Buildings under construction are a maze of half-completed structures, gantries, stacked materials, and busy workers -- tracking what's going on can be a nightmare. Scaled Robotics has designed a robot that can navigate this chaos and produce 3D progress maps in minutes, precise enough to detect that a beam is just a centimeter or two off. Bottlenecks in construction aren't limited to manpower and materials. Understanding exactly what's been done and what needs doing is a critical part of completing a project in good time, but it's the kind of painstaking work that requires special training and equipment. Or, as Scaled Robotics showed today at TC Disrupt Berlin 2019, specially trained equipment.

The company launched an AI-powered tool this month that sends investors personalized emails, including tailored educational resources, based on their clicks on the TD Ameritrade website, their customer profile and their investor portfolio. Before, investors would get generic marketing emails that would often be unrelated to their particular investment strategy, Mr. Sankaran said. The tool was created by a team of eight AI experts at the company. Building AI tools in house is preferable to working with a vendor because they need to be customized specifically for the financial sector, Mr. Sankaran said. The same AI engine also identifies news articles from outside sources that might make a particular company's stock price move up or down and affect a TD Ameritrade investor's portfolio.

From the moment that Donald Trump set foot on the Trump Tower escalator, the promise of mass deportations for undocumented immigrants was a pillar of his presidential campaign. This is one promise that the current administration has managed to keep, with ICE enforcement efforts skyrocketing since Trump took office in January 2017. While the president's executive orders on immigration have played well with his political base, they've caused havoc with a number of US industries, from tourism to construction. But nowhere are the detrimental effects of these policies more clearly illustrated than in the agricultural sector. What's more, the current state of agricultural automation appears woefully unprepared to fully supplement the loss of migrant labor.

As a postdoc, plant biologist Christopher Topp was not satisfied with the usual way of studying root development: growing plants on agar dishes and placing them on flatbed scanners to measure root lengths and angles. Five years later, the idea of using detailed imaging to study plant form and function has caught on. The use of drones and robots is also on the rise as researchers pursue the'quantified plant'--one in which each trait has been carefully and precisely measured from nearly every angle, from the length of its root hairs to the volatile chemicals it emits under duress. Such traits are known as an organism's phenotype, and researchers are looking for faster and more comprehensive ways of characterizing it. From February 10 to 14, scientists will gather in Tucson, Arizona, to compare their methods.