Podcast with “Andreessen Horowitz Distinguished Visiting Professor of Computer Science … Fei-Fei Li [who publishes under Li Fei-Fei], associate professor at Stanford University.”
One of the biggest things driverless vehicles is going to do to the average person is to take away the semi driver jobs.
It’s an unfortunate fact and one that will continue to spread to other facets of the workforce, but for now we won’t have to worry, that’s a while off. Either way there’s still the first in what will hopefully be a long line of elegant driverless semi’s, and the two you’re about to see come straight from the geniuses at Audi. The first of these beautiful trucks is the street truck, designed for active use on the road. The second is their show truck, and looks to be much less practical but much cooler to be in!
Continue reading “This Mind-Blowing Audi Truck Could Be the Future of Big Rigs” »
In this post I refer to lyrics of certain bands as being “Metal”. I know some people have strong feelings about how genres are defined, and would probably disagree with me about some of the bands I call metal in this post. I call these band “Metal” here for the sake of brevity only, and I apologise in advance.
Introduction
Natural language is ubiquitous. It is all around us, and the rate at which it is produced in written, stored form is only increasing. It is also quite unlike any sort of data I have worked with before.
Continue reading “Heavy Metal and Natural Language Processing — Part 1” »
Joshua Brown, 40, believed in the power of engineering. He was a former Navy SEAL, a technology consultant, and a Tesla fan. He had posted YouTube videos of himself driving a Tesla Model S on autopilot, taking his hands off the wheel to show how the car could avoid a collision on its own. He had nicknamed his car “Tessy.”
The driver of a Tesla car died in Florida in May after colliding with a lorry.
Under scrutiny is Tesla’s Autopilot feature, which automatically changes lanes and reacts to traffic.
In a statement, Tesla said it appeared the Model S car was unable to recognise “the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky” that had driven across the car’s path.
Continue reading “US opens investigation into Tesla after fatal crash” »
How does the human brain collect, process and store the flow of data which it constantly encounters? How does it manage cognitive tasks, which require complex interaction between various areas of the brain and overload high performance computers that work much more quickly? Why can the brain cope with all of this using much less energy? It is the aim of the research team from Kiel led by Professor Hermann Kohlstedt, Head of the Nanoelectronics Department at Kiel University (CAU) and spokesman of the national collaborative research project “Memristive devices for neural systems” (FOR 2093) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) to track this impressive efficiency of the human brain using technology and to implement its method of operation in artificial neural networks. The scientists from Kiel have now succeeded in electronically reproducing two fundamental principles of operation of the human brain, memory and synchronisation. They recently published their results in Applied Physics Letters.
The human brain is a master of energy efficiency. It has approximately 100 billion nerve cells, also known as neurons, which manage with power of only about 20 Watt. Modern high performance computers would require many thousands of times more energy to perform similarly complex calculations as the brain manages. The neurons in the brain are linked to each other with synapses and form a highly complex network. The term “learning” in the neurological sense means that the synaptic connections in the brain are not determined statically. Instead they are continually readjusting on the basis of environmental influences, for example sensations. This makes it possible to store new memory content locally, known as the neurological plasticity of the brain.
In addition to the spatial ability of the neural connections to adjust, there is another important building block to process information in the brain: the synchronisation of neural groups. Electrical impulses, so-called action potentials, form the basic unit of information processing in the brain. These impulses permanently transmit information between the neurons and in doing so they cross and influence the synaptic connections in the brain. “In the case of conscious sensory perceptions the spatial irregular occurrence of neural impulses changes into ordered structures suddenly and for a limited time,” says Professor Thorsten Bartsch, a neurologist at Kiel University and member of the research group. The previously independent impulses of the neurons synchronise themselves in this case even over areas of the brain that are not close together. Evidence of this synchronised “firing” in humans can also be shown by measuring brain waves (electroencephalography, EEG).
Although we love them to pieces, eventually smart phones won’t be the only way we communicate and spend our time. Scientists predict we might end up using neural networks to play candy crush, or we could spend all our time using smart eyewear.
They still have a few issues to iron out, but there’s a new reason that smart eyewear might be a good option — night vision! Google’s just submitted a patent that suggests it’s planning on adding the future at some point.
Seriously though, we’re keen for anything to stop us tripping over stuff in the middle of the night.
Continue reading “A new patent means Google Glass might soon have night vision” »
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has finished its work to integrate live data feeds from several sources into the U.S. Space Surveillance Network run by the Air Force in an effort to help space monitoring teams check when satellites are at risk.
SSN is a global network of 29 military radar and optical telescopes and DARPA added seven space data providers to the network to help monitor the space environment under its OrbitOutlook program, the agency said Wednesday.
DARPA plans to test the automated algorithms developed to determine relevant data from the integrated feed in order to help SSA experts carry out their mission.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has finished its work to integrate live data feeds from several sources into the U.S. Space Surveillance Network run by the Air Force in an effort to help space monitoring teams check when satellites are at risk.
