Texas is suing Facebook’s parent company, Meta (FB (FBK) ), over allegations the social media giant illegally harvested the facial recognition data of tens of millions of state residents for a decade.
The lawsuit, filed Monday in Texas’s Harrison County District Court, argues that a now-shuttered Facebook (FB) photo-tagging feature failed to get Texans’ informed consent before gathering their facial recognition data. The feature worked by analyzing faces in photos, including those of non-Facebook users, and recommending that Facebook users tag the people that the tool identified.
On-demand drone delivery specialist Flytrex releases booming activity growth for 2021 in three North Carolina communities it serves.
While the development of all kinds of next-generation aviation and UAV activity merits the attention it attracts, the reality is a lot of what’s afoot is still in early-phase operation or testing. That work-in-progress status makes seeing quantified metrics in advanced applications like those released today by drone delivery specialist Flytrex particularly useful in measuring rates of progress.
The marquee stats Flytrex published include over 12,000 orders its automated drones delivered to backyards in its North Carolina zone of operation in 2021 – more than any other company in the US, it says. That activity was the densest on New Year’s Eve, when orders flowed in at the rate of one per 6.5 minutes, requiring the company to have three UAVs flying at once.
With marine debris a growing concern, innovators are getting creative — designing autonomous boats that act as on-the-water trash-eating machines.
The latest development comes from the Danish company RanMarine Technology. They’ve created an aquadrone called WasteShark that sucks up waste from the water much like a Roomba — consuming up to 200 liters of garbage in a single ride.
A Black-owned tech firm based in Miami, Florida, has begun manufacturing self-driving vehicles called JéGO Pods. The firm will start releasing the pods in late 2022 and will be used to mobilize healthcare services.
JéGO Technologies Inc is founded by Frederick Akphoghene, a Nigerian immigrant, who started his career in tech as early as 16. Since he started his journey, he has built and partnered with hundreds of companies and startups including Abovav Technologies and Oddio Tribe Holdings.
According to Akphoghene, the purpose of his company is to use its mobile platform to connect users with businesses that provide on-demand services like Flu Testing, COVID testing, IV therapy and other services which can be brought directly to customers using driverless JéGO pods.
Researchers have developed a way to identify sources of error in quantum computers through Artificial intelligence and machine learning. Now they can reduce quantum computing errors using custom machine learning algorithms.
Two recent collaborations between mathematicians and DeepMind demonstrate the potential of machine learning to help researchers generate new mathematical conjectures.
The thing is, it could be—and a University of Michigan physicist is using quantum computing and machine learning to better understand the idea, called holographic duality.
A new shape-shifting material out of Virginia Tech can be used to give robots the power to transform smoothly between different shapes — like going from a drivable robot to a flying drone.
The challenge: Most of today’s robots are really good at one function — drones are designed to fly, but they can’t swim, and wheeled bots can drive, but they can’t fly.
The few exceptions typically use complex systems of motors, gears, and hinges to reconfigure themselves into different shapes suited for different tasks, but every extra part is a new potential point of failure.
Soul Machines, a New Zealand-based company that uses CGI, AI and natural language processing to create lifelike digital people who can interact with humans in real time, has raised $70 million in a Series B1 round, bringing its total funding to $135 million. The startup will put the funds toward enhancing its Digital Brain technology, which uses a technique called “cognitive modeling” to recreate things like the human brain’s emotional response system in order to construct autonomous animated characters.
The funding was led by new investor SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with additional participation from Cleveland Avenue, Liberty City Ventures and Solasta Ventures. Existing investors Temasek, Salesforce Ventures and Horizons Ventures also participated in the round.
While Soul Machines does envision its tech will be used for entertainment purposes, it’s mainly pursuing a B2B play that creates emotionally engaging brand and customer experiences. The basic problem the startup is trying to solve is how to create personal brand experiences in an increasingly digital world, especially when the main interaction most companies have with their customers is via apps and websites.
