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Category: transportation – Page 321

Google Trains Two Billion Parameter AI Vision Model

Researchers at Google Brain announced a deep-learning computer vision (CV) model containing two billion parameters. The model was trained on three billion images and achieved 90.45% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, setting a new state-of-the-art record.

The team described the model and experiments in a paper published on arXiv. The model, dubbed ViT-G/14, is based on Google’s recent work on Vision Transformers (ViT). ViT-G/14 outperformed previous state-of-the-art solutions on several benchmarks, including ImageNet, ImageNet-v2, and VTAB-1k. On the few-shot image recognition task, the accuracy improvement was more than five percentage-points. The researchers also trained several smaller versions of the model to investigate a scaling law for the architecture, noting that the performance follows a power-law function, similar to Transformer models used for natural language processing (NLP) tasks.

First described by Google researchers in 2017, the Transformer architecture has become the leading design for NLP deep-learning models, with OpenAI’s GPT-3 being one of the most famous. Last year, OpenAI published a paper describing scaling laws for these models. By training many similar models of different sizes and varying the amount of training data and computing power, OpenAI determined a power-law function for estimating a model’s accuracy. In addition, OpenAI found that not only do large models perform better, they are also more compute-efficient.

Baltimore spy plane program was invasion of citizens’ privacy, court rules

The AIR program was run by a company called Persistent Surveillance Systems with funding from two Texas billionaires. The city police department admitted to using planes to surveil Baltimore residents in 2016 but approved a six-month pilot program in 2020, which was active until October 31st.

The city of Baltimore’s spy plane program was unconstitutional, violating the Fourth Amendment protection against illegal search, and law enforcement in the city cannot use any of the data it gathered, a court ruled Thursday. The Aerial Investigation Research (or AIR) program, which used airplanes and high-resolution cameras to record what was happening in a 32-square-mile part of the city, was canceled by the city in February.

Local Black activist groups, with support from the ACLU, sued to prevent Baltimore law enforcement from using any of the data it had collected in the time the program was up and running. The city tried to argue the case was moot since the program had been canceled. That didn’t sit well with civil liberties activists. “Government agencies have a history of secretly using similar technology for other purposes — including to surveil Black Lives Matter protests in Baltimore in recent years,” the ACLU said in a statement Thursday.

In an en banc ruling, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit found that “because the AIR program enables police to deduce from the whole of individuals’ movements, we hold that accessing its data is a search and its warrantless operation violates the Fourth Amendment.” Chief Judge Roger Gregory wrote that the AIR program “is like a 21st century general search, enabling the police to collect all movements,” and that “allowing the police to wield this power unchecked is anathema to the values enshrined in our Fourth Amendment.”

New algorithm helps autonomous vehicles find themselves, summer or winter

Without GPS, autonomous systems get lost easily. Now a new algorithm developed at Caltech allows autonomous systems to recognize where they are simply by looking at the terrain around them—and for the first time, the technology works regardless of seasonal changes to that terrain.

Details about the process were published on June 23 in the journal Science Robotics.

The general process, known as visual terrain-relative navigation (VTRN), was first developed in the 1960s. By comparing nearby terrain to high-resolution satellite images, can locate themselves.

Deep reinforcement learning will transform manufacturing as we know it

If you walk down the street shouting out the names of every object you see — garbage truck! bicyclist! sycamore tree! — most people would not conclude you are smart. But if you go through an obstacle course, and you show them how to navigate a series of challenges to get to the end unscathed, they would.

Most machine learning algorithms are shouting names in the street. They perform perceptive tasks that a person can do in under a second. But another kind of AI — deep reinforcement learning — is strategic. It learns how to take a series of actions in order to reach a goal. That’s powerful and smart — and it’s going to change a lot of industries.

Two industries on the cusp of AI transformations are manufacturing and supply chain. The ways we make and ship stuff are heavily dependent on groups of machines working together, and the efficiency and resiliency of those machines are the foundation of our economy and society. Without them, we can’t buy the basics we need to live and work.

Michelin, GM testing airless tires on Chevy Bolt EV for 2024

The airless tire isn’t a new concept.
Michelin first introduced its idea for one called.
the Tweel over decade ago, and it started selling.
production versions for small lawn and construction equipment a few years back. But what.

Is new about the tech is its use for actual production cars, and that’s where this new Michelin Uptis tire comes in. The Uptis is designed to handle not just the weight of a real car like the old Tweel, but also be able to provide proper grip and durability at highway speeds, too.

Though the design is now more capable, the Uptis airless tire still uses the same basic idea as the Tweel. Sandwiched between the outer tread and the inner aluminum wheel are a bunch of spokes or ribs that substitute air pressure. These spokes are made of a combination of rubber and fiberglass reinforced resin.

Michelin Uptis

A Hardware Engineer Built A Self-Balancing Autonomous Bicycle /

I think there is actually a company that makes something similar to this.

The self-balancing bike is a reminder of the incredibly creative projects that students and young recently graduated engineers can come up with — another recent example is an all-electric monowheel built by a group of Duke University students.

In principle, Zhi Jui Jun’s self-balancing bike should work with someone riding it as well, though no one is shown riding it in Jui Jun’s video — the bicycle steering and keeping balance with the added top-heavy weight of a person would be a sight to behold. Stay posted for updates on any “piloted” tests in the future.

It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s a Boeing MQ-25 Stingray!

The U.S. Navy successfully conducted its first-ever aerial refueling between a manned aircraft and an unmanned tanker. The unmanned tanker was being flown from the ground control station.

The Illinois-based mission lasted about four and a half hours and validated that an unmanned tanker could successfully use the Navy’s standard probe-and-drogue aerial refueling method.

Battery recycling firm set to expand in Nevada

| by KSNV NEWS 3, LAS VEGAS.

RENO (AP) — A battery recycling company founded by a former executive at Tesla Inc. broke ground on 100 acres (40 hectares) of land at an industrial park near Reno as part of its expansion plan.

Redwood Materials, which was founded in Nevada in 2017, is expecting its operations to continue growing with a boost in used battery packs from older electric vehicles, the Reno-Gazette Journal reported.

As a result, the company plans to expand its facilities and increase its workforce from just over 100 employees to more than 600 in the next couple of years. In addition to the acquisition at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, the company is also undertaking a major project in Carson City to expand its 150000-square-foot facility (13935-square-meter) to 550000 square feet (51000 square meters) within the next two years.