As reported by Engadget: Hyperloop One has teamed up with the city of Moscow and a local company to explore bringing the Hyperloop to Russia. The trio will investigate how and where such high-speed transportation can be integrated into the country's existing transport network. Since Moscow itself has a population of 16 million people, cheap, quick and reliable mass transit is always worthy of further study. But the wider picture is that Hyperloop One views this as the first step on building a new high-speed freight link between Europe and China.
As co-founder Shervin Pishevar explains, Hyperloop could form the backbone of a "transformative new Silk Road: a cargo Hyperloop that whisks freight containers from China to Europe in a day." That would reduce shipping times from weeks (as it currently stands) and lighten the load on container ships. It helps, too, that the local company Hyperloop has partnered with is, essentially, the ideal company to actually build the system out.
Hyperloop cargo carriers have been proposed as an alternative to train, trucking, air and ship based transportation of cargo.
Summa Group is an investment and construction conglomerate that can probably knock out a passable Hyperloop without any outside help. For instance, it already owns Russia's largest sea port, three different construction companies and a logistics company. Then there's the fact that it's already got its own oil-and-gas plant and experience of building oil pipelines -- sealed metal tubes that travel large distances across the country. Given that Hyperloop will also rely upon the same technology, such expertise will come in very handily indeed.
As reported by The Verge: NASA is still testing wild new wing technologies to improve energy efficiency in flight. The agency announced yesterdaythat it is conducting research on a unique wing design that uses 14 electric motors. The experimental aircraft it's designing is called X-57, otherwise known as "Maxwell."
The X-57 is NASA's first X-plane in a decade, and the plan is to develop technologies that improve fuel use and emissions and reduce noise, while also potentially paving the way to faster and more efficient small aircraft. "With the return of piloted X-planes to NASA’s research capabilities – which is a key part of our 10-year-long New Aviation Horizons initiative – the general aviation-sized X-57 will take the first step in opening a new era of aviation," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.
PAVING THE WAY TO FASTER AND MORE EFFICIENT SMALL AIRCRAFT
The Maxwell, which is named after 19th century Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, will be built by the Scalable Convergent Electric Propulsion Technology Operations Research (Sceptor) project. The aircraft itself will be a modified Tecnam P2006T, outfitted with 14 motors for propulsion. Researchers hope to prove that using that many motors can reduce the amount of energy required to reach a cruising speed of 175 mph.
NASA has been doing this research for X-planes for some time, and it'll be awhile before these experimental planes are ready. NASA also awarded Lockheed Martin $20 million for the company to develop its own supersonic X-plane designs. NASA hopes that these efforts represent the future of flight. Here's hoping they're right.
As reported by SlashGear: When MediaTek announced its deca-core moble processor, it almost seemed insane in a world that's very much settled on octa-cores. The chip maker, however, has nothing on the silicon produced by researchers at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Davis. Although it definitely won't fit inside a smartphone, tablet, or even a laptop for that matter, the chip boasts of being the world's first kilo-core processor. That's 1,000 processing cores at your service, making even the beefiest gaming rig cry in shame.
Of course, you probably won't be using it for that gaming, or any other consumer purpose. It's still something that exists inside controlled conditions of a laboratory, but it is nonetheless an achievement worth bragging about. According to electrical and computer engineering professor Bevan Baas, the highest number of cores ever achieved in a multi-core chip has been 300. This UC Davies chip is easily more than thrice that many.
That's not its only bragging right either. Each processor is like an island of its own and can run a tiny program independently of others. This would be akin to a "Multiple Instruction, Multiple Data" architecture that is more flexible than current Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) used by most modern commercial processors these days.
And there's more to it than that. Almost like the "True Octa Core" feature MediaTek flaunted a few years ago, each processor can power itself down when not in use, so you aren't exactly going to be using 1,000 times the power. In fact, the chip can be powered by a AA battery.
In terms of specs, the cores operate at 1.78 GHz and has been clocked to process 1.78 trillion instructions per second. A special feature of the chip is that the cores can send and receive data directly to each other instead of having a common memory pool, like an L-level cache, which would have been a bottleneck instead of a speed increase in this situation. The chip itself was fabricated by IBM using a much older 32nm process. As for what the chip can be used for, it could, if it ever becomes mass produced and stable, be a favorite among media processing, scientific, and encryption circles. Basically anything that requires processing tons of data in parallel and in break neck speeds.
Can you imagine combining this technology with Google's Tensor processors, or with deeply trained neural network systems?
As reported by Wired: ON SUNDAY MORNING, the Chinese government launched the 23rd satellite in its BeiDou Navigation Satellite System—the Chinese equivalent of GPS—into orbit aboard a Long March-3C rocket. BeiDou has worked for a while on a regional level, but China has been racking up the launches recently. Each one is another step toward BeiDou having fully operational global coverage, something that only the United States and (kinda, sometimes, maybe) Russia have today. If it works, it could mean a new golden age of navigation. Unless it leads to global war.
BeiDou is already a a Regional Navigational Satellite System; India and Japan are working on their own regional systems, too. Completing the Chinese constellation would turn it into a Global Navigational Satellite System, joining the US (the familiar GPS), Russia (GLONASS), and the European Union (Galileo). Though each places satellites in slightly different orbits and at different altitudes, they all work on the same idea, providing global coverage with enough signal to allow devices on Earth to triangulate a precise location. GPS is accurate to within a meter.
The more satellites you have, the more precise and accurate the system. And you need a reliable satellite constellation because so much modern technology is location-enabled and dependent. GPS and its siblings are how airplanes and freighters navigate, how maps stay accurate on the move, how cell phones work. The modern global economy only works if it knows where it is in all three spatial dimensions.
A more philosophical dimension matters even more. “If you want acceptance, a system has to have more than precision and accuracy, it has to have integrity,” says Brad Parkinson, a Stanford engineer and one of the inventors of GPS. “It has to operate within spec, and have some system of monitoring and publishing when it isn’t.” If a GPS satellite goes berserk, the FAA’s Wide Area Augmentation System sends out an alarm within six seconds. WAAS, or something like it, could just as easily monitor Galileo, GLONASS, and even BeiDou, and then, technically, anyone could use any and all of the various networks. “If it’s there, and it’s working, why not use it?” says Parkinson. “Almost all modern smartphone receivers support GPS and GLONASS already.”
Actually, the US and China have been working towards GPS-BeiDou interoperability for years in fields like aviation. “If you can land a plane in pea soup fog conditions, that’s a pretty great thing,” says Tom Langenstein, Executive Director of the Stanford Center for Position, Navigation and Time. “China would like to be able to do that too. It’s kind of a nice area of cooperation between our countries.”
Granted, BeiDou hasn’t been totally cooperative and transparent. China launched several satellites before telling the engineering community what their signal structure was—somewhat pointlessly, considering Stanford researchers were able to figure it out in about day. But as Langenstein points out, if they fail to provide evidence of their accuracy and integrity, then their satellites simply won’t be used. GLONASS has had a lot of trouble keeping their satellites in working order, and is notably cagey about system failures, which to Parkinson’s mind keeps them in a vicious cycle of limited viability. So it’s likely that, if BeiDou is to succeed, it’s by being welcomed into the international GNSS club.
Ultimately, international use of BeiDou satellites is in China’s own interest. “GPS has been a major boon for the US economy for the last twenty years,” Langenstein says. “China wants some of that. If you want to fear that, you can. But China is the second largest economy in the world and getting larger. It would be far better to cooperate and work with them than try to find some way to fight them.”
It’s that fighting part that could make BeiDou more scary than useful. “For the last several decades, satellites have been one of the signature elements of the US projecting as the sole remaining superpower. We can blow up anyone who looks at us cross-eyed,” says John Pike, a prominent military analyst and director of GlobalSecurity.org. “This suggests that China has global ambitions. They’ve got superpower-style space systems, but they don’t have the military to go with it.” The US and China are already frenemies at best; a significant military advantage for the Chinese could jeopardize the relationship further.
On the other hand, an optimist might point out the opportunities here. “BeiDou would change the asymmetry of military power,” Parkinson says. “But I’ve been saying for years that our ground soldiers should have sets that pick up US, Russian, Chinese, and European signals, and a very rapid technique of letting that ground soldier know when not to use it—a military analogue of WAAS. You wouldn’t be relying on foreign systems, but they’d enhance your mission when you know that they’re working properly.” BeiDou’s ultimate direction might not be clear yet, but it’s definitely headed there—fast.
As reported by IEEE Spectrum: If you’ve been out on the streets of Silicon Valley or New York City in the past nine months, there’s a good chance that your bad driving habits have already been profiled byNexar. This U.S.-Israeli startup is aiming to build what it calls “an air traffic control system” for driving, and has just raised an extra $10.5 million in venture capital financing.
Since Nexar launched its dashcam app last year, smartphones running it have captured, analyzed, and recorded over 5 million miles of driving in San Francisco, New York, and Tel Aviv. The company’s algorithms have now automatically profiled the driving behavior of over 7 million cars, including more than 45 percent of all registered vehicles in the Bay Area, and over 30 percent of those in Manhattan.
Using the smartphone’s camera, machine vision, and AI algorithms, Nexar recognizes the license plates of the vehicles around it, and tracks their location, velocity, and trajectory. If a car speeds past or performs an illegal maneuver like running a red light, that information is added to a profile in Nexar’s online database. When another Nexar user’s phone later detects the same vehicle, it can flash up a warning to give it a wide berth. (This feature will go live later this year.)
Lior Strahilevitz, a law professor at the University of Chicago, proposed a similar (if lower-tech) reputation system for drivers a decade ago. “I think it’s a creative and sensible way to help improve the driving experience,” he says. “There aren’t a lot of legal impediments in the United States to what Nexar is doing, nor should there be.” Eran Shir, Nexar’s co-founder, says, “If you’re driving next to me and you’re a dangerous driver, I want to know about it so I can be prepared.”
Nexar estimates that if 1 percent of drivers use the app daily, it would take just one month to profile 99 percent of a city’s vehicles. “We think that it’s a service to the community to know if you’re a crazy driver or not,” says Shir.
That community includes insurance companies, who Nexar suggests could save billions by cherry-picking only the best drivers to cover. Nexar has calculated that companies using its universal driving score could save $125 a year on each policy. Drivers benefit, too, from video and sensor footage stored in the cloud that they can use to support their side of the story following a collision.
Shir hopes that Nexar will also reduce traffic fatalities long before self-driving cars become mainstream. The app can highlight treacherous intersections, or detect a car braking sharply and send alerts to users several cars back or even around a corner. “This needs to be a real-time network,” says Shir. “We’ve optimized the way that cars communicate so that the latency is very low: about 100 to 150 milliseconds.”
Such targeted warnings require much more precise geolocation than that offered by normal GPS systems, which are typically accurate to within only 5 to 50 meters. Nexar’s app fuses data from multiple sensors in the smartphone. The accelerometer senses potholes and speed bumps, while the magnetometer (used for compass settings) detects when the car is travelling under power lines. “We use these, refreshed fifty times a second, to crowdsource features of the road and pinpoint where you are to within 2 meters,” says Shir. A side benefit is that the company has built detailed maps of road surface quality in its pilot cities.
Shir thinks that Nexar can also help drivers realize the vision of smart, connected highways. “We’re going into a hybrid world where autonomous vehicles and humans will share the road,” says Shir. “We won’t be able to shout at each other or ask someone to move. We need a network that will manage our roads as a scarce resource.”
For the past decade, the automotive industry has been struggling to implement dedicated short range communications (DSRC), a messaging system that lets a car transmit its location, speed, and direction to nearby vehicles and infrastructure. Shir thinks that apps like Nexar could leapfrog the billions of dollars and decades of roll-out time that such a system would likely demand.
“DSRC is dead in the water,” he says. “Instead of sharing information about a single vehicle, where you need a density [of equipped vehicles] of 10 to 20 percent to become effective, you can share the information of all the vehicles around you, and start with 1 percent. It’s a massive force multiplier.”
Over the next year, Nexar plans to launch its network features in 10 more cities, including San Diego; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; and Seattle. It will work towards that that magic 1-percent penetration mark where it could rate almost every driver and detect almost every incident.Although ranking the driving performance of every vehicle in the United States might sounds legally dubious, Lior Strahilevitz says that it is probably legal: “Courts generally say that people generally have little or no expectation of privacy in the movements of their cars on public roads, as long as cars aren’t being tracked everywhere they go for a lengthy period of time.”
Nevertheless, Nexar will face some ethical dilemmas. For example, should the app inform users when it spots a license plate that’s the subject of an Amber Alert? Or contact law enforcement directly if the algorithms suggest that an erratically moving car is being operated by an intoxicated driver?
Although Shir says that Nexar is “not interested in generating more traffic ticket revenue for cities… or becoming the long arm of the FBI,” he admits that law enforcement could subpoena its raw footage and sensor data.
Ultimately, Nexar might succeed because drivers are constantly being rated, whether or not they are running the app themselves. If its algorithms are judging you anyway, you might not want to be the only one in the dark about that accident-prone pick-up in the next lane.
As reported by Wired: YOUR NEXT IPHONE will be even better at guessing what you want to type before you type it. Or so say the technologists at Apple.
Let’s say you use the word “play” in a text message. In the latest version of the iOS mobile operating system, “we can tell the difference between the Orioles who are playing in the playoffs and the children who are playing in the park, automatically,” Apple senior vice president Craig Federighi said Monday morning during his keynote at the company’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference.
Like a lot of big tech companies, Apple is deploying deep neural networks, networks of hardware and software that can learn by analyzing vast amounts of data. Specifically, Apple uses “long short-term memory” neural networks, or LSTMs. They can “remember” the beginning of a conversation as they’re reading the end of it, making them better at grasping context.
Google uses a similar method to drive Smart Reply, which suggests responses to email messages. But Apple’s “QuickType”—that’s what the company calls its version—shows that not only is Apple pushing AI onto personal devices, it’s pushing harder than Federighi let on.
Today, on its website, Apple also introduced an application programming interface, or API, that lets outside businesses and coders use a similar breed of neural network. This tool, Basic Neural Network Subroutines, is a “collection of functions that you can use to construct neural networks” on a wide range of Apple operating systems, including iOS as well as OS X (for desktops and laptops), tvOS (for TVs), and watchOS (for watches), according to the documentation. “They’re making it as easy as possible for people to add neural nets to their apps,” says Chris Nicholson, CEO and founder of deep learning startup Skymind.
For now, BNNS looks better at identifying images than understanding natural language. But either way, neural networks don’t typically run on laptops and phones. They run atop computer servers on the other side of the Internet, and then they deliver their results to devices across the wire. (Google just revealed that it has built a specialized chip that executes neural nets inside its data centers before sending the results to your phone). Apple wants coders to build neural nets that work even without a connection back to the ‘net—and that’s unusual. Both Google and IBM have experimented with the idea, but Apple is doing it now.
It might not work. Apple doesn’t provide a way of training the neural net, where it actually learns a task by analyzing data. The new Apple API is just a way of executing the neural net once it’s trained. Coders, Nicholson says, will have to handle that on their own or use pre-trained models from some other source. Plus, no one yet knows how well Apple’s neural nets will run on a tiny device like a phone or a watch. They may need more processing power and battery life than such devices can provide. But that’s all details; one day, neural nets will work on personal devices, and Apple is moving toward that day.
As reported by The Verge: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched two satellites into orbit this morning, but the company failed to land the vehicle on a floating drone ship at sea afterward.
THE VEHICLE'S LANDING CAUSED A BIT OF DRAMA
The vehicle's landing caused a bit of drama, since SpaceX wasn't sure at first if the vehicle actually made it down in one piece. Once the rocket landed, it shook the drone ship pretty violently, causing the ship's onboard camera to freeze. The last shots of the vehicle before the camera cut out showed the Falcon 9 standing upright on the ship, but there were also some flames around the bottom.
Afterward, a SpaceX employee announced on the company's webcast that the vehicle was indeed lost. "We can say that Falcon 9 was lost in this attempt," said Kate Tice, a process improvement engineer for SpaceX. Later CEO Elon Musk confirmed that the Falcon 9 suffered an RUD, or a rapid unscheduled disassembly. That's Musk speak for an explosion.
SpaceX will have many more chances to land its rockets again soon. The company will launch a cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station for NASA on July 16th. After that launch, SpaceX will try to land the Falcon 9 on solid ground at Cape Canaveral, Florida — something it hasn’t attempted since its first rocket landing in December. And after that, SpaceX has another satellite launch slated for August.
Meanwhile, the company still has an impressive stockpile of landed rockets in its possession. Right now, SpaceX is keeping its four recovered rockets in a hangar at Launch Complex 39A, a launch site at Kennedy Space Center in Florida that the company leases from NASA. That hangar can only store five Falcon 9 rockets at a time, though. So whenever SpaceX does land its next rocket in Florida, the building will be at full capacity.
Shir hopes that Nexar will also reduce traffic fatalities long before self-driving cars become mainstream. The app can highlight treacherous intersections, or detect a car braking sharply and send alerts to users several cars back or even around a corner. “This needs to be a real-time network,” says Shir. “We’ve optimized the way that cars communicate so that the latency is very low: about 100 to 150 milliseconds.”
