Lifeboat Foundation

Self-driving cars, voice assistants, and facial recognition technology are just a few of the advancements made possible by Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio’s work.

The award, named after British mathematician Alan Turing, carries a $1 million prize, which the trio will split. Previous Turing Award winners include Tim Berners-Lee, best known for inventing the World Wide Web.

Hinton is currently a top AI researcher at Google. LeCun is now at Facebook, working as the company’s chief AI scientist. Bengio has remained in academia but has worked with companies such as AT&T, Microsoft, and IBM.

Continue reading “The ‘Godfathers of AI’ win Turing Award” »

A 4.5-hour plane trip would reportedly take just 3.5 hours by maglev.

The Create the Future Design Contest was launched in 2002 by the publishers of NASA Tech Briefs magazine to help stimulate and reward engineering innovation. The annual event has attracted more than 8,000 product design ideas from engineers, entrepreneurs, and students worldwide.

Despite this, electric garbage trucks are still few and far between. BYD’s main competitor is Motiv Power Systems, which has sold small fleets of class 8 side-loading garbage trucks to Los Angeles and Sacramento, California. Wrightspeed, which was also making hybrid-electric garbage trucks—featured in this article from 2015—appears to have gone dormant, despite a contract to supply the New Zealand cities of Auckland and Wellington. And recently, Volvo announced a battery electric garbage truck, the FE Electric, although it appears to be limited to the European market.

http://xhne.ws/wvqF1

Jetpack Aviation opens pre-orders on jet-powered flying motorcycle.

Digit the robot will place orders right on customers’ doorsteps.

Autonomous vehicles might someday be able to navigate bustling city streets to deliver groceries, pizzas, and other packages without a human behind the wheel. But that doesn’t solve what Ford Motor CTO Ken Washington describes as the last 50-foot problem.

Ford and startup Agility Robotics are partnering in a research project that will test how two-legged robots and self-driving vehicles can work together to solve that curb-to-door problem. Agility’s Digit, a two-legged robot that has a lidar where its head should be, will be used in the project. The robot, which is capable of lifting 40 pounds, can ride along in a self-driving vehicle and be deployed when needed to delivery packages.

“We’re looking at the opportunity of autonomous vehicles through the lens of the consumer and we know from some early experimentation that there are challenges with the last 50 feet,” Washington told TechCrunch in a recent interview. Finding a solution could be an important differentiator for Ford’s commercial robotaxi service, which it plans to launch in 2021.

Continue reading “In Ford’s future, two-legged robots and self-driving cars could team up on deliveries” »

(Reuters) — The U.S. Postal Service on Tuesday started a two-week test transporting mail across three Southwestern states using self-driving trucks, a step forward in the effort to commercialize autonomous vehicle technology for hauling freight.