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(Inside Science) — It took years of painstaking work for Carlos Souza and his colleagues to map out every road in the Brazilian Amazon biome. Official maps of the 4.2 million-square-kilometer region only show roads built by federal and local governments. But by carefully tracing lines on satellite images, the researchers concluded in 2016 that the true length of all the roads combined was nearly 13 times higher.

“When we don’t have a good understanding of how much roadless areas we have on the landscape, we probably will misguide any conservation plans for that territory,” said Souza, a geographer at a Brazil-based environmental nonprofit organization called Imazon.

Now, Imazon researchers have built an artificial intelligence algorithm to find such roads automatically. Currently, the algorithm is reaching about 70% accuracy, which rises to 87%-90% with some additional automated processing, said Souza. Analysts then confirm potential roads by examining the satellite images. Souza presented the research last month at a virtual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

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It is no secret that Apple is working on the development of electric vehicle technology for almost 5–6 years now. Codenamed as Project Titan, the project contains many ex-employees of renowned automobile brands such as Tesla, Land Rover, and Aston Martin. Recently, there were rumours of Apple linking up with TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) for producing self-driving chips for their planned vehicles.

It was unclear until now whether Apple will be manufacturing the vehicles on their own, or will they act as a software provider for existing automobile brands. Now, however, there are reports that the tech company is in early talks with the Hyundai Motor Group, among others.

A Hyundai Motors representative confirmed yesterday that the South Korean automobile company is in discussion with Apple. Of course, ever since the tech company announced its intentions of developing an electric vehicle, it is in talks with a number of global manufacturers. However, Hyundai is one of the first major names to have come up.

AR cloud technology enables the unification of the physical and digital world to create immersive experiences. This technology uses a common interface to deliver persistent, collaborative and contextual digital content overlaid onto people, objects and locations. This provides users with information and services directly tied to every aspect of their physical surroundings.


The AR cloud will use a common interface to overlay digital content onto people, objects, and locations in persistent, interactive way.