How does cloudy weather affect a grid powered by solar energy? How do we ensure that electricity is delivered to the consumer if a grid is powered by wind and the wind does not blow? What's the best course of action if a bird hits a plane engine on takeoff? How can you predict the behavior of a cyber attacker? A senior research scientist in MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering, Annaswamy spends most of her research time dealing with decision-making under uncertainty.

Elon Musk said he's'very confident' that Tesla will have autonomous robo-taxis on the road as soon as next year. The billionaire tech mogul showed off a Tesla ride-sharing app at the company's Autonomy Day with investors at its Palo Alto, California headquarters on Monday. Not long after Tesla's robo-taxis are operational, Musk also predicts the firm will eliminate the steering wheel and pedals from its vehicles by 2021. Elon Musk said he's'very confident' that Tesla will have autonomous robo-taxis on the road as soon as next year. Pictured is a mock up of Tesla's ride-sharing app, shown at Autonomy Day'I feel very confident predicting autonomous robo-taxis for Tesla next year,' Musk said on stage.

A private hire firm has called for standardization of regulation across all local authorities to ensure safety in future robo-taxi services. The call came in an interview with TU-Automotive by Andrew Wescott, head of regulatory and external affairs at Addison Lee, as he revealed the company's finding from the MERGE Greenwich project that carried out simulated autonomous vehicle ride-sharing trials in south-east London and sought consumer opinion. Wescott said the project showed that a set of national standards for private hire operators should be introduced across the UK and a national database of licensed private hire drivers to be set up. He said: "There are some authorities that are, let's say, a bit freer in licensing and others that are a bit stricter." While admitting several trials of this type are currently being staged in the UK, he said: "The important thing for us is there's a national approach that is then implemented at a local level. Because otherwise you might get some challenges in terms of the way you operate and also the way in which the transport system itself works. We're not going to go overnight from manual to autonomous, there'll be a staged process. Also, there'll be a need to integrate that with existing transport networks. That needs that level of national structure first."

We are rapidly heading towards a future where the concept of having a family car parked out in the garage will become about as common as owning a horse and cart. Private vehicle ownership will shrink dramatically over the next couple of decades, replaced for the most part by Autonomous ride-sharing services like Waymo, where you simply push a button on your phone, and within minutes a Driverless Taxi arrives to pick you up and take you to your destination. Yeap it does, but the technology is already well and truly here, with Waymo the self-driving car division of Google's parent company Alphabet Inc having been busy at work perfecting the art of Autonomous driving since 2009. The Waymo fleet has already accumulated 8 million miles of travel on real world roads without a human behind the wheel, and the company is aiming to launch a paid Driverless ride-sharing service in Arizona before the end of this year. The Waymo ride-sharing service will for the most part be just like Uber, where you hail a ride on your phone, and a car magically appears at your location.

Artificial intelligence technologies aren't just being used to help computers more quickly recognize dogs in photos. Several businesses like Mastercard and fast-growing drone companies are exploring ways that AI technologies like machine learning can better verify people's identities and process insurance claims. Executives from companies like ride-hailing company Lyft and German energy company Innogy, a subsidiary of energy giant RWE, explained different ways they are exploring AI technologies on Thursday at the Bootstrap Labs Applied AI Conference in San Francisco. Here's some interesting ways these businesses are using the technology. During the past few years, insurance companies like Allstate have been using drones to inspect homes for storm damage.

The Internet of Things (IoT) appeared all over the news throughout 2017, whether that was due to the development of new devices, cyber attacks using unsecured devices or even new IoT divisions from companies like Dell and Rolls-Royce, we have definitely heard a lot about the emerging sector. Of course this comes as no surprise, as the oft-quoted Gartner prediction goes: there will be over 20 billion connected things by 2020. The increase in connected devices over the past year, from toasters to toothbrushes, shows we may be getting even closer to the forecast. As the opportunity within the IoT sector continues to rise, businesses globally have been taking a leap to developing unique devices or searching for a way to get in on the action with emerging software or platform solutions. Here are some IoT trends to watch out for in 2018, according to the experts.

The Internet of Things (IoT) appeared all over the news throughout 2017, whether that was due to the development of new devices, cyber attacks using unsecured devices or even new IoT divisions from companies like Dell and Rolls-Royce, we have definitely heard a lot about the emerging sector. Of course this comes as no surprise, as the oft-quoted Gartner prediction goes: there will be over 20 billion connected things by 2020. The increase in connected devices over the past year, from toasters to toothbrushes, shows we may be getting even closer to the forecast. As the opportunity within the IoT sector continues to rise, businesses globally have been taking a leap to developing unique devices or searching for a way to get in on the action with emerging software or platform solutions. Here are some IoT trends to watch out for in 2018, according to the experts.

The Internet of Things (IoT) appeared all over the news throughout 2017, whether that was due to the development of new devices, cyber attacks using unsecured devices or even new IoT divisions from companies like Dell and Rolls-Royce, we have definitely heard a lot about the emerging sector. Of course this comes as no surprise, as the oft-quoted Gartner prediction goes: there will be over 20 billion connected things by 2020. The increase in connected devices over the past year, from toasters to toothbrushes, shows we may be getting even closer to the forecast. As the opportunity within the IoT sector continues to rise, businesses globally have been taking a leap to developing unique devices or searching for a way to get in on the action with emerging software or platform solutions. Here are some IoT trends to watch out for in 2018, according to the experts.

Volkswagen has unveiled the electric van that's a key part of its MOIA autonomous vehicle ride-sharing service. The van-pooling MOIA service will launch in Hamburg in 2018 with 200 vans, letting passengers enter a departure point and destination in an app. "We've set ourselves the goal of taking more than a million cars off the roads in Europe and the USA by 2025," said MOIA CEO Ole Harms. MOIA's aim is to eventually put autonomous, purpose-built vehicles on the road without drivers. At Disrupt, the company said that the business can still be profitable without the need for autonomous operation. MOIA also revealed more details about the ride-pooling service, including pricing.

This paper focuses on modeling ride requests and their variations over location and time, based on analyzing extensive real-world data from a  ride-sharing service. We introduce a graph model that captures the spatial and temporal variability of ride requests and the potentials for ride pooling. We discover these ride request graphs exhibit a well known property called  "densification power law" often found in real graphs modelling human behaviors. We show the pattern of ride requests and the potential of ride pooling for a city can be characterized by the densification factor of the ride request graphs. Previous works have shown that it is possible to automatically generate synthetic versions of these graphs that exhibit a given densification factor. We present an algorithm for automatic generation of synthetic ride request graphs that match quite well the densification factor of ride request graphs from actual ride request data.