Lifeboat Foundation

The head of Google’s self-driving car division made headlines recently for asking federal regulators to permit a vehicle without human-facing features like a steering wheel. Now he’s made a very good case for why no autonomous vehicle should have these things at all.

In an interview with NPR that aired today, Google’s Chris Urmson hit home the point that it’s simply not a good idea to any to have any kind of human-oriented controls in self-driving cars:

You wouldn’t imagine that in the back of a taxi, we put an extra steering wheel or brake pedal there for the passenger to grab ahold of anytime. It would just be crazy to think about doing that. But at the same time, I could imagine that there are vehicles where most of the days you don’t really want to drive it, so let it take you to and from work in the morning, for example, but on the weekend when you get a chance to get out onto some open road, that you might enjoy driving in that location. But I think the idea that you want the person to jump in who hasn’t been paying attention or maybe had a couple of drinks with dinner and then jump in to override is probably not the right idea.

Continue reading “Why Self-Driving Cars Really Shouldn’t Ever Have Steering Wheels” »

Nice — Liquid biopsies, AI therapy, silico trials, precision surgery.

Negotiations and collaborations are launching now to decide which research trends and areas deserve the most support. Only disruptive innovations will be able to transform the status quo in cancer, leading patients to get more personalized and faster cancer care, while letting physicians do their job more effectively. Here are the technologies and trends that could help achieve the cancer moonshot.

Prevention and diagnosis

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New Watson API Rel.

The lines are beginning to become blurred as machines gain artificial intelligence capabilities based on Watson’s popular API set.

IBM has just announced the beta release of three new APIs, which could help revolutionize the way we interact with machines. The APIs are called Tone Analyzer, Emotion Analysis and Visual Recognition.

Continue reading “IBM’s Latest Watson API Release Redefines How People and Machines Interact” »

Is it time to relook at the CIO role requirements to include some level of CISO/ CSO experience?

Many of the security defences that companies invest in are blind to encrypted traffic and untrustworthy digital certificates, a study reveals.

A new set of measurements provides the tightest ever constraint for the Bell parameter, which constitutes the closest ever approach to the Tsirelson bound.

Scientists see cislunar outpost as critical to advancing future Mars missions.

NASA researchers based in Colorado are devising efforts to build a human outpost in cislunar space — the region around the moon. Unfortunately for fans of space tourism, these outposts are not designed to be the Airbnb of tomorrow. Rather, the habitats are to be used as in-between points to facilitate travel to near-Earth asteroids or Mars.

Scientists and engineers at NASA’s Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) Projects are researching life-support needs, updating astronaut radiation protection, and rethinking communication systems, to enhance the habitability of orbital communities parked in cislunar space.

Continue reading “Vacation Rentals on the Moon? NASA Plans Human Outpost in Space” »

Google Fiber is heading close to home for its next location: San Francisco. Google announced this morning that it intends to bring its fast gigabit internet to “a portion of San Francisco,” specifically to apartments, condos, and affordable housing units. Details on exactly where and when are nonexistent for now, and Google suggests that we may be waiting a while to hear more.

What Google Fiber does say is that it won’t be building out its own network in San Francisco, as it’s done in many other cities. Instead, it’ll rely on existing fiber networks to provide its service. That may limit what Google can do and where it can go, but it also means a much faster path to launch. “To date, we’ve focused mostly on building fiber-optic networks from scratch,” Michael Slinger, Google Fiber’s business operations director, writes in a blog post. “Now, as Google Fiber grows, we’re looking for more ways to serve cities of different shapes and sizes.” Google Fiber is already taking this approach in a couple other markets, including Huntsville, Alabama, where earlier this week it announced plans to launch using the city’s municipal network.

As it’s done elsewhere, Google Fiber plans to provide free gigabit internet service to “some public and affordable housing properties” in San Francisco. It’s also working with a nonprofit to teach people basic internet skills, like setting up an email account and applying for jobs.

Continue reading “Google Fiber is coming to San Francisco” »

Guessing the location of a randomly chosen Street View image is hard, even for well-traveled humans. But Google’s latest artificial-intelligence machine manages it with relative ease.

Audience viewing “Seeking Home: Life Inside the Calais Migrant Camp,” a VR experience placing viewers at the center of the migrant camp via Samsung Gear VR. (AP Photo)