Sidewalk robots are set to help some of their airborne counterparts with deliveries in Dallas under an agreement between key players in the industry.

Serve Robotics, which develops automated four-wheeled machines, unveiled a pilot partnership to work with Wing, a drone delivery company, to help improve the efficiency of transporting orders, according to statement. The effort, which marks Serve’s entry into Texas, is set to arrive in the coming months.

“Together, Serve and Wing share an ambitious vision for reliable and affordable robotic delivery at scale,” Ali Kashani, CEO of Serve, said in a statement. “Our end-to-end robotic delivery solution will be the most efficient mode for the significant majority of deliveries.”

The partnership is addressing a challenge for some deliveries: getting the orders to a place where drones can launch. The flying devices need space at pick-up areas, which can be challenging in crowded urban settings, while sidewalk robots are built to navigate city streets, even as the range can be limited.

Under the new arrangement, Serve delivery robots will take restaurant orders curbside and deliver them to a drone “Autoloader” to transfer the meals. From there, the package will then be aerial delivered to customers up to six miles away.

By leveraging the strengths of both technologies, Serve and Wing will enable more reliable food delivery, the statement said.

“Through this pilot partnership, Wing hopes to reach more merchants in highly-congested areas while supporting Serve as it works to expand its delivery radius,” Adam Woodworth, CEO at Wing, said in the statement.

Serve operates its delivery service in Los Angeles and also has done a pilot in Vancouver, British Columbia. Serve, spun off from Uber in 2021 as an independent company, has completed deliveries for partners such as Uber Eats and 7-Eleven. Wing, which operates in the Dallas area and assists Wal-Mart with deliveries, became a subsidiary of Alphabet, the parent of Google, in 2018.

Dallas is no stranger to sidewalk robots. For example, the University of Texas at Dallas has enabled deliveries of meals via the autonomous machines.

2024 The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Tech giant Oracle on Wednesday said it plans to invest more than $6.5 billion on cloud services data centers in Malaysia, joining a list of US titans rushing to build up their AI infrastructure in Southeast Asia.

The firm said the cloud region would help organizations in the country modernize their applications, migrate their workload to the cloud and innovate with data, analytics and artificial intelligence.

Oracle is working to expand its cloud infrastructure business globally. The company recently projected it will surpass $100 billion in revenue in fiscal 2029, driven by increasing demand for cloud services.

Malaysia’s new cloud region will be the firm’s third in Southeast Asia, following two facilities in neighboring Singapore.

“Malaysia offers unique growth opportunities for organizations looking to accelerate their expansion with the latest digital technologies,” Garrett Ilg, Oracle’s executive vice president for Japan and Asia Pacific, said in a statement.

“Our multi-billion dollar investment affirms our commitment to Malaysia as a regional gateway for cloud infrastructure as well as a comprehensive suite of software as a service applications deployed within Malaysia.”

The statement also quoted Malaysia’s Investment, Trade and Industry Minister Tengku Zafrul Abdul Aziz as welcoming the investment, saying it would help firms with innovative and cutting-edge AI and cloud technologies to boost their global competitiveness.

“Oracle’s decision to establish a public cloud region in Malaysia underscores Malaysia’s infrastructure readiness, and its growing position as a premier Southeast Asian destination for digital investments,” he added.

Oracle is the latest global tech giant to announce major digital investments in Southeast Asia. Google-parent Alphabet said in May it would invest $2 billion to house the firm’s first data center in Malaysia.

Google on Monday said it plans to invest $1 billion to build digital infrastructure in Thailand, including a new data center.

Amazon and Microsoft have also announced investments worth billions of dollars in the region as demand for AI hots up.

Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim on Tuesday announced that the country plans to develop a National Cloud Policy.

Anwar said it would focus on four core areas including boosting public service innovation and efficiency as well as strengthening user trust and data security.

The government would also set up a National Artificial Intelligence Office to coordinate all initiatives related to AI technology.

This, Anwar added, was in line with efforts to position the nation as a competitive player in the global AI landscape.

© 2024 AFP

A Brazilian judge on Tuesday ordered the unblocking of the bank accounts of Elon Musk’s X in the country after the social media platform agreed to pay more than $5 million in fines.

The ruling by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes paves the way for the suspension of X to be lifted in Brazil, where it has been off-limits to users since August 31 in a standoff over disinformation between the judge and Musk.

Moraes ordered X shut down in Latin America’s biggest country after Musk refused to remove dozens of right-wing accounts and then failed to name a new legal representative in the country as ordered.

In his latest decision, the judge ordered Brazil’s central bank to unblock X’s bank accounts so it can receive transfers and “immediately make payment of the fines indicated.”

X had informed the court it would pay fines to the tune of some $5.2 million, according to the ruling.

High-profile judge Moraes has been engaged in a long feud with Tesla and SpaceX owner Musk as part of his drive to crack down on disinformation in Brazil.

The clash between the Brazilian court and the billionaire has morphed into a high-stakes tussle testing the limits of both freedom of expression and corporate responsibility in South America’s largest country.

X had more than 22 million users in Brazil before the ban, which was put into place on August 31.

The company has in the last week started complying with the Brazilian court’s conditions to get reactivated.

Musk has repeatedly hit out at Moraes in social media posts, calling him an “evil dictator” and dubbing him “Voldemort” after the villain from the “Harry Potter” series.

© 2024 AFP

How would you try to make a good impression at a job interview? Beyond the obvious (making eye contact, smiling, and attempting to appear knowledgeable and competent), what other tactics might you deploy?

One subtle approach some jobseekers might take involves the use of social identity. Humans are notoriously cliquey—establishing some shared sense of belonging with a new acquaintance can establish feelings of closeness and trust, and might result in favorable treatment.

Perhaps you have in mind an interviewee with blond hair and blue eyes, who notices the interviewer shares similar features. Is the interviewee recommended to casually suggest that the two can therefore look forward to an effective working relationship?

Of course not. These days, such a strategy thankfully seems improbable, not only because of its moral repugnance, but also because it is hardly likely to work. (It feels less improbable that it might have been used in previous centuries, possibly with success, at job interviews in the world of colonial bureaucracy, for example.)

But other identities, especially political leanings, can play a big part in helping us to form connections—and use them to our advantage.

Shared identity does not only apply to sensitive characteristics such as race and gender. In fact, our social identities are multidimensional and include some traits regarded as more frivolous. As former Labor MP Frank Roy put it: “Monday to Friday, my body belongs to the trade union movement. Saturday my heart belongs to Celtic. And Sunday, my soul belongs to the Catholic Church.”

With most people you might meet, you are a clique member on some dimensions, but an outsider on others.

In recent research, I explored whether people deploy identity characteristics in strategic ways. I ran an economic experiment, creating scenarios where one person’s success depends on how someone else treats them.

Job interviews are like this, as the interviewee’s success depends on the interviewer’s decision. But there are many other examples of how this could work in business and our wider lives. For instance, an Airbnb host’s profitability depends on guests choosing to do business with them.

In my experiment, involving 416 students in the UK, interactions consisted of a decision-maker selecting amounts of real money to transfer to an “applicant,” who I will refer to as a dependent.

Crucially, before their interaction, the dependent could select which of several identity characteristics to reveal to the decision-maker, in the same way as an Airbnb host picks which details to show on their profile.

They made this decision with full awareness of the decision-maker’s characteristics, understanding which revelations would mark them as an in-group member and which would set them apart in the out-group. Dependents also reported how they believed the decision-maker would treat them had they chosen to reveal each of their available characteristics.

The data made it possible to check how accurate these beliefs were, and whether dependents’ choices about what to reveal led to higher transfers than they would have obtained by revealing other characteristics.

Political leanings

The results showed decision-makers gave preferential treatment to in-group dependents, but the level of this favoritism depended on which dimension of identity I looked at. By far the strongest favoritism was based on political identity.

In the experiment, one of the things dependents could reveal was whether they supported or opposed Brexit. Decision-makers who were Remainers acted extremely generously towards Remainers and harshly towards Brexiters. Those who were Brexiters did the opposite.

Decision-makers’ in-group favoritism based on other characteristics, such as race and gender, tended to be much milder. This could be because people find discrimination based on race or sex to be distasteful or morally unacceptable—especially when they know their behavior is being observed. Political leanings, on the other hand, might be said to be a choice.

Importantly, dependents correctly anticipated that political identity would have the biggest impact. Consequently, they had a very strong tendency, when they knew their view on Brexit matched the decision-maker’s, to reveal it—and to conceal it when they knew their views diverged. In contrast, dependents were rather reluctant to reveal shared race or gender, perceiving this to be less beneficial.

On average, dependents profited from their decisions, obtaining better treatment from decision-makers than would have occurred had they randomly selected what to reveal. So the deliberate use of social identity appears to be an effective strategy.

Overall, this research shows people often use their identity, especially their political stances, strategically in their interactions with, for example, potential employers or business contacts.

In today’s world, political identity has become one of our strongest dividing lines and people mostly interact with like-minded others. But it is worth thinking about how strategically emphasizing shared political affiliations to strengthen a relationship might actually be making this polarization even worse.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.