Weekly output: Most Innovative Companies, Serve Robotics, Android 17, United Airlines’ ambitions, Polymarket’s pop-up bar

CHICAGO–This is one of my favorite cities in the U.S., but it doesn’t show up in my work travel as often as I’d like. So I’m delighted that the Online News Association decided to move its annual conference from late summer to early spring and then stage this year’s event here–in a hotel that should be familiar to everybody who’s seen The Fugitive.

Patreon readers got a bonus post that I’d meant to have written weeks earlier: a recap of MWC Barcelona in which I also gave away a global eSIM to the first reader to ask for it.

3/24/2026: The most innovative robotics and engineering companies of 2026, Fast Company

This list, the product of months of research and editorial back-and-forth, finally emerged online this week. And then we had to run a quick correction after one of the companies honored said that we’d mentioned an achievement that they did not want disclosed.

3/25/2026: Delivery Robots Have a Mapping Problem, PCMag

I sat down in a hotel lobby in Austin during SXSW with MJ Burk Chun, co-founder and vice president of product and design at Serve Robotics, to talk about the issues that company is working to address as it tries to scale up having four-wheeled robots cart food deliveries to customers.

3/27/2026: Google Ships Latest Android 17 Beta. Here’s What’s New, PCMag

In between having so many longer stories to write, I was happy to get one that I could bang out in an hour or so.

3/28/2026: United’s New Upgrades Aim to Keep You Online and Fully Charged at 35,000 Feet, PCMag

My week started with me flying to another one of United’s hubs–with the airline covering my airfare and lodging–for its United Elevated event at LAX. In addition to looping me into UA’s ambitions for its onboard product, this event doubled as a reunion with some of the avgeek journalists I met at Cranky Dorkfest in September and with my former Washington Post colleague Lori Aratani, who interviewed United CEO Scott Kirby onstage Tuesday morning.

3/29/2026: Pints meet prop bets: Polymarket’s “Situation Room” pop-up bar in DC, Ars Technica

I thought I saw an opportunity to write for this occasional client for the first time since the summer of 2023; fortunately, my editor then and now agreed.

Weekly output: Robust.ai, United Airlines Starlink rollout, Ookla speed test rankings, UpScrolled, Shop with Points fraud risk, commercial space stations

This past week had me flying a long distance to trade snow for sand, in the form of Web Summit Qatar. This coming week will also have me flying from snow to sand, but not nearly as far: I’m headed to Las Vegas for the customer-experience company Medallia’s annual conference. (The organizers of each event are covering my travel costs.)

2/2/2026: Automation in the wild: Why real environments break perfect models, Web Summit Qatar

My one panel at Web Summit’s Qatar conference had me quizzing John Spinale, chief strategy officer at Robust.ai, about how that company has gone about designing robots to help ease the work of humans in warehouses.

2/2/2026: United Airlines: More Than 25% of Our Daily Departures Now Offer Starlink Wi-Fi, PCMag

I was able to add some context to this post because I’m an avgeek and know there’s a volunteer-run site tracking the state of United’s fleet–a site that I wrote about nine years ago.

2/3/2026: Latest Speed Tests Put T-Mobile Ahead of Rival Carriers, PCMag

I’ve been wondering why Ookla issues scores for AT&T’s fiber broadband, ignoring the rest of that company’s residential broadband services, while it grades other providers on a company-wide basis, and this time I asked Ookla far enough ahead of time to get a clear answer to include in my writeup of this survey.

2/4/2026: CEO of Would-Be TikTok Rival UpScrolled: We Won’t Censor Anybody, PCMag

Watching UpScrolled founder and CEO Issam Hijazi go on at Web Summit Qatar’s opening night about how that social platform would not practice censorship reminded me of all of the other times I’ve seen other social-networking executives say versions of that and then be proved wrong by reality.

2/4/2026: Shop on Amazon? Watch Out for This Sneaky Credit Card Points Scam, PCMag

I had started reporting this post in late December, then had to set it aside for CES, then had to set it aside for other pressing deadlines, and finally filed it on the last day of January.

2/6/2026: Space Startups to NASA: Hurry Up and Pick Someone to Build ISS Replacement, PCMag

Appropriately enough, considering a prior topic of my coverage this week, I finished and filed this post via Starlink from my Qatar Airways flight back to Dulles.

How easy is to persuade a large language model?

The Interchange Forum for Reflecting on
Intelligent Systems (IRIS @Stuttgart_IRIS @Uni_Stuttgart) invites all interested students and university staff to their next IRIS colloquium on March 26 at 2 PM in the room UN 302.101, where Mara Seyfert will talk about uncertainty and robustness against persuasion in large language models.

#LargeLanguageModels #AI #GPT #GPT4 #RobustnessAgainstPersuasion #AIResearch #MachineLearning #LLMs #ArtificialIntelligence #TechTalk #RobustAI #DataScience #AIethics #Innovation

Excited to attend my first PhD defence at TU Delft: Daniël Vos will be defending his thesis "Decision Tree Learning: Algorithms for Robust Prediction and Policy Optimization", containing work he did under supervision of Prof. Dr. Ir. R.L. Lagendijk and Dr. Ir. Sicco Verwer.

#AcademicMastodon #AcademicChatter #PhDLife #Delft #TUDelft #DelftUniversityOfTechnology #Dissertation #Defence #PhD #PhDDefence #DecisionTrees #Optimization #Optimisation #Algorithms #ExplainableAI #RobustOptimization #RobustAI #Defense #PhDDefense

Share with us your research on #generativeAI and #KnowledgeGraphs!

Deadline approaching:
Workshop on Generative AI and Knowledge Graphs (GenAIK 2025), co-located with COLING 2025.

Submission deadline: 5 November 2024

🌐 Website: https://genetasefa.github.io/GenAIK2025/

@GenAIK @GenAsefa @fizise @fiz_karlsruhe @albertmeronyo #coling2025 #genaik2025 #AI #SemanticWeb #llms #explainableAI #robustAI #robustLLMs

Over 100 #PhD students from across Europe joined the ELLIS Doctoral Symposium #EDS2024 in Paris this year. A recap of the vibrant five-day event, themed ‘AI and Sustainability,’ featuring keynotes by top #AI experts, poster sessions, and an industry fair: https://ellis.eu/news/over-100-phd-students-from-across-europe-gather-in-paris-for-this-year-s-ellis-doctoral-symposium

And plans for 2025 are already in full swing: Next year’s symposium will be hosted by our #ELLISUnit in #Warsaw at IDEAS NCBR. The theme: #RobustAI. Stay tuned!

#MachineLearning #Sustainability #ELLISPhD #PhDProgram

Curious about attending the workshops organized by our #ELLISProgram ‘Robust Machine Learning’ this summer? Then save the dates now!

- ELLIS Robust ML Workshop 2024: June 27-28, Helsinki 🇫🇮
- ELLIS Robust LLMs Workshop 2024: July 29-30, Oxford 🇬🇧

For more information and updates on the programs, check out this page: https://sites.google.com/view/robustml2024/

Learn more about the program & the researchers who are part of it here: https://ellis.eu/programs/robust-machine-learning-group

#ELLISRobustML #RobustAI #AI #ML #MachineLearning

📢This winter semester, a SAIL lecture series will be held on the topic of "Robust AI".

👉It will kick off on 2nd November at 4 pm with Prof. Barbara Hammer giving a talk on "How to Attack Neural Networks."🤩

➡️The lecture will take place online at: https://uni-bielefeld.zoom-x.de/j/64775735478?pwd=TFpEUVFPME5EQXFKMHZHY1ZsM2Y4Zz09

#SAILnetwork #RobustAI #LectureSeries