http://www.technologyreview.com/news/537556/why-googles-self-driving-bubble-cars-might-catch-on/

Why Google’s Self-Driving Bubble Cars Might Catch OnThe compact, speed-limited vehicles being tested by Google might have a better chance at success than automated versions of conventional cars.

By Mark Harris on May 18, 2015

Why It Matters

Practical autonomous vehicles could improve road safety and help people get around more efficiently.

Cars like this one will start driving themselves around Mountain View, California, this summer.

Google’s announcement Friday that it will test small, pod-style autonomous cars on public roads might seem surprising to

anyone enthusiastic about—or just familiar with–conventional cars. The vehicles look cute but hardly impact-resistant, and they have a top speed of only 25 miles per hour.

But some experts suspect that the unconventional two-seater vehicle, known within Google as “Prototype,” represents a practical strategy to get fully autonomous cars into everyday use. Google still has significant work to do before its software can handle all the situations a human driver can. But it will be easier to build, test, and market small vehicles for limited environments than to craft autonomous cars that can handle everything from high-speed freeway driving to city streets, they say.

“There’s going to be an enormous market for small autonomous vehicles,” says Gary Silberg, an auto industry analyst at the consulting firm KPMG. He cites city centers, airports, campuses, and amusement parks as places where vehicles much like those Google is just starting to test could fit in. “From a market perspective, it’s a huge opportunity,” he says.

Google first unveiled its compact car design last year, in what seemed like a change in strategy from its effort to make conventional cars that were capable of driving themselves (see “Lazy Humans Shaped Google’s New Autonomous Car”). On Friday Google said that the new design will be unleashed on the roads of the company’s hometown of Mountain View, California, this summer. Eventually, up to 100 vehicles will roam the town’s suburban streets.

Prototype’s low top speed qualifies it for the less stringent vehicle safety standards the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) applies to electric golf carts. The car must have lights, mirrors, and seat belts but is exempt from many of the crashworthiness standards and air-bag requirements of normal gas and electric vehicles. In Mountain View, it will be restricted to roads with a speed limit of 35 miles per hour or less.

That still gives the design a lot of scope as an urban taxi, says Bryant Walker Smith, an expert on autonomous vehicles at the University of South Carolina. “Almost the entire island of Manhattan between the expressways could be accommodated by a vehicle operating at 25 miles per hour,” he says. “Right there, you have several million people who could be serviced by a car like this.”

A slow, light car such as Prototype is also less apt to be involved in a catastrophic accident. Impacts are more likely to be gentle fender-benders rather than pile-ups, and there’s less potential to injure or kill pedestrians or cyclists. “A limited-environment low-speed vehicle will be technologically and socially viable sooner than a vehicle capable of operating anywhere,” says Smith.

But there are also drawbacks to focusing on such a limited vehicle. Tests of Prototype won’t give Google the experience with safety systems and crash tests it will need to design a more conventional autonomous car that can travel at higher speeds.

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http://www.technologyreview.com/news/537476/three-questions-for-twitter-and-now-super-cofounder-biz-stone/

Three Questions for Twitter (and now Super) Cofounder Biz StoneThe Twitter cofounder talks about his latest social app, Super, and why it looks like technicolor pop art.

By Rachel Metz on May 15, 2015

Why It Matters

Millions of us regularly use social apps and websites to communicate, and their purpose and makeup are constantly evolving.

Biz Stone

Biz Stone loves using technology to help people communicate. Sometimes it works really well: Twitter, which he cofounded, is used by 302 million people each month. Sometimes it doesn’t: Jelly, an app he cofounded in 2013 that lets people use text and an image to ask questions, never gained mass popularity.

Now Stone and Jelly cofounder Ben Finkel are trying again, this time with an app called Super that they launched in the fall and updated on Wednesday. As its name suggests, Super is fond of superlatives—users pick a brightly colored rectangle containing an all-capitalized word or phrase like “THE BEST,” “THE WORST,” or “I LOVE” and add their own message to it, plus a photo or an image that they can search for within the app.

Over lunch this week in San Francisco with Stone, his Super (and Jelly) cofounder Ben Finkel, and a small group of reporters, Rachel Metz, MIT Technology Review’s senior editor for mobile, asked him to talk about the failure of Jelly, the artsy inspiration behind Super’s bright, in-your-face look, and how he imagines social media fitting in with fast-maturing technologies in virtual and augmented reality.

Jelly, the question-and-answer app you launched publicly in early 2014, failed to take off. How did it lead to Super?

Three or four months into Jelly we just didn’t see it becoming a global phenomenon. It wasn’t fun enough. People were using it for homework, math problems. Like actually taking pictures of math problems. Which Ben was fine with because he was like, “Cool, I’ll help you solve this.” But I was like, “Ah, I don’t know how large this is going to get.” He wasn’t answering—he’d show them how to solve it. And a lot of people were asking, “What kind of spider is this?” and I was like, do we really want to be the kings of spider identification?

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http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2015/05/18/navy-develops-autonomous-air-launched-missile-for-fa-18/

Navy develops autonomous air-launched missile for F/A-18

By Kris Osborn

Published May 18, 2015

 (Lockheed Martin)

The Navy is working on a deal with Lockheed Martin to integrate its new, autonomously guided Long Range Anti-Ship Missile onto an F/A-18 Super Hornet aircraft, giving the fighter an increased ability to identify and strike targets at longer ranges from the air, service and Lockheed officials explained.

In development since with the Navy and the Pentagon’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the so-called LRASM weapon is being developed as a long-range air, surface and submarine-launched missile able to track and destroy targets autonomously or semi-autonomously.

Not much detail about its seeker technology, range or guidance systems is publically available – as much of the program is secret. However, Lockheed officials have said the weapon has an unclassified range of 200 nautical miles, a distance which is likely to be well short of its actual range.

Also, LRASM does use an autonomous guidance technology designed to allow the weapon to avoid obstacles in the air while in flight, Lockheed officials explained.

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http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/chinese-search-big-baidu-unveils-advanced-ai-article-1.2220947

Chinese search big Baidu unveils what it calls the world's smartest artificial intelligenceBY COLTER HETTICH

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Wednesday, May 13, 2015, 2:25 PM

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Watch out, Google and Microsoft: Baidu is coming for you in the artificial intelligence race.

Chinese web search giant Baidu unveiled its latest technology Monday, saying it had taken the lead in the global race for true artificial intelligence.

Minwa, the company's supercomputer, scanned more than 1 million images and taught itself to sort them into about 1,000 categories — and did so with 95.42% accuracy, the company claims, adding that no other computer has completed the task at that same level.Google's system scored a 95.2% and Microsoft's, a 95.06%, Baidu said.

All three companies' computers, however, exceed human performance.

The concept of "deep learning," or self-learning, algorithms is not unique to Minwa. Yet Baidu seems to have the upper hand and is not slowing down: the company has announced plans to build an even faster computer in the next 2 years, one capable of 7 quadrillion calculations per second.

Detailed results of Baidu's report can be viewed at: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1501.02876v3.pdfhttp://www.technologyreview.com/news/537436/baidus-artificial-intelligence-supercomputer-beats-google-at-image-recognition/

Baidu’s Artificial-Intelligence Supercomputer Beats Google at Image RecognitionA supercomputer specialized for the machine-learning technique known as deep learning could help software understand us better.

By Tom Simonite on May 13, 2015

Why It MattersDeep learning has produced breakthroughs in speech, image, and face recognition and could transform how we relate to computers.

Chinese search company Baidu built this computer to accelerate its artificial-intelligence research.

Chinese search giant Baidu says it has invented a powerful supercomputer that brings new muscle to an artificial-intelligence technique giving software more power to understand speech, images, and written language.

The new computer, called Minwa and located in Beijing, has 72 powerful processors and 144 graphics processors, known as GPUs. Late Monday, Baidu released a paper claiming that the computer had been used to train machine-learning software that set a new record for recognizing images, beating a previous mark set by Google.

“Our company is now leading the race in computer intelligence,” said Ren Wu, a Baidu scientist working on the project, speaking at the Embedded Vision Summit on Tuesday. Minwa’s computational power would probably put it among the 300 most powerful computers in the world if it weren’t specialized for deep learning, said Wu. “I think this is the fastest supercomputer dedicated to deep learning,” he said. “We have great power in our hands—much greater than our competitors.”

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http://www.technologyreview.com/news/537561/courting-app-makers-to-unlock-your-cars-powerful-data-trove/

Courting App Makers to Unlock Your Car’s Powerful Data TroveStartups like Automatic are trying to interest developers in gadgets that plug into your car, hoping to power a new wave of mobile apps.

By Rachel Metz on May 19, 2015

Why It Matters

Your car’s computer collects tons of information about speed, emissions, and more that can be used for all kinds of things.

Automatic wants software developers to make apps that take advantage of the driving data its in-car device can grab from your car’s computer.

As Thejo Kote and Ljuba Miljkovic see it, your car can do a lot more than just get you around town. The data that it’s constantly collecting can also be used to let your smart thermostat know to adjust the temperature because you’re heading home, or to help you log work-related trips for expense reports, or to send a “yo” to a friend when you start your car.

Kote and Miljkovic are founders of Automatic, a San Francisco startup that, for the past two years, has sold a $100 gadget that connects to your car’s built-in computer through its diagnostic port—an outlet built into every U.S. car since 1996—and sends encrypted data via Bluetooth about your driving to a mobile app so you can track things like gas

mileage and driving habits (see “Gadget Gets Under the Hood to Bring Analytics to Driving”).

Today Automatic is announcing a big push to get developers to make all kinds of apps that take advantage of the data that its device collects. It’s releasing a host of new and reworked app-making tools, an app gallery that corrals apps that were already or are now compatible with Automatic, and a new version of its hardware that includes GPS and allows some apps to access a real-time stream of car data as the Automatic in-car dongle grabs it, without waiting for it to go through a remote server first.

Automatic is one of several startups selling diagnostic-port dongles that are asking outside developers to make apps that take advantage of the data that so many cars already collect, but most of us don’t have regular access to. This data, they think, could be used in smartphone apps that work with all kinds of cars to do everything from automatically splitting the cost of gas with friends to keeping an eye on how your teenager is doing behind the wheel.

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http://www.technologyreview.com/news/537446/silicon-chips-that-see-are-going-to-make-your-smartphone-brilliant/

Silicon Chips That See Are Going to Make Your Smartphone Brilliant

Many gadgets will be able to understand images and video thanks to chips designed to run powerful artificial-intelligence algorithms.

By Tom Simonite on May 14, 2015

Why It Matters

Many applications for mobile computers could be more powerful with advanced image recognition.

Many of the devices around us may soon acquire powerful new abilities to understand images and video, thanks to hardware designed for the machine-learning technique called deep learning.

Companies like Google have made breakthroughs in image and face recognition through deep learning, using giant data sets and powerful computers (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning”). Now two leading chip companies and the Chinese search giant Baidu say hardware is coming that will bring the technique to phones, cars, and more.

Chip manufacturers don’t typically disclose their new features in advance. But at a conference on computer vision Tuesday, Synopsys, a company that licenses software and intellectual property to the biggest names in chip making, showed off a new image-processor core tailored for deep learning. It is expected to be added to chips that power smartphones, cameras, and cars. The core would occupy about one square millimeter of space on a chip made with one of the most commonly used manufacturing technologies.

Pierre Paulin, a director of R&D at Synopsys, told MIT Technology Review that the new processor design will be made available to his company’s customers this summer. Many have expressed strong interest in getting hold of hardware to help deploy deep learning, he said.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/16/technology/google-to-test-bubble-shaped-self-driving-cars-in-silicon-valley.html?ref=technology&_r=0

Google to Test Bubble-Shaped Self-Driving Cars in Silicon ValleyBy CONOR DOUGHERTY and AARON M. KESSLERMAY 15, 2015Photo

A prototype of Google's self-driving car. CreditTony Avelar/Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO — The world is one step closer to the day when people can, in good conscience, drive to work while sipping coffee, texting with a friend and working on a laptop computer.

On Friday, Google announced that sometime this summer several prototype versions of its self-driving cars are set to hit the streets of Mountain View, Calif., the search giant’s hometown. The move is still just another round of testing but it is a significant step toward a pilot program in which regular consumers could ride in self-driving cars.

Google has long been testing its self-driving car technology with a fleet of Lexus sport utility vehicles that have driven about a million miles on public roads, and that continue to put in 10,000 miles each week.

Traditional automakers are also pushing the envelope of driverless tech with on-the-road testing of their own autonomous prototypes, and the industry predicts that by 2020 those dreams could come true.

Getting there is now much more about software than hardware. The systems of radar, lasers and cameras currently used by Google and automakers have grown so sophisticated that the vehicles can easily monitor the road in all directions — even beyond what the eye can see. The tough part is figuring out what to do with all that information.

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from usa today

Wolfram's latest IDs what's in your photosMatt Cantor, Newser staff11:36 a.m. EDT May 17, 2015

(Photo: Toru Yamanaka, AFP/Getty Images)

(NEWSER) – You probably can already identify the contents of most of your photos, but this is still fun. A new website from Stephen Wolfram, whom you may know from the search tool

WolframAlpha, lets you drag and drop any photo; it will then in theory identify what's in it.Right now, ImageIdentify manages some impressive feats, the Verge reports: For instance, it was able to tell that a picture of a cow was a black angus. On the other hand, it thought a cupcake was a bottle cap.The Wolfram Language team is happy to acknowledge the mistakes. In a blog post, Wolfram notes that "somehow the errors seemed very understandable, and in a sense very human. It seemed as if what ImageIdentify was doing was successfully capturing some of the essence of the human process of identifying images."

In the meantime, it does have some practical uses: At PC World, Jared Newman writes that "using the site, I was able to figure the breed of dog that kept following my wife and I around on our honeymoon (miniature pinscher) and the exact type of flower from a hike in Los Angeles (larkspur)." ** I like this application **

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/world/middleeast/isis-fighters-seized-advantage-in-iraq-attack-by-striking-during-sandstorm.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

ISIS Fighters Seized Advantage in Iraq Attack by Striking During SandstormBy ERIC SCHMITT and HELENE COOPERMAY 18, 2015

Iraqis displaced when Islamic State fighters took control of Ramadi last week waited to cross a bridge on their way to Baghdad. Credit Ahmed Ali/European Pressphoto Agency

WASHINGTON — Islamic State fighters used a sandstorm to help seize a critical military advantage in the early hours of the terrorist group’s attack on the provincial Iraqi capital of Ramadi last week, helping to set in motion an assault that forced Iraqi security forces to flee, current and former American officials said Monday.

The sandstorm delayed American warplanes and kept them from launching airstrikes to help the Iraqi forces, as the Islamic State fighters evidently anticipated. The fighters used the time to carry out a series of car bombings followed by a wave of ground attacks in and around the city that eventually overwhelmed the American-backed Iraqi forces.

Once the storm subsided, Islamic State and Iraqi forces were intermingled in heavy combat in many areas, making it difficult for allied pilots to distinguish

friend or foe, the officials said. By that point, the militants had gained an operational momentum that could not be reversed.

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http://www.technologyreview.com/news/537566/oculus-rift-hack-transfers-your-facial-expressions-onto-your-avatar/

Oculus Rift Hack Transfers Your Facial Expressions onto Your AvatarFacebook teams with researchers to transfer your smiles and frowns into virtual reality.

By Tom Simonite on May 20, 2015

Why It MattersTechnology that makes it feel natural to inhabit a virtual body could make simulated worlds more popular and useful.

The software combines data from sensors tracking the upper and lower parts of the face and matches the result onto a 3-D model of a face.

Virtual reality is set to get a vital dash of social reality.

Researchers at the University of Southern California and Facebook’s Oculus division have demonstrated a way to track the facial expressions of someone wearing a virtual-reality headset and transfer them to a virtual character. That could make for much more rewarding socializing, work, or play in virtual worlds, because the expression of a virtual body double or otherworldly avatar could perfectly mimic that of a person’s real face.

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http://www.technologyreview.com/news/537256/can-you-improve-your-e-mails-by-analyzing-recipients-personalities/

Can You Improve Your E-Mails by Analyzing Recipients’ Personalities?Startup Crystal claims it can help you write better e-mails by mining recipients’ online data for clues to their personality.

By Rachel Metz on May 14, 2015

Why It MattersThe websites and apps we use collect ever-growing mountains of data about us that are being used to tailor all kinds of content to our preferences.

It can be hard to figure out just what to say in an e-mail to someone you don’t know very well. A startup wants to make this easier by correcting messages as you type, suggesting changes that may make the recipient more receptive to what you’re saying. These suggestions are gleaned from data gathered about the recipients online.

Crystal, which launched in an invite-only beta in March, attempts to show you the best and worst ways to converse with people, in messages and in person, by scrutinizing publicly available data from LinkedIn, Twitter, blogs, and other online sources. The startup lets users look up people’s personality profiles on its website for free; for $19 per month, you can access a Gmail plug-in for the Chrome Web browser that offers specific real-time suggestions about word choice and punctuation, depending on whom you’re writing to. A mobile app is also in the works.

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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/05/17/fbi-doc-security-researcher-claims-he-hacked-commercial-planes-controls-while-on-board-and-then-did-something-terrifying/

TECHNOLOGY

FBI Report: Passenger Hacked Into Plane’s Controls and Made It Fly SidewaysMay. 17, 2015 1:33am Dave Urbanski

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A security researcher for airline vulnerabilities told the FBI he hacked into controls while on board a flight and made the aircraft climb and briefly fly sideways, Wired reported, citing an application for a search warrant filed by an FBI agent.

Image source: APChris Roberts of One World Labs told the FBI agent in February that he entered the in-flight entertainment system (IFE) and overwrote code on the aircraft’s Thrust Management Computer, Wired added.

“He stated that he thereby caused one of the airplane engines to climb resulting in a lateral or sideways movement of the plane during one of these flights,” FBI Special Agent Mark Hurley wrote in his warrant application, Wired noted. “He also stated that he used Vortex software after comprising/exploiting or ‘hacking’ the airplane’s

networks. He used the software to monitor traffic from the cockpit system.”Roberts attempted to board a United flight from Colorado to San Francisco to speak at a major security conference in April but was stopped by the airline’s corporate security at the gate. He’d been removed from an earlier United flight by the FBI after landing in Syracuse, New York, and was questioned for four hours after jokingly suggesting on Twitter he could get the oxygen masks on the plane to deploy.…

http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2015/05/13/surprising-jobs-that-robots-are-doing/?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000058

14 Surprising Jobs That Robots Are DoingActors? Waiters? The next machine age is coming.Business Insider May 13th 2015 10:26AM 1515710210

APA robot slices a ball of dough and drops its strips into a pot to make noodles at a food stall in Beijing. By Kathleen Elkins

There are machines cranking out articles for The Associated Press and robots slicing the perfectly shaped noodle in restaurants across China - and that's just the start of it.

Historically, experts believed that robots would only threaten blue-collar jobs, but they're beginning to challenge white-collar professions, as well.

While some economists believe this "Second Machine Age" will ultimately create more jobs, others predict that several unlucky employees will be pushed out of work in the near future.

Can a robot do your job?

Engineered Arts, a British company, has created a fully interactive and multilingual robot called the RoboThespian. Controlled by a tablet, it can hold eye contact, guess a person's mood and age, break into song, and will soon be able to walk, hop, and jump.

In addition to performing on stage - including taking the lead role in new a production of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis - the RoboThespian gives guided tours to the public at museums, science centers, and other visitor attractions.

AnesthesiologistsWhite collar jobs are not immune to the Second Machine Age. Anesthesiologists, who are the highest-paying professionals in America, could be pushed out of the room now that Johnson & Johnson has developed a system called Sedasys, which delivers low-level anesthesia at a much cheaper price.

The FDA approved Sedasys for patients 18 and older, but several anesthesiologists are sounding the alarm and challenging the safety of the technology.

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http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/17/technology/tim-cook-gwu-graduation/index.html

Tim Cook: How Steve Jobs changed the worldBy David Goldman   @DavidGoldmanCNN Tim Cook's advice to grads in :90

In a powerful commencement address to George Washington University graduates, Apple CEO Tim Cook implored the class of 2015 to follow in the footsteps of Steve Jobs.

Many view work as boring, hopeless drudgery -- a view Cook said he shared in 1997 before he came to Apple (AAPL, Tech30).

But Cook said Steve Jobs made him question everything he thought was true. Jobs persuaded him that "doing good and doing well" were not mutually exclusive.

"I always figured that work was work," Cook said. "There were things I wanted to change about the world, but I figured that was what I had to do on my own time. Steve didn't see it that way. He convinced me that if we made great products, we too could change the world."

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