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Category: transportation – Page 549

MNA– Head of Iran Nanotechnology Initiative Council and Iran’s envoy to Armenia met with Armenian Minister of Transport, Communication and IT in Yerevan.

Seyed Kazem Sadjadi, the Ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Iran to Yerevan and Professor Saeed Sarkar, Secretary-General of the Iran Nanotechnology Initiative Council (INIC) met with Vahan Martirosyan, the Minister of Transport, Communication and Information Technology of the Republic of Armenia on Wednesday in Yerevan.

The Armenian minister in the meeting welcomed the Iranian delegation for initiating cooperation and underlined that cooperation with Iran in areas of transportation and communication was of prime importance to Armenia. He voiced hope for expansion of bilateral cooperation in information technology.

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George “Geohot” Hotz is driving forward with his push to bring self-driving cars to the masses, but he’s going about it a slightly unconventional way. His company Comma.ai is brushing past some previous regulatory issues and is trying another route — open-sourcing not only its self-driving technology, but also instructions for building your very own hardware device (“a robotics platform”) called Comma Neo. All of this information is available today through Comma.ai’s GitHub repositories.

Since the beginning, the company has had a goal of being the Android version of self-driving cars — it wants to empower “ghostriding for the masses.” Earlier this year, it was approached by state and federal regulators inquiring about a product Hotz claimed wasn’t even on sale yet. Fed up with the scrutiny, Comma.ai cancelled its first product, the Comma One, and pivoted its thinking to democratizing its knowledge. So it’s keeping with its promise, but has scrapped its $999 price point in favor of it being free. “If we really want to be the Android of self-driving cars, we can’t be charging $999, can we?” Hotz explained.

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When you see a photo of a dog bounding across the lawn, it’s pretty easy for us humans to imagine how the following moments played out. Well, scientists at MIT have just trained machines to do the same thing, with artificial intelligence software that can take a single image and use it to to create a short video of the seconds that followed. The technology is still bare-bones, but could one day make for smarter self-driving cars that are better prepared for the unexpected, among other applications.

The software uses a deep-learning algorithm that was trained on two million unlabeled videos amounting to a year’s worth of screen time. It actually consists of two separate neural networks that compete with one another. The first has been taught to separate the foreground and the background and to identify the object in the image, which allows the model to then determine what is moving and what isn’t.

According to the scientists, this approach improves on other computer vision technologies under development that can also create video of the future. These involve taking the information available in existing videos and stretching them out with computer-generated vision, by building each frame one at a time. The new software is claimed to be more accurate, by producing up to 32 frames per second and building out entire scenes in one go.

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Since the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) needs to be in tip-top shape to discover new particles, it has two inspectors making sure everything’s in working order. The two of them are called TIM, short not for Timothy, but for Train Inspection Monorail. These mini autonomous monorails that keep an eye on the world’s largest particle collider follow a pre-defined route and get around using tracks suspended from the ceiling. According to CERN’s post introducing the machines, the tracks are remnants from the time the tunnel housed the Large Electron Positron instead of the LHC. The LEP’s monorail was bigger, but not quite as high-tech: it was mainly used to transport materials and workers.

As for what the machines can do, the answer is “quite a few.” They can monitor the tunnel’s structure, oxygen percentage, temperature and communication bandwidth in real time. Both TIMs can also take visual and infrared images, as well as pull small wagons behind them if needed. You can watch them in action below — as you can see, they’re not much to look at with their boxy silver appearance. But without them, it’ll be tough monitoring a massive circular tunnel with a 17-mile circumference.

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We took the technology out of the studio and into a car – making Holoportation truly mobile. To accomplish this, we reduced the bandwidth requirements by 97%, while still maintaining quality. This new mobile Holoportation system greatly increases the potential applications of real-time 3D capture and transmission.

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