A top executive from Baidu's telematics division believes the company will become the word leader in driverless by 2020, according to a report in today's South China Morning Post.
Tesla CEO and founder Elon Musk has repeatedly said this year all Tesla models made since October 2016 have the requisite hardware for "full self-driving" capabilities, yet the company has reportedly begun to add a second graphics processor (GPU) to its computer platform for Autopilot — without officially saying why.
The ride-sharing firm Lyft and Faraday Future, a troubled electric carmaker and potential Tesla competitor, have quietly appointed new top executives, but like the rest of the industry, they struggle to find talent for their driverless programs.
Drive.ai (a startup founded by Stanford University graduates), Waymo, General Motors, and serial entrepreneur and author Vivek Wadhwa are featured in today's top news.
Some drivers give Tesla's Autopilot update released this week rave reviews, after version 8.1 has taken longer than expected to live up to Elon Musk's "smooth as silk" Tweet from earlier this year.
Google quickly learned over five years ago electric vehicles (EVs) were the powertrain of choice for its then fledging driverless car program and the industry has since followed its lead.
This most recent school shooting, one of the worst in history, has devastated our country. That such an act can be performed not by a begrudged child, but by one or more adults, is nearly unthinkable.
Nauto, which develops driver-monitor cameras and algorithms for autonomous vehicles, is among a growing list of driverless startups able to attract tens of millions of dollars in funding after raising $159 million in its latest round of financing.
Hyundai Motor Company says it will launch its driverless tech ahead of schedule, but the Korean carmaker will remain behind mainstream rivals, including General Motors (GM), Nissan, and Honda.
Humans are able to produce a wide variety of sounds in part because they have descended voice boxes that makes room for longer vocal tracts.
Legal Services A group of lawyers refused to provide legal services to needy AARP members for $30 per hour, but when asked to do it for free, they readily agreed.
As you have no doubt observed, brothers and sisters do not mate. While they may find one another attractive, they find the notion of sex with one another repulsive. This is because a child produced by siblings has a high probability of sharing the same recessive genes, and recessive genes are often harmful unless coupled with dominant genes.
In yesterday's tidbit, we learned that across the planet women seek material wealth in their mates. This stems from our hunter-gather past in which females depended on male hunters to provide them and their children the meat necessary to support their large brains.
One of the roles our government has taken on is to provide us with information to be used in making decisions.
Economists have long since known that people want to be rewarded for taking on risk. Investments are thus judged by their risk-adjusted returns (Sharpe ratios). A typical hedge fund has a Sharpe ratio of around 0.5. This means that its excess annual return over the risk-free rate is about half its annual standard deviation.
Before lead was removed from gasoline, lead from car exhaust got into the air, was breathed in by kids, lowered their IQs, and increased crime rates (there is a very strong correlation between IQ and criminal behavior).
Imagine two stakes in your backyard. Now draw an east-west, north-south coordinate system on your lawn. Measure the east-west distance between the stakes and also the north-south distance. Take the square root of the sum of the squares of the two measurements and, voilà, you end up with the "distance" between the two stakes.
Roughly five million years ago, humans split off from chimpanzees, who had in turn split off from gorillas five million years earlier.
Nicole Mead and Vanessa Patrick had a bunch of dieters, one at a time, sit and watch a movie, each with a bowl of candy next to him. Some were told they shouldn't eat the candy, while others were told that they should hold off during the movie but could have the candy later.
As we approach the holiday (i.e. gift-giving) season, don't forget to make sure to include the usual notes in your gifts indicating that they can be returned. Otherwise, you'll just cause the recipients to save your gifts until they can be properly regifted onto some other ungrateful chump.
Sea otters are the largest members of the weasel family. When people started hunting sea otters for their fur, their population fell from roughly 225,000 to about 1,500, until the International Fur Seal Treaty took effect in 1911. Since the international ban on otter hunting, the population has rebounded back to roughly 107,000.
When subjects are asked to watch a movie and not display emotions (say, a comedy without laughing, or a tearjerker without crying), they evidently use up glucose in particular areas of their brain in a way that subjects who are free to react however they want do not.
Augmented reality as a storytelling medium can do some extraordinary things words and images alone can't convey -- such as transporting readers 400 years into the past.
After winning the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup, the USA Women's National Soccer Team is ready to defend its title in the 2019 tournament.
Newly appointed Ford Motor CEO Jim Hackett admitted yesterday that demand for driverless transportation could take many different forms and that Ford was rethinking how it would tailor its cars and mobility services for self-drive modes of transportation in the future.
Google largely helped to pioneer the concept of a steering wheel- and pedal-free self-driving experience when it began testing its Firefly pod-like vehicles a few years ago.
Ex-Uber CEO and founder Travis Kalanick's bad and likely illegal behavior aside, his vision of not wanting to pay "the other dude in the car" has lead to a ground-breaking driverless test fleet.
Cruise Automation, General Motors' (GM) driverless car arm, has hired two hackers who were once seen by many as a safety threat to help find vulnerabilities in its self-drive car network.
The AFL-CIO's Transportation Trades Division, which represents 32 unions in the US, has successfully lobbied for the removal of 10,000-lb. and heavier commercial trucks from provisions in bills expected to pass that could allow for millions of driverless vehicles on public roads and streets, Bloomberg News reported.
The status of Uber's driverless program remains a big unknown amid the company's recent woes, but a reported multibillion-dollar shot in the arm by Japanese tech giant Softbank could change all that.
A Norwegian carrier's launch of a pilotless container ship next year could lead the way to a new era in sea transportation and shipping if successful.
Lyft officially laid its stake in the ground to develop driverless fleets following its Friday announcement, but how fast it is catching up to ride-hailing competitor Uber's driverless initiative remains to be seen.
Research group OpenAI, a research institute co-founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, says it is possible to trick driverless cars' neural networks into mistaking images for something else.
The Chinese government's tight restrictions on gathering data by foreign firms for 3D mapping, the lifeblood of machine-taught driverless systems, could at least slow down access to the market by Waymo, Tesla, General Motors (GM), Ford, and other players hoping to make inroads there.
Waymo and Lyft have remained highly secretive about their driverless car programs, but may be forced to reveal a lot about their plans after a judge in a US federal court granted Uber's request to review documents about Waymo and Lyft's partnership.
The laws and regulations in place in the US for driverless vehicles are a mess, but Republican congressional members say they can fix it.
The auto industry continues to shift into high gear to lay the groundwork for driverless cars with an electric vehicle (EV) emphasis.
Many wonder how driverless cars will ever be able to navigate through any driving condition imaginable — but the point is self-taught machines, in theory, have the innate ability to adapt to chaotic and extreme driving conditions in ways far superior to what humans are capable of.
All the Driverless news you need to know from the past 24 hours, bundled together in a tightly written package, about Uber, London delivery services, capital investments, and kangaroos.
There was big news today from Google, Apple, Volvo, and Nvidia regarding their self-driving efforts.