MIT INVENTED A TOOL THAT ALLOWS DRIVERLESS CARS TO NAVIGATE RURAL ROADS WITHOUT A MAP
In a paper posted online on May 7 by CSAIL and project partner Toyota, 30-year-old PhD candidate Teddy Ort—along with co-authors Liam Paull and Daniela Rus—detail how using LIDAR (a radar-like sensor that uses lasers instead of radio waves to measure distances) and GPS together can enable self-driving cars to navigate on rural roads without having a detailed map to guide them. The team was able to drive down a number of unpaved roads in rural Massachusetts and reliably scan the road for curves and obstacles up to 100 feet ahead, according to the paper.
Read moreREAL-TIME AI: MICROSOFT ANNOUNCES PREVIEW OF PROJECT BRAINWAVE
That’s where Microsoft’s Project Brainwave could come in. Project Brainwave is a hardware architecture designed to accelerate real-time AI calculations. The Project Brainwave architecture is deployed on a type of computer chip from Intel called a field programmable gate array, or FPGA, to make real-time AI calculations at competitive cost and with the industry’s lowest latency, or lag time. This is based on internal performance measurements and comparisons to other organization’s publicly posted information.
Read moreFOR THE FIRST TIME, TWO CUBESATS HAVE GONE INTERPLANETARY
The first CubeSats launched in 2003, and in less than a decade, more than 100 had reached orbit around Earth. The aerospace industry has debated whether the 2kg to 15kg microsatellites are a fad, a toy, or a disruptive technology that will change the way we ultimately observe and study Earth and the rest of the Solar System. However, what is now beyond doubt is that the first CubeSats have gone interplanetary.
Read moreWHY SPINNING LIDAR SENSORS MIGHT BE AROUND FOR ANOTHER DECADE
Velodyne invented modern three-dimensional lidar scanners in the mid-2000s. But in recent years, the conventional wisdom has held that Velodyne’s design—which involves mounting 64 lasers onto a rotating gimbal—would soon be rendered obsolete by a new generation of solid-state lidar sensors that use a single stationary laser to scan a scene. But a startup called Ouster is seeking to challenge that view, selling Velodyne-like spinning lidar sensors at competitive prices.
Read moreLYME DISEASE IS ON THE RISE AGAIN
Tick-borne diseases have been ‘steadily going up every year … as the diseases expand to new areas around the country,’ Lyle Peterson of the CDC told reporters in a recent conference call announcing the updated infection estimates. Lyme disease accounts for about 80 percent of the tick-borne illnesses in the U.S. Source: npr.org
12-YEAR STUDY WILL LOOK AT EFFECTS OF UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME
Suri is conducting the research along with MIT professor Abhijit Banerjee, Princeton professor Alan Krueger, University of California San Diego professor Paul Niehaus, and GiveDirectly president Michael Faye. Overall, GiveDirectly expects to transfer $25 million to more than 21,000 people (not including the control group), 5,000 of whom will receive cash transfers for 12 years. The money comes with no strings attached. Source: mit.edu
DOLPHINS ARE HELPING US HUNT FOR ALIENS
When 12 men gathered at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia to discuss the art and science of alien hunting in 1961, the Order of the Dolphin was born. A number of the brightest minds from a range of scientific disciplines, including three Nobel laureates, a young Carl Sagan, and an eccentric neuroscientist named John Lilly—who was best known for trying to talk to dolphins—were in attendance. It was Lilly’s research that inspired the group’s name: If humans couldn’t even communicate with animals that shared most of our evolutionary history, he believed, they were a bit daft to think they could recognize signals from a distant planet.
Read moreCILIUM 1.0: BRINGING THE BPF REVOLUTION TO KUBERNETES NETWORKING AND SECURITY
The last couple of months have been tremendously exciting for everyone working on Cilium and BPF. We have witnessed a fast growing community of Cilium users as well as the rapid increase of BPF usage and development with companies such as Google joining the existing already strong BPF community of engineers from Facebook, Netflix, Red Hat and many more. Possibly the strongest signal on the success of BPF has been the decisions of the Linux kernel community to replace the in-kernel implementation of iptables with BPF.
Read moreOPEN SOURCING TERRATEST: A SWISS ARMY KNIFE FOR TESTING INFRASTRUCTURE CODE
Infrastructure as code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, Packer, and Docker offer a number of advantages: you can automate your entire provisioning and deployment process, you can store the state of your infrastructure in code (instead of a sysadmin’s head), you can use version control to track the history of how your infrastructure has changed, and so on. But there’s a catch: maintaining a large codebase of infrastructure code is hard.
Read moreMUSK HUNG UP ON NTSB CHIEF DURING CALL ABOUT TESLA CRASH PROBE
Robert Sumwalt, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, called the feisty builder of new-age cars and rockets on April 11 to tell him that blog posts by Tesla Inc. casting blame on the driver of a Model X for a fatal crash had gone too far. The NTSB had earlier warned Tesla not to make statements about the accident while it was being investigated by the board. Sumwalt then said he was taking the unusual step of kicking the company’s representatives off the investigation.
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