Lifeboat Foundation

Planting a flag in Europe for the development of the kind of “deep technology” companies that have long been the bread and butter of Silicon Valley, the European venture firm Atomico has invested 10 million euros in the vertical take-off and landing plane developer, Lilium Aviation.

The roughly $10.7 million Series A investment announced at TechCrunch Disrupt London is meant to help Lilium develop into a manufacturer of a commuter alternative to helicopters and traditional planes.

Since the 1950s and 1960s, flying cars have ranked right up there with jetpacks as an example of the fulfillment of our expectations for future travel (I still think the Uber and Lyft app is pretty magical).

Continue reading “European VCs are going to make flying cars a reality” »

MNA– Head of Iran Nanotechnology Initiative Council and Iran’s envoy to Armenia met with Armenian Minister of Transport, Communication and IT in Yerevan.

Seyed Kazem Sadjadi, the Ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Iran to Yerevan and Professor Saeed Sarkar, Secretary-General of the Iran Nanotechnology Initiative Council (INIC) met with Vahan Martirosyan, the Minister of Transport, Communication and Information Technology of the Republic of Armenia on Wednesday in Yerevan.

The Armenian minister in the meeting welcomed the Iranian delegation for initiating cooperation and underlined that cooperation with Iran in areas of transportation and communication was of prime importance to Armenia. He voiced hope for expansion of bilateral cooperation in information technology.

Continue reading “Armenia eyeing nano coop. with Iran” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3no3tF2kqEE

Designs and manufactures electric components, drivetrains and vehicles including the Nikola One and Nikola Two electric semi-trucks.

George “Geohot” Hotz is driving forward with his push to bring self-driving cars to the masses, but he’s going about it a slightly unconventional way. His company Comma.ai is brushing past some previous regulatory issues and is trying another route — open-sourcing not only its self-driving technology, but also instructions for building your very own hardware device (“a robotics platform”) called Comma Neo. All of this information is available today through Comma.ai’s GitHub repositories.

Since the beginning, the company has had a goal of being the Android version of self-driving cars — it wants to empower “ghostriding for the masses.” Earlier this year, it was approached by state and federal regulators inquiring about a product Hotz claimed wasn’t even on sale yet. Fed up with the scrutiny, Comma.ai cancelled its first product, the Comma One, and pivoted its thinking to democratizing its knowledge. So it’s keeping with its promise, but has scrapped its $999 price point in favor of it being free. “If we really want to be the Android of self-driving cars, we can’t be charging $999, can we?” Hotz explained.

What I have been waiting for; now I can get all of my novels written for me.

Literai is a community that uses neural networks to automate storytelling by computers.

Now retrofitted for civilian use, the Community Chlorine Maker makes enough chlorine to treat water for a whole village. We just need to get it to them.

What might life be like once autonomous vehicles populate the roads? With the help of colleague Timothy Bonds, RAND’s Nidhi Kalra described what may occur when autonomous vehicles “democratize transportation.” Read our recap from #PoliticsAside: r.rand.org/326y

When you see a photo of a dog bounding across the lawn, it’s pretty easy for us humans to imagine how the following moments played out. Well, scientists at MIT have just trained machines to do the same thing, with artificial intelligence software that can take a single image and use it to to create a short video of the seconds that followed. The technology is still bare-bones, but could one day make for smarter self-driving cars that are better prepared for the unexpected, among other applications.

The software uses a deep-learning algorithm that was trained on two million unlabeled videos amounting to a year’s worth of screen time. It actually consists of two separate neural networks that compete with one another. The first has been taught to separate the foreground and the background and to identify the object in the image, which allows the model to then determine what is moving and what isn’t.

Continue reading “MIT’s deep-learning software produces videos of the future” »

Since the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) needs to be in tip-top shape to discover new particles, it has two inspectors making sure everything’s in working order. The two of them are called TIM, short not for Timothy, but for Train Inspection Monorail. These mini autonomous monorails that keep an eye on the world’s largest particle collider follow a pre-defined route and get around using tracks suspended from the ceiling. According to CERN’s post introducing the machines, the tracks are remnants from the time the tunnel housed the Large Electron Positron instead of the LHC. The LEP’s monorail was bigger, but not quite as high-tech: it was mainly used to transport materials and workers.

As for what the machines can do, the answer is “quite a few.” They can monitor the tunnel’s structure, oxygen percentage, temperature and communication bandwidth in real time. Both TIMs can also take visual and infrared images, as well as pull small wagons behind them if needed. You can watch them in action below — as you can see, they’re not much to look at with their boxy silver appearance. But without them, it’ll be tough monitoring a massive circular tunnel with a 17-mile circumference.

Continue reading “CERN introduces Large Hadron Collider’s robotic inspectors” »