Uber's self driving cars on the streets this month

Sometime early this year, Uber's self-driving car was tested around the Pittsburgh area. And Now, the goodnews is that the company just announced that their self cars will start taking passengers as soon as this month after testing the prototype self driven car three months ago.

This comes in accordance to the plan to build an autonomous vehicle empire, Uber plans to launch more than a million self-driving cars to replace human drivers, with around 100 Volvo XC90s modified for autonomy to start taking passengers. An engineer will be on the driver’s seat to start, as well as a co-pilot to take down observations. A “liquid-cooled” computer will also be recording trip and map data in the trunk. Passengers who take the experimental self-driving cars will get their ride for free.

Uber’s self-driving car. Image source: Uber

Uber plans to install self-driving kits into existing vehicles rather than building autonomous cars from the ground up. Earlier this month, Uber acquired Otto, a company that works on retrofitting heavy-duty freight haulers on the highway into self-driving trucks.

Otto’s LIDAR (light detection and ranging) sensor technology detects infrared emissions to monitor speed is geared to be adapted for use in Uber’s autonomous vehicles.

Audi’s New Suspension System Converts Potholes Into Energy

Audi has designed an active suspension system called eROT, which allows the electromechanical dampers to store the energy from bumps and potholes for use in the car. It also makes the ride far smoother, adapting the car to the road.

The automotive industry’s ‘green revolution’ hopes to make electric vehicles far more efficient. Every bit of force under the hood should be used to its maximum potential. That why you have concepts such as regenerative braking, which return some of the energy used in braking back into the system.

But Audi is looking at tapping another roadway staple: potholes. It has created a system called eROT, an active suspension system that stores the energy when a driver hit potholes, bumps, and other forces that induce kinetic energy on a car.

The eROT system was created by replacing hydraulic shocks with electromechanical ones. The electromechanical rotary dampers in the 48-volt electrical system allow the car to use this kinetic energy.

Audi

This is all accomplished by having a lever arm absorbing the motion of the wheel carrier, which is then transmitted to an electric motor via a series of gears. The electric motor then transforms this into electricity.

On average, this system is able to pump out 100 to 150 watts. That varies depending on road condition. For example, a newly paved highway will generate as little as 3 watts, and a rough country road as much as 613 watts. According to Audi, this would translate to CO² savings of up to three grams per kilometer (4.8 g/mi).

But this system doesn’t just store energy from potholes. eROT also makes your drive better. The system allows the dampers to adapt to the road conditions and the driver’s driving style. These new dampers also free up space in the lugage compartment.

Drive better, and enjoy the potholes along the way. Seems like a pretty good deal.

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China launches the world's first quantum satellite into space

China is on the verge of launching if possible fully prepared for the launch of its quantum-enabled satellite for some time now. And that has made it not only a Chinese first, but a world first.

Now, China has actually done it! Just this past Tuesday, August 16, China launched its Micius Quantum Space Satellite from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert.

Micius was named after a fifth century B.C. Chinese philosopher and scientist who was one of the first in the world conducting optical experiments.

The satellite contains the equipment needed for quantum key distribution, creating entangled photons that will change when a third party tries to observe them. This means that when someone tries to eavesdrop, the message will be altered and the interception will be obvious.

“The newly-launched satellite marks a transition in China’s role — from a follower in classic information technology (IT) development to one of the leaders guiding future IT achievements,” said Pan Jianwei, chief scientist of the project, to Chinese state media.

Another kudos to the Chinese Government

Elon Musk’s OpenAI is Using Reddit to Teach An Artificial Intelligence How to Speak

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI just received a package took $2 billion to develop: NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang just delivered the first DGX-1 supercomputer to the non-profit organization, which is dedicated to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”

Jen-Hsun Huang with Elon Musk, and the DGX-1. NVIDIA.

The “AI supercomputer in a box” is packed with 170 teraflops of computing power—that’s equivalent to 250 conventional servers. NVIDIA says it’s a very fitting match: “The world’s leading non-profit artificial intelligence research team needs the world’s fastest AI system.”

“I thought it was incredibly appropriate that the world’s first supercomputer dedicated to artificial intelligence would go to the laboratory that was dedicated to open artificial intelligence,” Huang added.

The supercomputer will tackle the most difficult challenges facing the artificial intelligence industy…by reading through Reddit forums. And apparently, Reddit’s size was not a hindrance. In fact, the site’s size the main reason why the online community was specifically chosen as DGX-1’s training ground.

“Deep learning is a very special class of models because as you scale up, they always work better,” says OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy. 

The nearly two billion Reddit comments will be processed by DGX-1 in months instead of years, as the $129,000 desktop-sized box contains eight NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs (graphic processing units), 7 terabytes of SSD storage, and two Xeon processors, apart from the aforementioned 170 teraflops of performance.

DGX-1 will take on Reddit to learn faster and to chat more accurately. “You can take a large amount of data that would help people talk to each other on the internet, and you can train, basically, a chatbot, but you can do it in a way that the computer learns how language works and how people interact,” Karpathy said.

The supercomputer is also equipped to make things easier from the developers at OpenAI. “We won’t need to write any new code, we’ll take our existing code and we’ll just increase the size of the model,” says OpenAI scientist Ilya Sutskever. “And we’ll get much better results than we have right now.”

Dubai’s 3D-Printed ‘Office of the Future’ is Officially Open

Dubai's 3D-printed "Office of the Future" is now officially open: it will house the Dubai Future Foundation and will serve as a meeting place for international delegates. Take a look inside.

The “Office of the Future” is now officially open…but it won’t be serving as just any office.

Dubai’s 3D-printed building is a 2,700-square-foot, single-story structure printed out of a special mix of concrete, fiber reinforced plastic, and glass fiber reinforced gypsum. And it looks astounding.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum at the Office of the Future. 

It will serve to promote innovation and enhance communication, specifically as a meeting place for international delegates. It will also house the Dubai Future Foundation, a government initiative dedicated to solving modern society’s biggest challenges.

To that end, Austrian office furniture company Bene furnished its interiors with modern pieces.

Earlier this year, His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE of Dubai, inaugurated the building as part of his goal to put Dubai in the forefront of global innovation.

The futuristic structure took only 17 days to print—resulting in an 80% reduction on construction costs, 60% on labor, and 60% on waste.

Researchers Just Broke A World Record in Superfast 5G Technology

In the time to come, Information users are expected to transfer much more information over the spectrum. However, with its short supply, there is a need to find a way to transfer all this new data more efficiently without causing delays for everyone using the available spectrum.

In response to this insufficiency, many researchers have been conducting experiments using a form of 5G technology called Massive MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) which would allow for the simultaneous transfer of data with the use of multiple transmitters and receivers.

Recently, Steffen Malkowsky, together with his research colleagues from Lund University, Sweden, and the University of Bristol, UK,  has set a new world record for spectrum efficiency that overwhelms today’s existing 4G technology, 22-fold!

Achieving rates of 145.6 (bits/s)/Hz for 22 users, each modulated with 256-QAM, on a shared 20 MHz radio channel at 3.51 GHz with an 128-antenna massive MIMO array, this event presents an important step towards a new type of wireless communication. “Setting a new world record was a significant event as it demonstrated that it is possible to transmit 22 times more data compared to current wireless systems. Although the goal is for 5G to increase the total transmission capacity by a factor of 1,000, this is still a big step”, says Malkowsky. 

These results, however, are still on the developmental stages and practically not in use for now. The users were stationary while in reality, people and their phones are often in motion. Also, being in a highly controlled environment with no interference from other cellular signals, the tech’s performance may decline when applied in a real word setting.

So to test how well the technology works when the connected units are mobile, the researchers from Bristol will visit Lund at the end of August.  “This is more realistic, as people using their mobile phones don’t exactly sit still”, as Malkowsky pointed out.

Russia to build 6th-Generation Fighter Jet which features Swarms of Protector Drones To fly with it

Russia is set to build a sixth-generation fighter jet will operate in conjunction with drone swarms armed with electromagnetic cannons, an official said.


Though It may still be 10 years from today before Russia’s sixth-generation fighter jet will be ready but officials say that the aircraft will have its own swarm of drones flying beside it.

Vladimir Mikheev, an adviser to the deputy head of Radioelectronic Technologies Concern — part of the Moscow-based state corporation Rostec — said the fighter jet will be unveiled in 2025.

With a supersonic speed of about 4-5 Mach, the unmanned aircraft will be able to enter near space and reenter the atmosphere in a designated spot, hundreds of kilometers away from the place of the original entry.

The real fact is that Pilots will be assigned a drone to command depending on their rank. “Depending on the status, he [the pilot] is given several subordinate drones,” Mikheev says. “They, in their turn, understand –– they must protect, for example, lieutenant Petrov. But if colonel Ivanov is in the cockpit, the number of subordinate drones should be more, and so forth.”

The drone aircraft will also be equipped with high-frequency electromagnetic cannons — too powerful for manned aircraft to operate without hurting pilots — designed to knock out enemy radio signals from a distance of about six miles.



And meanwhile The U.S., , is also working on sixth-generation fighter designs after the introduction of the Lockheed Martin Corp.-made F-22 Raptor and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter fifth-generation aircraft, the latter of which is still in development.

But rather than create a single sixth-gen platform capable of overcoming today’s threats — cyber, electronic attack, anti-satellite, surface-to-air — the Air Force has signaled an interest in trying to develop new weapons such as directed energy and hypersonic missiles that can be installed on updated aircraft.

Here comes the World’s First 3D Printing Restaurant to Open in London

Food Ink, the world's first 3D printing restaurant will open in London at the end of July to serve 3D printed meals, in 3D style – but only for three days.

"Food Ink" which is the name of the restaurant promises a food revolution on the 25th, 26th, and 27th of July with a pop-up restaurant serving 3D printed culinary creations. The restaurant promises the evening to be a “one-of-a-kind gourmet experience…where fine cuisine meets art, philosophy and tomorrow’s technologies.”

The 3D dining experience will set you back £250 or about $330 for nine courses. The whole experience will be live streamed online so people at home can watch diners chow down on 3D printed dishes.

Not only will the food all be 3D printed but the cutlery, tables, and chairs will be similarly created.


Top chefs Antony Dobrzensky and Marcio Barradas from the famous La Boscana restaurant will be in charge of the creating the menu, and they hinted that the first course is said to be paired with virtual reality headsets to provide “an immersive and thrilling glimpse of the future.”

Convinced you have to take part of this futuristic dining experience? Well, you have to hurry. There will only be 10 tickets each evening and they will become available on Friday 15 July.

The pop-up restaurant will at 8 Dray Walk, E1 6NJ. Dinner will be served from 7:30pm each evening.

An Artificial Intelligence Watched 600 Hours of TV and Started to Accurately Predict What Happens Next.

An AI Watched 600 Hours of TV and Started to Accurately Predict What Happens Next.


MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory developed an algorithm that uses deep learning, which enables artificial intelligence (AI) to use patterns of human interaction to predict what will happen next. Researchers fed the program with videos featuring human social interactions and tested it to see if it “learned” well enough to be able to predict them.

The researchers’ weapons of choice? 600 hours of Youtube videos and sitcoms, including The Office, Desperate Housewives, and Scrubs. While this lineup may seem questionable, MIT doctoral candidate and project researcher Carl Vondrick reasons out that accessibility and realism were part of the criteria.

“We just wanted to use random videos from YouTube,” Vondrick said. “The reason for television is that it’s easy for us to get access to that data, and it’s somewhat realistic in terms of describing everyday situations.”Said Carl

They (the scientists) showed the computer videos of people who are one second away from doing one of these four Human emotional actions like hugging, kissing, high-fiving and handshaking. The AI was able to guess correctly 43% of the time compared to humans, who were right 71% of the time.


Giving AI the ability to understand visuals the way humans can could be an indicator to what would be efficient home assistants, as well as intelligent security cameras that could call an ambulance or the police ahead of time.

While this isn’t the first attempt at video prediction, it is the most accurate thus far. The reason is that, first, the new algorithm deviates from previous attempts at video predicting, wherein pixel-by-pixel representations were a priority. It predicts using abstract representation and focuses on the important signs: it learns on its own and uses “visual representations” to discriminate between visual cues that are important in social interactions from those that are not. It’s something that comes naturally to humans, but is far more complicated in AI.

“It’s not hugely different from some other things that people have done, but they’ve gotten substantially better results out of it than people have in this area before,” says Pedro Domingos, a machine learning expert and professor at the University of Washington.

Rats to become Super Sniffers as Scientists mutates their genes for that purpose.

Scientists are trying to create a new generation of rodents that can sniff out drugs or explosives which means that K-9 dogs might soon have some competition. U.S. scientists have mutated mice so that they are “super sniffers” for drugs and explosives.

This new generation of rodents was genetically altered to track down certain scents, according to a report at scientific journal Cell Reports.
“What we think we can do is make ‘super sniffers’ for particular odors,” said co-researcher Dr.Paul Feinstein. “We trick the animals to want to pay attention to one odor over many others.”
The mutated mice were exposed to two known odors – a chemical that has a sweet smell similar to jasmine and another that smells like peppermint. It turns out they can detect lower doses of these odors than non-mutated mice.
Scientists say the next step is to apply this research to detecting drugs or explosives.
“We want to create an explosive-detecting rat or mouse – and we could also do this for narcotics such as cocaine, for example,” said lead researcher Dr.Charlotte D’Hulst. “If we can find the receptor that is activated by cocaine, we could create ‘super-sniffing’ cocaine rodents.”

Researchers said they see the application of their study in a number of areas.

It could be used in military and defense, where the mutated rats could sniffing out TNT, the main explosive component of landmines.

The fragrance and flavour industry can also benefit from mice that are bred with human receptors for smelling particular odours by utilizing the same method for unique super rodents!

The mutated rodents could also be implanted with some sort of “bio-reactor” made up of nerve cells to sniff out human diseases from the chemical signatures they give off in blood or sweat.

As with any groundbreaking study, it will still take time before scientists could come out and give humans the mutated rat that they need. One could only remain hopeful.

137 Million Southeast Asian Workers Could Lose Their Jobs to Automation in the Next 20 Years.

137 million workers from five Southeast Asian countries are in danger of being replaced by automated systems in the next 20 years. The International Labour Organisation says that laborers working in the manufacturing industry, the garment industry most of all, are at the highest risk.
A study conducted by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that in the next 20 years, more than half of the workers in five Southeast Asian countries are highly likely to lose their jobs to automation—most specifically in the garment industry.

The countries on the danger list are Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, where 137 million workers are at high risk of being laid off in favor of technology. This number constitutes 56% of these countries’ salaried labor force, with workers in textiles, clothing, and footwear sectors being at the highest risk of being replaced by automated machines.

Sadly, as automation starts to become dominant, certain skills become obsolete, even when their costs were supposedly low enough. “Countries that compete on low-wage labour need to reposition themselves—price advantage is no longer enough,” said Deborah France-Massin, director for the ILO’s bureau for employers’ activities.

“Robots are becoming better at assembly, cheaper and increasingly able to collaborate with people,” the ILO said.