Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
New Zealand: Domino’s to Test Pizza Delivery Drones
August 24th, 2016Via: NZ Herald: Aerial pizza delivery may sound futuristic but Domino’s has been given the green light to test New Zealand pizza delivery via drones. The fast food chain has partnered with drone business Flirtey to launch the first commercial drone delivery service in the world, starting later this year.
Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month
August 18th, 2016Via: Bloomberg: Starting later this month, Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved. Google, widely regarded as the leader in the field, has been testing its fleet for several years, and Tesla Motors offers Autopilot, […]
Ford: Driverless Cars by 2021
August 17th, 2016Via: NBC: Most major automakers — and a number of automotive start-ups — are racing to develop the first hands-free vehicles. Nissan, for one, hopes to have a fully autonomous car in production by 2020. But Ford says it will go a step beyond. It has announced plans to eliminate the driver entirely when it […]
How CIA’s Palantir Wired Washington
August 14th, 2016Via: Politico: When a little-known Silicon Valley software startup began vying for national security contracts, it went up against an entrenched bureaucracy and opposition from major contractors skilled in the Washington game. But quickly, Palantir began pulling pages from the defense industry’s own playbook — bulking up on lobbyists, challenging the Pentagon’s contracting rules and […]
MIT and DARPA Pack Lidar Sensor Onto Single Chip
August 5th, 2016Via: IEEE: Applications such as autonomous vehicles and robotics heavily depend on lidar, and an expensive lidar module is a major obstacle to their use in commercial products. Our work at MIT’s Photonic Microsystems Group is trying to take these large, expensive, mechanical lidar systems and integrate them on a microchip that can be mass […]
Sea Hunter Unmanned Sub Chaser Completes First Sea Trials
August 3rd, 2016Via: New Atlas: The Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) has completed its first round of sea trials, during which main contractor Leidos says it met or surpassed its performance goals. Co-sponsored by DARPA and the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the autonomous 132-ft (42-m) trimaran, which is designed to track potentially hostile […]
Google’s Project Wing Delivery Drones to Be Tested in U.S.
August 3rd, 2016Via: Bloomberg: The proposed drone delivery service born in Google’s experimental labs will test its system at a U.S. site, the White House announced as part of an initiative to push research and safety measures for unmanned flight. … Project Wing’s test program will be the most significant drone delivery trial to date in the […]
Delphi to Begin Testing On-Demand Robot Taxis in Singapore
August 1st, 2016Via: Bloomberg: Delphi Automotive Plc, the vehicle-electronics supplier that last year conducted the first coast-to-coast U.S. demonstration of a self-driving car, will begin testing autonomous autos in Singapore this year that may lead to robot taxis by the end of the decade. The test will involve six autonomous autos, starting with the modified Audi Q5 […]
Electronic Voting Systems and Security
July 30th, 2016Of course, it’s worse than Bruce admits: Clinton Foundation and Electronic Voting Machines Via: Bruce Schneier: Over the years, more and more states have moved to electronic voting machines and have flirted with Internet voting. These systems are insecure and vulnerable to attack. But while computer security experts like me have sounded the alarm for […]
Artificial Intelligence Swarms Silicon Valley on Wings and Wheels
July 24th, 2016See artificial intelligence winters and hype cycles. Via: New York Times: For more than a decade, Silicon Valley’s technology investors and entrepreneurs obsessed over social media and mobile apps that helped people do things like find new friends, fetch a ride home or crowdsource a review of a product or a movie. Now Silicon Valley […]
