The global AI explosion has supercharged the need for a common sense, human-centered methodology for dealing with data privacy and ownership. Leading the way is Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), but there’s more than just personally identifiable information (PII) at stake in the modern market. What about the data we generate as content and art? It’s certainly not legal to copy someone else’s work and then present it as your own. But there are AI systems that attempt to scrape as much human-generated content from the web as possible in order to generate content that’s similar. Can GDPR or any other EU-centered policies protect this kind of content? As it turns out, like most things in the machine learning world, it depends on the data.
The end of summer also sounded the end of Germany’s €9 public transport ticket — a tenth of its usual price. Unsurprisingly popular with commuters, it left people wondering what was next. This week the Berlin Senate has announced its plan to secure funds for reduced-price BVG tickets. According to Mayor Franziska Giffey, a monthly ticket price of €29 for zones A-C has been agreed upon, with further discussion for outer regions and the rest of Germany. Hi there, EV nerd! Subscribe now for a weekly recap of our favorite mobility stories
Lithium-ion batteries have become a key component in the rise of electric mobility, but forecasting their health and lifespans is limiting the technology. While they’ve proven successful, the capacity of lithium-ion batteries degrades over time, and not just because of the ageing process that occurs during charging and discharging — known as “cycling ageing.” Batteries also degrade when not in use Lithium-ion battery cells also suffer degradation from so-called “calendar ageing,” which occurs during storage, or simply when the battery is not in use. It’s determined by three main factors: the rest state of charge (SOC), the rest temperature, and the duration of the rest time of a battery.
When it comes to mobility, the future is electric, and that means a lot of batteries. Unfortunately, batteries can potentially catch fire or explode, causing fast, ferocious fires. But we might have a solution – or several solutions. This article is Part Three, the final of a series I’ve been writing on lithium-ion battery fires in escooters and ebikes. Part One explored the incidence of battery fires, while Part Two looked at causation. Today I’m focusing on prevention. Let’s jump in: Prevent the fire from occurring What if we could prevent a fire from happening in the first instance?
Scientists have tapped neuromorphic computing to keep robots learning about new objects after they’ve been deployed. For the uninitiated, neuromorphic computing replicates the neural structure of the human brain to create algorithms that can deal with the uncertainties of the natural world. Intel Labs has developed one of the most notable architectures in the field: the Loihi neuromorphic chip. Greetings, humanoids Subscribe to our newsletter now for a weekly recap of our favorite AI stories in your inbox. Loihi is comprised of around 130,000 artificial neurons, which send information to each other across a “spiking” neural network (SNN).
A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics recently demonstrated a record-breaking experiment that could turn the quantum computing industry on its head. The quantum slalom One of the biggest challenges facing STEM researchers today is the difficulty of building a fault-tolerant, stable quantum computer. In essence, modern physicists are darting back and forth between trying to scale quantum computers to functional sizes and attempting to squelch all the noisy errors as the systems grow. Greetings, humanoids Subscribe to our newsletter now for a weekly recap of our favorite AI stories in your inbox.
If you’re impressed by the recent spate of text-to-image generators, get ready for the next step in AI artistry: text-to-video. While the huge compute costs and scarcity of text-to-video datasets have stunted the technique’s growth, recent research has brought the promise closer to reality. A computer artist called Glenn Marshall has given a glimpse at the potential. Greetings, humanoids Subscribe to our newsletter now for a weekly recap of our favorite AI stories in your inbox. The Belfast-based composer recently won the Jury Award at the Cannes Short Film Festival for his AI film The Crow.
Nikita Gourianov, a physicist at Oxford university, yesterday published a scathing article full of wild, damning claims about the field of quantum computing and the scientists who work in it. According to Gourianov, the quantum computing industry has been led astray by greedy physicists who’ve hyped up the tech’s possibilities in order to rip off VCs and get paid private-sector salaries for doing academic research. Double, double Per Gourianov’s article, the real problems started in the 2010s after investors started taking notice of the hype surrounding quantum physics: As more money flowed in, the field grew, and it became progressively more tempting for scientists to oversell their results.
The City of New York is grappling with a problem — fire. Specifically, escooter and ebike lithium-ion batteries catch fire and sometimes explode. And there’s no sign of it ending anytime soon. Earlier this year, I wrote an introductory article detailing the rate of lithium-ion battery fires. Today I want to look at New York as a cautionary tale in the struggle of dealing with battery fires as ebikes (and, to a lesser extent, escooters) become mainstream. I’ll follow up with a third article tomorrow, exploring potential technological solutions to prevent battery fires. What causes battery fires?
