Computers in Google's self-driving cars can function like human drivers based on a ruling by the United States' highway safety agency. The new definition of "driver" set by the federal government's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is good news for the Alphabet company that is designing and testing autonomous vehicles without steering wheels and foot pedals.
A new energy-efficient computer chip that can do powerful artificial intelligence (AI) tasks on smartphones and Internet of Things (IoT) devices has been developed by researchers. The tiny chip called Eyeriss developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) would integrate things called "neural networks" modeled after the human brain into mobile AI.
Google is in talks with London's transportation chiefs about extending its self-driving car program to England's capital city. The city wants the Alphabet company to expand its road trials by adding London to road tests already being conducted in the states of California, Washington, and Texas.
Google's artificial intelligence (AI) program DeepMind will take on the best Go player on the planet for a $1 million prize. Its Alpha Go AI system will challenge world champion Lee Sedol from South Korea in a man vs. machine contest from March 9 to 15 during a live YouTube broadcast from Seoul.
A robot octopus has been developed by a robotics researcher by modeling it after a soft sea creature her father caught for her in 2007. The Italian scientist studied how the cephalopod grabbed little fish and crabs in a saltwater tank. Her team then built soft robot prototypes made mostly of elastic materials that mimicked the eight-armed animal's motions and squeezed into their environments.
Elon Musk has cancelled the Model X crossover SUV order by a customer after the blogger posted an open letter to the Tesla CEO last fall criticizing the electric vehicle's (EV) launch event. The Tesla customer complained that the September event started late and that the company's founder used bad judgment by not apologizing for the late start.
Google will extend the road tests of its self-driving cars to the wet weather conditions of a small city in Washington State. The rainy streets and rolling hills of the Pacific Northwest city of Kirkland near Seattle will test the performance of the driverless cars. Google's parent company Alphabet announced on February 3, Wednesdays that it would add the third city to the autonomous vehicles' testing regions of California and Texas.
Robotic exoskeletons are helping patients who have been paralyzed since birth or after events such as car accidents, to take their first step forward and then walk again. The Phoenix robot suits developed by a research lab at University of California at Berkeley (UCB) are basically battery-powered wearable devices with hip and knee joints to power the user's movements.
Microsoft introduced its HoloLens augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) headset last year, but the tech giant has already teased several applications including video games and business tools. The official tech sponsor of the National Football League (NFL) is now introducing a new NFL-centered concept just before the kickoff of Super Bowl 50 that could revolutionize how HoloLens users watch preseason or champions games.
Microsoft Research's brand new concept could use underwater data centers to power cloud services for about half of the world's human population of 7.4 billion people. The operating system giant's Project Natick would include a steel submarine capsule lying on the ocean floor. It could be self-sustaining for five years without needing any repairs from a technician, and end the high cooling costs required for traditional server farms.
