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Blog – Page 5745

And they can detach while still in motion.

Three former SpaceX engineers launched a company to develop autonomous battery-electric trains that they believe can help to improve the efficiency and emissions of railroads, a press statement reveals.

The firm, Parallel Systems, recently raised $49.55 million in Series A funds to build autonomous freight trains. The funding will go, in part, towards advanced tests for its self-driving machines.

Decarbonizing cargo transportation Railroads are a great testbed for self-driving technologies as the constrained movement of trains means there is less possibility for something to go wrong. On top of that, the transportation sector in the U.S. is the country’s largest source of greenhouse emissions, though rail is only responsible for 2 percent of total transportation emissions. Estimates by the Association of American Railroads suggest that a shift to rail and away from road transportation could reduce emissions by up to 75 percent.

Continue reading “Three Former SpaceX Engineers Are Designing New, Ultra-Efficient Autonomous Trains” | >

“No AI technology ‘where training or transactional data is known to be of poor quality, carry bias, or where the quality of such data is unknown’ should ever be considered for use, and thus should be deemed Extreme Risk, not High Risk. Any AI technology based on poor quality or biased data is inherently compromised.”

“No AI technology that assists in “identifying, categorizing, prioritizing or otherwise making decisions pertaining to members of the public” should be deemed Low Risk. Automating such actions through technology, even with the inclusion of a human-in-the-loop, is an intrinsically risky activity, and should be categorized as such by the Policy.”

Full Story:

AI technologies are impacting our everyday lives. The ethical risks of AI mean we should think beyond the barebones of algorithmic fairness and bias in order to identify the full range of effects of AI technologies on safety, privacy and society at large.

Continue reading “Community Of AI Researchers, Practitioners Calls For Stringency In Toronto Police Services Board’s Use Of AI Technologies Policy” | >

Luminar, a laser lidar startup led by one of the youngest U.S. billionaires, has a new partnership with Mercedes-Benz that includes supplying sensors for its luxury vehicles and gathering on-road data from them to improve automated driving. The German carmaker also bought a small stake in the tech company.

Luminar’s Iris lidar will be integrated into future Mercedes planned for its next-generation platform to improve safety and help them operate autonomously during highway driving, the companies said. Details including specific models that will use the sensor and when they’ll be available for sale to customers aren’t being disclosed. Mercedes also acquired 1.5 million Luminar shares as part of the partnership, founder and CEO Austin Russell, 26, tells Forbes.

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The luxury automaker is buying 1.5 million shares of the laser lidar startup that’s led by one of the youngest U.S. billionaires.

Continue reading “Mercedes Signs On To Use Luminar Lidar In Its Luxury Cars, Invests In Laser Sensor Maker” | >

Scotland awarded rights for a massive offshore wind development more than twice the size of the U.K.’s current capacity, in a move that surprised the market for its scale and was welcomed by environmentalists.

The list of winning projects in the tender adds up to nearly 25 gigawatts, far bigger than the 10 gigawatts that Scottish authorities had anticipated ultimately being built.

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UNSW Sydney-led research paves the way for large silicon-based quantum processors for real-world manufacturing and application.

Australian researchers have proven that near error-free quantum computing is possible, paving the way to build silicon-based quantum devices compatible with current semiconductor manufacturing technology.

“Today’s publication in Nature shows our operations were 99 percent error-free,” says Professor Andrea Morello of UNSW, who led the work.

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While the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is well known for smashing protons together, it is actually the quarks and gluons inside the protons – collectively known as partons – that are really interacting. Thus, in order to predict the rate of a process occurring in the LHC – such as the production of a Higgs boson or a yet-unknown particle – physicists have to understand how partons behave within the proton. This behavior is described in Parton Distribution Functions (PDFs), which describe what fraction of a proton’s momentum is taken by its constituent quarks and gluons.

Knowledge of these PDFs has traditionally come from lepton–proton colliders, such as HERA at DESY. These machines use point-like particles, such as electrons, to directly probe the partons within the proton. Their research revealed that, in addition to the well-known up and down valence quarks that are inside a proton, there is also a sea of quark–antiquark pairs in the proton. This sea is theoretically made of all types of quarks, bound together by gluons. Now, studies of the LHC’s proton–proton collisions are providing a detailed look into PDFs, in particular the proton’s gluon and quark-type composition.

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General Motors Ultium batteries.

“When you need to put much more energy into the storage form, you get to a point where it’s no longer economical with the batteries, and that’s where the hydrogen comes in,” Freese explained to Green Car Reports. “So there will be a need for both.”

“Grid buffering is more than just the 24-hour cycle…it’s even more than what we talk about with wind, which might flow for a week and then not flow for two weeks,” he argued, noting that if the sources on the grid follow a seasonal nature and loads change quite a bit, it makes sense.

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Official launch marks a milestone in the development of quantum computing in Europe.

A quantum annealer with more than 5,000 qubits has been put into operation at Forschungszentrum Jülich. The Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) and D-Wave Systems, a leading provider of quantum computing systems, today launched the company’s first cloud-based quantum service outside North America. The new system is located at Jülich and will work closely with the supercomputers at JSC in the future. The annealing quantum computer is part of the Jülich UNified Infrastructure for Quantum computing (JUNIQ), which was established in autumn 2019 to provide researchers in Germany and Europe with access to various quantum systems.

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