While clean energy is not a new area for Alphabet’s X, the moonshot division has previously only focused on energy creation. With a new “exploration” called Malta, Alphabet is now looking at cost-effective energy storage solutions.
On its first wholly-made device, Google earned high marks for the Pixel’s 12.3 megapixel camera. Surprisingly, the software behind the lens dates back to when Alphabet’s X division was working on Google Glass.
In 2014, Google bought Titan Aerospace, maker of high altitude, solar-powered drone aircraft. At the time Google noted, “It’s still early days, but atmospheric satellites could help bring internet access to millions of people, and help solve other problems, including disaster relief and environmental damage like deforestation.” Titan previously said that its drones could collect real-time, high-resolution images of the earth, carry other atmospheric sensors and support voice and data services. A video of the Titan Aerospace Solara 50 can be seen below…
Any SF fan will be familiar with Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics, designed to ensure that robots were safe to be around. Scientists at Google, OpenAI, Stanford and Berkeley have just published a paper proposing the real-life equivalent for AI systems.
In a blog post summarising the proposal, Google Research’s Chris Olah says that while the team believes that AI will greatly benefit humanity, the risks do also need to be considered …
Google is finally about to get the go ahead from the Indian government to run a pilot of Project Loon in India according to a report from the Economic Times. According to the sites source, an anonymous “top government official”, the nation is keen to test as many alternative methods of providing internet connectivity as possible. One of which is Google’s high-altitude balloons.
While Google’s self-driving cars have an excellent safety record, that record isn’t quite perfect, and the company wants to do all it can to protect pedestrians should one be hit by a car.
A previous Google patent described a combination of foam bumpers and external airbags to minimize injuries to pedestrians in the event of a collision, but a new patent spotted by Mercury News swaps out the airbags for an adhesive coating intended to act as human flypaper …
You may remember a little while back it was revealed that Google has been feeding its neural networks steamy romance novels to read. The aim through this exercise was to teach it to produce more human-like responses in order to power its search results and ‘smart reply’ systems.
As well as forcing its neural networks to digest more than 11,000 unpublished books (3,000 of which were romance), Google Brain’s engineers have also been teaching it to relate two unique phrases to each other. As revealed in a Quartz article, the method was fairly straightforward and resulted in some really weird, romantic, dark ‘poetry’.
Four months ago, Chrysler unveiled its 2017 Pacifica minivan range at the Detroit Auto Show. If a report from Bloomberg is anything to go by, this Pacifica Hybrid range could feature Google’s self-driving technology, bringing weeks/months of rumors to fruition. The deal could be signed by Tuesday…
Google has in the past explored more than one type of electronic contact lens, but a patent published yesterday takes eye-based electronics to a whole new level. The company believes it can cure short-sightedness by removing the inferior biological lenses from your eyes and replacing them with motorized ones controlled by tiny computers.
The planned device […] contains a number of tiny components: storage, sensors, radio, battery and an electronic lens. The eyeball device gets power wirelessly from an “energy harvesting antenna.” The patent describes what looks like an external device to interface with the eyeball computer. The two will communicate through a radio and the ”interface device” contains the processor to do the necessary computing.
The description is not for the squeamish, especially when it comes to the insertion process …
Google joins Uber, Ford, Volvo and Lyft in forming a Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets to promote self driving car regulations on a federal level versus state by state level. Google has been battling the California DMV who have proposed to ban Google’s Koala car that does not have a steering wheel or pedals and would not require a licensed driver.
I’ve said it time and time again over the last couple of years, but maybe this will make you finally believe it. Glass isn’t dead, and as I told you across across several exclusive reports last year, there’s even new hardware being field tested right now.
To further prove this morning that Google’s troubled head-mounted display device isn’t done yet, Glass for Work startup Augmedix — which deploys wearable solutions for healthcare systems and hospitals — announced that it has raised $17 million in funding from five leading healthcare systems across the U.S. And CrowdOptic has announced that it has now surpassed 10,000 Glass livestreams…
Google-backed Magic Leap has uploaded a fresh demo of its head-mounted VR (technically AR) on YouTube, and gives us hope that Microsoft’s HoloLens won’t have the augmented reality market all to itself.
Truly autonomous vehicles are poised to be an exciting technology, but as with any other technology, there are always regulatory hurdles to be cleared. As first spotted by public records sleuth Mark Harris, a bill working its way through the California legislature would require the state’s DMV to effectively legalize Google’s ambitions of having a driverless fleet of self-driving Koala cars…
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Update: Google has said that the robot is designed to be a ‘low-cost, low-power, compact device.’
While Alphabet is rumored to sell Boston Dynamics due to a lack of “marketable products”, it still owns quite a few robot companies. This morning one of them called SCHAFT showcased a bipedal robot that is capable of climbing stairs, balancing, and walking on difficult terrain.
Drones have become very popular among consumers over the last few years, with various applications mainly in photography and videography, but their potential suggests that there soon could be a slew of additional uses that normal people could benefit from. Particularly, drones could turn out to be very helpful for delivery of physical objects or perhaps an Internet connection.
According to Quartz, a new Google patent filed recently is all about a potential medical use. While last year the idea of medical equipment-carrying drones had already been patented by the search giant, it looks like the company may have found a viable method via which users could contact the devices…
Reuters last month reported that Google has been bolstering its self-driving car team as of late, and now as April rolls in, we’ve uncovered some more information on new hires as the team continues to expand. In one case, Google has added an ex-Apple global supply manager for the iPhone and the Apple Watch to the self-driving car supply management team…
While the previous version of Google Glass is dead and dying, it is still an Android device. And that means it’s hackable, mod-able, and will probably be tinkered with for years to come. Similar to how other aging devices still have developer support, Reddit user jtxdriggers has managed to install 4.4 KitKat on Glass.
Google/Alphabet published its self-driving car report for March over the weekend, and besides of course the latest numbers (including the number of cars in each city, the total number of autonomous and manual driven miles, etc.), there are also some new details on the system the company uses to map the cars’ surroundings, and mention of a mundane accident that happened in Austin, Texas involving one of the company’s Lexus vehicles…
We reported last week that Tesla is using wearable tech to increase production efficiency at its factory, and cited knowledge of a promotional video that Google made in collaboration with Tesla as reason to believe that the company was using Glass hardware. Now, we have clips to share from that video to prove that, indeed, Tesla Motors did at one time trial using Google’s wearable at its Fremont factory…
Project Ara has been very quiet this year, with the last we really heard from the Mountain View company being a “re-route” announced last year. The project was slated in early 2015 to be getting a market pilot in Puerto Rico, but that just didn’t happen. Everything seemed to be on track when Regina Dugan and co. were talking up the project during the Google ATAP event at I/O last year, but there haven’t been hardly any updates besides a new logo and a video look inside the group since.
Now, some new questions on Google Opinion Rewards seem to be polling the public on how much it might be willing to pay for Project Ara modules…
Update: It appears Google has shut down the eBay listing.
Earlier this year, we told you across several exclusive reports that second-generation Glass hardware was in development, namely a variant of the device reworked with the enterprise in mind. Now, a couple months after getting our first look at FCC images of the device and later an official Google patent, we now have our first look at a unit in the wild via a new eBay listing…
Before former Android head Andy Rubin left Google, he headed up Google’s robotics efforts. In 2013, Google acquired numerous companies and added 300 robotics engineers. The crown jewel was Boston Dynamics, already known for their animal- and human-like robots. However, Bloomberg is now reporting that Alphabet is selling Boston Dynamics.
Back when I was in high school, I remember our computer studies teacher telling us that a computer only does what it’s told to do, and so mistakes are not the machine’s, but rather the user’s. With neural networks and machine learning, that is no longer true. AlphaGo, DeepMind’s specialist Go-playing machine, has proved as much. AlphaGo has been programmed to learn from its mistakes, and can err all on its own.
The AI-powered system failed to recover from an error against Lee Sedol in their fourth game, and eventually lost. In the fifth game, however, it made a mistake and was able to win the series in seemingly dramatic fashion.