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What happens to roadkill or traffic tickets when our vehicles are in control? Related Article.

Las Vegas’ newest tourist attraction has nothing to do with casinos, neon lights or Cirque du Soleil. It’s a driverless shuttle that will make a half-mile loop all day long on city streets in the downtown Fremont East district, starting Wednesday.

AAA of Northern California, Nevada & Utah is sponsoring the yearlong pilot program along with two French companies: Keolis, a global transportation company that already runs Las Vegas’ public bus system, and Navya, which manufactures the driverless shuttle. The goal is twofold: to expose the public to the futuristic technology and gain insights on how people view it.

“Las Vegas prides itself on being first, getting out there and trying out new things,” said city spokesman Jace Radke.

Continue reading “Self-driving shuttle hits Las Vegas streets” »

Flying Ubers are coming to LA: Ride-sharing company links with NASA to bring 200mph electric aircraft to the city in 2020 and a flight will cost you the same as a car journey…

Uber’s Chief Product Officer, Jeff Holden, announced the plans at the global Web Summit in Lisbon today.

Continue reading “Uber announces LA will be the third city for UberAIR” »

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By 2050, two thirds of the world’s population will live in cities. Urbanisation is happening faster than at any time in human history.

Continue reading “Transforming cities with technology” »

Waymo, the self-driving vehicle unit of Alphabet, showed its latest advances at Castle, its test track in California’s Central Valley.

Thank a new approach to spoofing image recognition AIs, developed by a team from Kyushu University in Japan, for that joke.

Trying to catch out AIs is a popular pastime for many researchers, and we’ve reported machine-learning spoofs in the past. The general approach is to add features to images that will incorrectly trigger a neural network and have it identify what it sees as something else entirely.

The new research, published on the arXiv, describes an algorithm that can efficiently identify the best pixels to alter in order to confuse an AI into mislabeling a picture. By changing just one pixel in a 1,024-pixel image, the software can trick an AI about 74 percent of the time. That figure rises to around 87 percent if five pixels are tweaked.

Continue reading “How Do You Turn a Dog into a Car? Change a Single Pixel” »

Japanese automaker Toyota is looking to reduce their vehicles’ carbon emissions by phasing out gas engines from their lineup by 2040.

The US Department of Transport (DoT) recently decreed that all hybrid and electric vehicles must make a noise to protect pedestrians, especially folks who are blind or have limited vision. Rather than just saying, “okay, we’re adding a noise to our EVs, you guys,” Nissan made a big production about releasing its “song,” even giving it a name. “‘Canto’ has been developed to help with pedestrian safety, as well as to provide … a sound that is energizing and confident,” the company said in a press release.

The sound changes tone and pitch when the vehicle speeds up and slows down, and is activated at speeds of around 12 to 19 mph. In the US, the standard is 30 km/h (19 mph), a rule the DoT said “will help prevent about 2,400 pedestrian injuries each year once all hybrids [sold in the US] are properly equipped.” Nissan says its own sound is also made to “enrich the aural environment of a typical city street” and be clearly audible, but not disturbing to city residents or vehicle occupants.

Continue reading “Nissan’s EVs will swap engine noises for ‘song’” »