Video assistant referees are about to get their biggest test to date. In the wake of an earlier general approval, the FIFA Council has authorized the use of VARs at the upcoming 2018 World Cup in Russia. The tool will help refs make decisions on difficult calls involving goals and penalties, any offenses leading up to those moments, mistaken identities and red cards. In theory, at least, this reduces the chances of a country going home early due to a bad call -- a distinct possibility given the messes from the last World Cup.
During his keynote at Cognizant Community, Malcolm Frank described how Rita Singh at Carnegie-Mellon U had helped the Coast Guard with machine learning applied to voice recognition use cases. It could be the next frontier in helping law enforcement agencies.
“That's long enough for Singh. She can pull troves of information from short snippets of sounds.
“There are things about your voice that you simply cannot change, like the sound of your breath,” Singh said. “Any information that we give them narrows the search. We're not at the point where we can say this is what the person looks like, go get him.”
Singh wasn't really sure what she had until the Coast Guard came asking. The Coast Guard came to her with a tape. She listened to it, ran in through her computer programs and was surprised with what she found.
“That was when we realized what we could do and that was when they realized we could do it,” Singh said. “You could actually get a lot of information from sound and it was actually pretty useful.”
Did you watch the Daytona 500 on Sunday? It was the first one in the NASCAR season where new pit-stop rules came into effect.
Drivers come to pit stops for a variety of reasons, but a full-blown pit stop consists of the following -- changing four tires, adding a full tank of fuel, wiping the grille clean, helping the driver and making minor adjustments to the car. For the past seven seasons, teams conducted pit stops with six crew members going over the wall: a jack man, a fueler, two tire carriers and two tire changers. This year that number allowed is down to 5, which will add precious seconds to each stop. In fact we are reverting to the stop times in the 1970s. The change was meant as a safety measure to reduce congestion at the stop but will likely make teams take more risks with fewer complete stops and more aggressive driving.
Over the course of the 36 race season it will be interesting to watch which teams show productivity improvements to cut the stop times down. That would be ideal
It rides along pavements, crosses roads, and avoids driving into humans, and can travel up to three miles at 4 mph. The robot is part of a trial by Starship Technologies, a company created by two Skype co-founders. Starship is developing self-driving robotic delivery vehicles, but the current robot isn’t autonomous just yet.
The robot is controlled remotely, thanks to a myriad of sensors and cameras that let someone drive it around a busy city to avoid dangerous situations. Starship’s robot even has a minder that walks nearby it to ensure it’s not vandalized and items aren’t stolen. It all looks very futuristic, but for now a lot of humans are still involved in getting this from A to B.
Starship has been trialling these robots with Just Eat, a huge delivery service in the UK, in several areas of London over the past year, and if you’re randomly selected (like I was) then you’ll receive the text message after your order. The process is as convenient as you might expect robot deliveries to be, and the food remained warm even though I didn’t pick it up for 15 minutes. The robot minder only had to call me and check I was coming to fetch my food because I was running late. Otherwise, the minder stays out of the process to give the illusion that a robot arrived at your front door on its own.
Dark colors absorb light, which means the navigating lasers of autonomous vehicles don’t quite bounce off—or enable detection of—black cars. Therein lies a potential windfall for old-school companies that make paint. The world’s largest producer of vehicle coatings, PPG Industries Inc., is engineering a paint that allows the near-infrared light emitted by lasers to pass through a dark car’s exterior layer and rebound off a reflective undercoat—making it visible to sensors. PPG got the idea from the purple eggplant, which uses a similar trick on farms to keep cool on hot days.
Traffic Jam Pilot is poised to make this the world’s first honest-ta-goo’ness SAE Level 3 self-driving car. That means that when conditions permit, the Audi A8 will assume all responsibility for the safe operation of the car so long as the driver remains prepared to resume control within 10 seconds (the car makes sure you remain ready by keeping an infrared eye on you). TJP’s required conditions are those during which we all hate driving: a nose-to-tail traffic jam at speeds below 37 mph. The car must also be traveling on a limited-access highway with opposing traffic separated by a rigid barrier.
Acceleration, braking, and steering within the lane all happen with a level of smoothness that human chauffeurs would struggle to match. Steer at all or touch the pedals, and the system surrenders control to you instantly, acknowledging this with a screen message and reverting from green to white lighting around the cluster. If your traffic jam involves an obstruction in your lane, the system will signal for you to resume control because it is not programmed to perform lane changes. You’ll also get this signal as soon as the speed of traffic ahead exceeds 37 mph, if visibility degrades markedly, or if the road’s limited-access is ending. This signaling involves a message on the screen, a tone, and red lighting around the cluster. If you fail to resume control, the system tries to rouse you with more insistent tones, a sharp cinching of the belt, and a couple stabs of the brake, after which it assumes you’ve passed out, so it stops in the lane, sets the parking brake, unlocks the doors, turns on the flashers, and calls for help.
Most driverless vehicle operations, including those at Ford Motor Co.and Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo, are focused on developing cars or trucks that operate with no human oversight at all, or “level 4 autonomy.” The idea is that a passenger could safely take a nap, send a text, or tie one on while the software worries about the road, but that kind of freedom could be decades away. Seltz-Axmacher, Starsky’s co-founder and chief executive officer, who’s featured in this week’s Decrypted podcast, is attempting something that’s both more modest and, potentially, more disruptive to U.S. employment. His company has designed an artificial intelligence system for big-rig trucks that makes them mostly self-sufficient on highways, and then, when it’s time to exit onto local roads, allows them to be taken over and driven from a remote operations center. The plan is to eventually employ dozens of drivers, each of whom will keep an eye on a few trucks at once, sitting before arrays of monitors livestreaming views of windshields and mirrors. The company’s name is a reference to a CB radio slang term for when drivers work in teams—that is, like the title characters of the 1970s TV series Starsky & Hutch.
“A beach goer spotted the two teenagers struggling off the coast of Lennox Head beach, in New South Wales state north of Sydney on Thursday and reported them to the lifeguards.
According to the Reuters news agency, the guards quickly deployed their Westpac Little Ripper Lifesaver drone, which carries an inflatable float that can be dropped into the water.
Within minutes the lifeguards receiving the report, the flotation device was dropped and the two boys, 16 and 17 years old, were able to use it to swim back to shore, exhausted but otherwise unscathed.”
The first clue that there’s something unusual about Amazon’s store of the future hits you right at the front door. It feels as if you are entering a subway station. A row of gates guard the entrance to the store, known as Amazon Go, allowing in only people with the store’s smartphone app.
Every time customers grab an item off a shelf, Amazon says the product is automatically put into the shopping cart of their online account. If customers put the item back on the shelf, Amazon removes it from their virtual basket.
The only sign of the technology that makes this possible floats above the store shelves — arrays of small cameras, hundreds of them throughout the store. Amazon won’t say much about how the system works, other than to say it involves sophisticated computer vision and machine learning software. Translation: Amazon’s technology can see and identify every item in the store, without attaching a special chip to every can of soup and bag of trail mix.
(During CES) Mercedes-Benz shut down part of the Las Vegas Strip to show off the Smart Vision EQ Concept car. It's a futuristic self-driving car prototype that's so new it had to be controlled remotely. It has no steering wheel, no pedals, and is supposed to represent what Mercedes-Benz thinks cars will be like in 2030.
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