Lifeboat Foundation

The latest sign of regulatory support comes two months after Beijing became the country’s first city to green light open road test for autonomous cars. The National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top economic planning agency, also unveiled a three-year plan in December, making the development of smart cars a national priority.

The latest sign of national regulatory support comes two months after Beijing became the country’s first city to green light open road test for self driving cars.

Chinese startup Ehang has released the first video of passengers flying aboard its autonomous 184 drone.

But that doesn’t mean the company isn’t working on cool new features. During the earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that within three to six months, he expects Tesla cars to be able to drive autonomously from U.S. coast to coast.

SEE ALSO: Tesla’s bringing Powerwall batteries to 50,000 homes in Australia

Continue reading “Elon Musk: In 3-6 months, Tesla cars will be able to drive themselves from coast to coast” »

AI “deepfakes” have become a cheap way to digitally alter faces. Just look what they did to Henry Cavil’s Superman mustache.

AI that identifies people in crowds is already pervasive in China—and now it’s augmenting police officers’ eyes, too.

Smart specs: The Wall Street Journal says the hardware, made by LLVision, sends data from its camera to a handheld device, where AI software crunches through an offline database of 10,000 pictures of suspects in about 100 milliseconds to help officers spot criminals. It’s unclear how accurate it is.

How they’re used: The glasses will be used to monitor busy crowds in China as citizens travel for next week’s Lunar New Year. But the People’s Daily newspaper says they’ve already been tested in Zhengzhou railway station, catching seven wanted criminals and 26 people travelling on fake ID.

Continue reading “Chinese cops are wearing glasses that can recognize faces” »

Meet OceanOne, a robot avatar that lets humans explore deep under the Ocean’s surface, without any of the dangers or time limits associated with diving.

While a human diver is constrained by pesky things like air and pressure when doing underwater research or excavations, a robot can stay underwater for much longer, collecting samples in hostile underwater environments.

OceanOne was tested at the archeological site of the shipwreck La Lune off the coast of France. La Lune, a flagship that sank in the Mediterranean in 1664. It lies under 300 feet of water, far beyond the reach of recreational SCUBA divers, who limit themselves to 130 feet.

Continue reading “Humanoid Robot Can Dive Deep Underwater, Exploring Reefs And Shipwrecks” »

The next research priorities include wearable mobility aid devices and technology that guides people to the toilet at what it predicts is the right time.

According to Japan’s robot strategy, the government hopes that four in five care recipients accept having some support provided by robots by 2020.

Japanese government wants to increase acceptance of technology that could help fill the gap in the nursing workforce.

Continue reading “Japan lays groundwork for boom in robot carers” »

A start-up called Embark has completed a coast-to-coast test drive of its autonomous truck.

It takes an immense amount of processing power to create and operate the “AI” features we all use so often, from playlist generation to voice recognition. Lightmatter is a startup that is looking to change the way all that computation is done — and not in a small way. The company makes photonic chips that essentially perform calculations at the speed of light, leaving transistors in the dust. It just closed an $11 million Series A.

The claim may sound grandiose, but the team and the tech definitely check out. Nick Harris, Lightmatter’s CEO, wrote his thesis on this stuff at MIT, and has published in major journals like Nature Photonics several papers showing the feasibility of the photonic computing architecture.

So what exactly does Lightmatter’s hardware do?

Continue reading “Lightmatter aims to reinvent AI-specific chips with photonic computing and $11M in funding” »