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Japan-based startup unveils its flying car at CES 2022, plans to enter market by 2025

The vehicle showcased at the event was Model SD-03, which was a demonstration for the autonomous SD-05 which is currently under development. The company is aiming to kickstart its business with the latter after unveiling it as a flying taxi at the World Expo 2025 in Osaka. It is worth mentioning that SkyDrive has been tested for manned flights and recently got certified by the Japanese government. “SkyDrive recently advanced toward commercialization with the Japanese transportation ministry’s acceptance of its type certificate application, a major milestone that no other flying vehicle developers have reached in Japan”, the company said in its statement.

READ | Flying car completes first 35-minute inter-city flight test in Slovakia

The model released by SkyDrive at the CES 2022 is a driver-only vehicle that runs on electricity and is equipped with eight propellers. As per SkyDrive’s description of the vehicle, it can carry a maximum weight of 400 kg and is capable of cruising at 40–50 kilometres per hour for five to ten minutes. The company had revealed the first prototype of its eVTOL in 2018 and conducted the first manned flight in 2020. According to a report by Interesting Engineering, more companies such as Lilium and Volocopter are also planning to kickstart their flying car business this decade.

Baidu to launch Level 2 autonomous car in 2023

China’s technology giant Baidu is stepping up its efforts to expand in the autonomous vehicle segment with the commercial launch of a car model with Level-2 self-driving technology next year.

Last week the company’s CEO Robin Li confirmed that Jidu Auto, Baidu’s joint venture with local automaker Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, plans to begin mass production of its first electric vehicle (EV) with Level-2 autonomous driving technologies in 2023. The vehicle’s self-driving system is powered by Nvidia chips and is scheduled to be unveiled at the Beijing Auto Show in April of this year.

Baidu, known widely as an internet search engine and artificial intelligence company, is targeting the autonomous vehicle segment as a key growth industry and is in the process of rolling out autonomous taxi services across China.

How combining human expertise and AI can stop cyberattacks

Chief information security officers’ (CISOs) greatest challenge going into 2022 is countering the speed and severity of cyberattacks. The latest real-time monitoring and detection technologies improve the odds of thwarting an attack but aren’t foolproof. CISOs tell VentureBeat that bad actors avoid detection with first-line monitoring systems by modifying attacks on the fly. That’s cause for concern, especially with CISOs in financial services and health care.

Enterprises are in react mode

Enterprises fail to get the most value from threat monitoring, detection, and response cybersecurity strategies because they’re too focused on data collection and security monitoring alone. CISOs tell VentureBeat they’re capturing more telemetry (i.e., remote) data than ever, yet are short-staffed when it comes to deciphering it, which means they’re often in react mode.

Researchers Use Machine Learning To Repair Genetic Damage

DNA damage is constantly occurring in cells, either due to external sources or as a result of internal cellular metabolic reactions and physiological activities. Accurate repair of such DNA damages is critical to avoid mutations and chromosomal rearrangements linked to diseases including cancer, immunodeficiencies, neurodegeneration, and premature aging.

A team of researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and the National Cancer Research Centre have identified a way to repair genetic damage and prevent DNA alterations using machine learning techniques.

The researchers state that it is possible to learn more about how cancer develops and how to fight it if we understand how DNA lesions originate and repair. Therefore, they hope that their discovery will help create better cancer treatments while also protecting our healthy cells.

Report: Computer vision teams worldwide say projects are delayed

According to new research by Datagen, 99% of computer vision (CV) teams have had a machine learning (ML) project canceled due to insufficient training data. Delays, meanwhile, appear truly ubiquitous, with 100% of teams reporting experiencing significant project delays due to insufficient training data. The research also indicates that these training data challenges come in many forms and affect CV teams in near-equal measure. The top issues experienced by CV teams include poor annotation (48%), inadequate domain coverage (47%), and simple scarcity (44%).

The scarcity of robust, domain-specific training data is only compounded by the fact that the field of computer vision is lacking many well-defined standards or best practices. When asked how training data is typically gathered at their organizations, respondents revealed a patchwork of sources and methodologies are being employed both across the field and within individual organizations. Whether synthetic or real, collected in-house or sourced from public datasets, organizations appear to be utilizing any and all data they can in order to train their computer vision models.

However, computer vision teams have already identified and begun to embrace synthetic data as a solution. Ninety-six percent of CV teams reported having already adopted the use of synthetic data to help train their AI/ML models. Nevertheless, the quality, source, and proportion of synthetic data that’s used remains highly variable across the field, and only 6% of teams currently use synthetic data exclusively.

The Case Against the Case Against AI

A review of The Age of AI and Our Human Future by Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher. Little, Brown and Company, 272 pages (November, 2021).

Potential bridges across the menacing chasm of incompatible ideas are being demolished by a generation of wannabe autocrats presenting alternative facts as objective knowledge. This is not new. The twist is that modern network-delivery platforms can insert, at scale, absurd information into national discourse. In fact, sovereign countries intent on political mischief and social disruption already do this to their adversaries by manipulating the stories they see on the Internet.

About half the country gets its news from social media. These digital platforms dynamically tune the content they suggest according to age, gender, race, geography, family status, income, purchase history, and, of course, user clicks and cliques. We know that their algorithms demote and promote perspectives that may come from opposing viewpoints and amplify like-minded “us-against-them” stories, further exacerbating emotional response on their websites and in the real world. Even long-established and once-reputable outlets capture attention by manufactured outrage and fabricated scandal. Advertising revenue pays for it all, but the real products here are the hundreds of millions of users who think they are getting a free service. Their profiles are sold by marketeers to the highest corporate bidder.

What 1000-X faster simulation means for digital twins

About a decade ago, MIT researchers discovered a technique that speeds physics modeling by 1000X. They spun this out into a new company, called Akselos, which has been helping enterprises to weave the tech into various kinds of digital twins used to improve shipping, refining, and wind power generation.

A digital twin is a virtual representation of an object or system that spans its lifecycle, is updated from real-time data, and uses simulation, machine learning, and reasoning to help decision-making. Connected sensors on the physical asset collect data that can be mapped onto the virtual model.

The specific innovation improves the performance of finite element analysis (FEA) algorithms which underpin most types of physics simulations. Akselos experience over the last decade can help executives explore the implications of the million-fold improvements in physics simulation that Nvidia is now demonstrating thanks to improvement in hardware, scalability, and new algorithms.

Hyundai tells CES it’s bringing robotics into metaverse

Jan. 6 (UPI) — South Korean automaker Hyundai Motor said the company would use robotics in the “metaverse,” or the virtual world.

The conglomerate disclosed the plan during its Tuesday presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show 2022 in Las Vegas.

Hyundai dubbed the vision as “meta-mobility,” which it said is designed to make robots act as a medium between the real world and virtual spaces so that changes in the metaverse are reflected in reality.

Tesla raises Full Self Driving software price to $12,000 in U.S., Musk says

Jan 7 (Reuters) — Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk tweeted on Friday that the electric carmaker will raise the U.S. price of its advanced driver assistant software dubbed “Full Self Driving” to $12,000 on Jan. 17.

The 20% price rise comes less than two years since Tesla raised Full Self-Driving (FSD) prices to $10,000 from $8,000 in 2020.

“Tesla FSD price rising to $12k on Jan 17. Just in the US.” Musk tweeted.

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