With billions of books, news stories, and documents online, there's never been a better time to be reading -- if you have time to sift through all the options. "There's a ton of text on the internet," says Justin Solomon, an assistant professor at MIT. "Anything to help cut through all that material is extremely useful." With the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and his Geometric Data Processing Group at MIT, Solomon recently presented a new technique for cutting through massive amounts of text at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). Their method combines three popular text-analysis tools -- topic modeling, word embeddings, and optimal transport -- to deliver better, faster results than competing methods on a popular benchmark for classifying documents. If an algorithm knows what you liked in the past, it can scan the millions of possibilities for something similar.

Forget vending machines, PepsiCo is testing a way to bring snacks directly to college students. The firm says it will start making deliveries with self-driving robots at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. Students will be able to order Baked Lay's, SunChips or Bubly sparkling water on an app, and then meet the six-wheeled robot at more than 50 locations on campus. The Snackbots: PepsiCo says it will start making snack deliveries with the robots on Thursday. Students will be able to order Baked Lay's, SunChips or Bubly sparkling water on an app, and then meet the six-wheeled robot at more than 50 locations on campus.

Snackbot is the first snack-delivering robot in the U.S. to be backed by a major food and beverage company. The snackbot is an outdoor, self-driving robot. Students at University of the Pacific are about to have a futuristic dream come true: a robot that delivers you snacks. PepsiCo's Hello Goodness brand, which was created in 2015 to provide healthier snacks and beverages to consumers on the go, partnered with the San Francisco Bay Area-based Robby Technologies to bring this self-driving snack robot -- or "snackbot" -- to life. From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., students at the private university in Stockton, California, can order food and drinks to one of more than 50 locations across campus through the snackbot app.

Like a zombie, it keeps coming back. Like zombie movies, it enjoys growing popularity by defying logic and common sense. Chicago and Stockton (CA) have launched the most recent proposals for Universal Basic Income (UBI). That the idea appeals to cities that have gone bankrupt or have unsustainable financial prospects should give us pause. Universal Basic Income is "…a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement."

In our high-vocational stress household, the most volcanic tension usually erupts over control of the PlayStation. I'm still – still – absorbed in the game of Fallout 4 I started a year ago, with thousands of hours spent on perfecting the aesthetics of post-apocalyptic settlement-building. My partner prefers a wordless immersion in the splattery worlds of first-person shooters and war games but we reconcile over rounds of two-player Diablo, fighting demons and hoarding treasure together. I've come a long way from the handheld Donkey Kong I cherished as a child, or the Pitfall caves I explored on a home PC, or the small parties of teens that gathered to play Sonic the Hedgehog on the loungeroom TV. The demands of fun are more complex now – but the need for fun remains the same.

A bus carrying Tesla employees crashed into a vehicle on a California highway Friday morning, killing an off-duty law enforcement officer, police said. The bus, which was carrying more than 50 employees of the electric car company, was driving on a freeway east of the Tesla factory in Fremont when it rear-ended a Volkswagen Beetle around 7am, crushing the car and killing the driver, according to the California Highway Patrol (CHP). One passenger on the bus suffered minor injuries but was treated on the scene, said CHP spokesman Derek Reed. The bus was contracted by Tesla and was driving to Stockton, a city 50 miles east of the company's main facility in Fremont. "We are aware of an accident this morning involving an independently-operated shuttle carrying Tesla employees and another vehicle," the company said in a statement.

The next big goal in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is to make them fully autonomous. The belief is that this will be the only way drones can deliver goods to customers from a mobile platform or return to a warship moving at high speeds in the ocean. Researchers at University of Cincinnati's College of Engineering and Applied Sciences are tackling the issue of drones and precision landing by using a type of artificial intelligence, which they call fuzzy logic. Researchers test drones using fuzzy logic, a type of artificial intelligence, in order for precision landing on moving targets. Source: University of Cincinnati "[A drone] has to land within a designated area, with a small margin of error," says Manish Kumar, associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Cincinnati.