing Problem by 34%, while also reducing daily vehicle miles traveled by approximately 30%. These results demonstrate the significant potential of autonomous vehicles for the shared commuting of a community to a common work destination.

EVENT: The UCI Forum for the Academy and the Public will host a two-day conference on "The Future of the Future: The Ethics and Implications of AI." Keynote speaker Bruce Sterling, an award-winning science fiction author, and an interdisciplinary and international panel of writers, academics and communicators will tackle an advance in technology that touches our everyday lives: artificial intelligence. INFORMATION: All events are free and open to the public, but please RSVP here. Visitor parking is available in the Student Center Parking Structure (grid D5 on campus map) and in the Mesa Parking Structure (grid D3 on campus map) for $13 per day or $2 per hour. Media planning to attend should contact Pat Harriman at 949-824-9055 or pharrima@uci.edu. BACKGROUND: The UCI Forum for the Academy and the Public is a collaborative project of the literary journalism program, the School of Humanities and the School of Law that bridges the university and the public via conferences and pop-ups that take on the most pressing issues of our time.

Ariel Moore exhaled sharply and lifted her arms to the sky. "I have arrived alive!" she said to no one in particular. This should not be notable. Moore just took a half-mile ride in a six-seat shuttle, one of several that run in a loop between her office in downtown Detroit and the garage where she parks her car. But on that sunny June day, she and her colleagues at real estate company Bedrock also did something quietly remarkable.