Has the Robot Future Pulled Up to the Curb?

In a milestone for the self-driving industry, Waymo said it will open up its autonomous ride-hailing service to the general public in metro Phoenix, Arizona. In the upcoming weeks, people in the Phoenix area can hail a taxi like they would a Lyft or an Uber ... then hop in a car that’ll know where they want to go to be taken to that destination. But... the car will be driving itself!

Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving vehicle division, has been testing its cars in the Phoenix area since 2016, diligently upgrading the technology and capacity to eventually roll out a fully fledged commercial service.  Hundreds of testers have been experimenting with the Robot Taxi service through the Waymo One app. 

The announcement expands the current program in two ways:

• Existing customers of Waymo One can start taking their friends and family along.
• By November, Waymo will make the app available to the “general public” in the Phoenix area.

To deal with the current pandemic, Waymo is limiting the scope of its service by restricting it to fully driverless rides. It is installing barriers in its vehicles so down the road it can plunk a human safety driver in the front seat and address a larger geographical market. 

Other car companies -- namely Tesla and GM -- are racing to introduce driverless vehicles, but Waymo has recently pulled away from the pack. This spring, it raised $3 billion to accelerate the rollout of its commercial service, using money for the first time from a company not associated with Google.

Read more here...

Contact Tracing App API from Apple and Google

Isolate potentially infected individuals, track and trace contacts -- these are steps responsible governments are taking to help stem the tide of the COVID19 pandemic in 2020.

Many governments around the world are developing contact tracing apps which meet the privacy standard advocated by Google and Apple, in order to ensure their apps will function only on Android and IOS devices. Google and Apple, the world’s leading makers of smartphone operating systems, recently released their contact tracing API (known as the “exposure notification” API) to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Some 22 countries (including Ireland) across 5 continents and a number of US states have already requested access to the software.  Notably missing from this list are France and the UK.

The API is not itself a contact tracing application -- instead, it enables governments and public health authorities to incorporate the software into their own apps that people install. The API will enable Bluetooth technology to run in the background of the phone, including on a locked phone. Without this ability for background use of Bluetooth technology, the utility of Apps would be greatly decreased.

Users would turn on and unlocks their phones, for the Apps to be able to use Bluetooth and log encounters. Apple and Google are limiting use of their API technology to government contact-tracing Apps.

Privacy activists have praised the protections ordered by Apple and Google’s API, as being in line with the principles of data protection by design and by default.

Google and Apple have explicitly barred use of the API in any apps that seek GPS loca on data from users, which means some apps being developed by public health authori es for contact tracing will not be able to use the API. In addition, the API can will only work on Apps using a decentralized system that uses randomly generated temporary keys created on a user’s device (but not linked to their specific identity or exact location).

The API allows public health officials to decide what constitutes exposure in terms of exposure time and distance. They can adjust transmission risk and other factors according to their own standards.


Read more...

How to do Contact Tracing while Respecting Privacy -- and avoiding the Hunger Games?

With the pandemic continuing, the agreed-upon model for dealing with this (until and if a vaccine can be developed) is a combination of social distancing, stepped-up testing for exposure, and contact tracing.

Following the vectors for infection is a key way to get those infected to self-quarantine. Using smart phones as a tool has been shown by South Korea to be effective. But any system that uses our ubiquitous smartphone to track locations and contacts could bump up against privacy needs, and create surveillance problem. Of course, surveillance of infected persons could also save millions of lives — and put us back on tract to get out to work, and restart the economy. Thus is born a paradoxical challenge: to build a comprehensive tracking system without it becoming a tool of oppression.

South Korea has shown to be effective in the management of the viral outbreak and spread of the novel coronavirus disease COVID-19. One area is South Korea’s enormous virus testing program. Another is the country’s use of surveillance technology, notably CCTV and the tracking of bank card and mobile phone usage, to identify who to test. The central part of the South Korean strategy is simple: test as many people as possible. But if patients can’t be located, testing capacity doesn’t matter. This is where smart city infrastructure comes in, with the goal of working out where known patients have been and test anyone who might have come into contact with them. South Korea uses contactless payment transactions to plot a card user’s movements on a map. Smartphone data is also used, because phone locations are automatically recorded when devices connect to up to to three transceivers (for triangulation). Facila recognition with CCTV cameras also enable authorities to identify people who have been in contact with COVID-19 patients.

Does this sound like a technological panopticon? To many westerners, such tracking could be anathema to the philosophy of individual privacy. Apple and Google have mapped a possible solution, obfuscating smartphone data enough to obscure individuals, but proving enough data to enable vector mapping of infected persons.

Abuse by authorities of raw location data could reveal sensitive information about anyone — from political dissent to journalists' sources. The big tech companies are looking to enable contact tracing systems without mass surveillance. We will soon see apps that notify potentially exposed users without revealing location data to the government. In some cases, personal information and health privacy laws means keep an infected individual's test results private while still warning anyone who might have entered their physical zone of contact.

The best way to protect geolocation data from abuse, is not to collect it in the first place. Or so suggests Stanford computer scientist Cristina White, working on the https://www.covid-watch.org project. Covid-Watch uses Bluetooth as a kind of proximity detector. The app constantly pings out Bluetooth signals to nearby phones, looking for others that might be running the app within about two meters, or six and a half feet. If two phones spend 15 minutes in range of each other, the app considers them to have had a "contact event." They each generate a unique random number for that event, record the numbers, and transmit them to each other.

GPS location tracking will likely play a role in contact-tracing apps, too, with all of the privacy risks that come with sharing a map of users’ movements.

Read more here…

When Demand Increases, Innovation Follows - Non-Contact Deliveries in the time of Pandemic

Alphabet subsidiary Wing is looking to help out through this pandemic with the scaling up of use of drones. Wing reports its drone delivery service is increasing the number of vendors and new items for delivery as it experiences a "dramatic" increase in customers.

Last April, Wing became the U.S.’ first drone operator to be FAA-certified as an air carrier, and in October it rolled out a test delivery program in the rural town of Christiansburg, Virginia (USA). Deliveries have more than doubled in the area, Wing says. The company has partnered with FedEx and Walgreens, and has added a local bakery, Mockingbird Cafe.

"We're trying to support local businesses that aren't able to open their doors by allowing them to deliver their products directly to customers' homes," Wing said. It pointed to a local bakery in Christiansburg, Virginia, which is now selling 50% more pastries via Wing on one weekend than it usually sells in store.

Social distancing and the need to isolate ourselves has fueled massive demand for delivery. Restaurants are re-tooling to serve take-away in place of sit-down. Uber and Lift are shifting drivers away from carrying passengers (who are not traveling) to help delivery comestibles and even pharmacy orders. Gig workers quickly have emerged as frontline responders, often driving people to the hospital or delivering food to those who have been quarantined, such as the elderly, disabled, or ill.

The San Antonio-based company Xenex has been deploying UV disinfection robots to keep up with coronavirus-fueled demand. The company’s flagship product, the LightStrike Germ-Zapping Robot, is a four-wheeled unit with a long, lantern-like tower mounted on it. This "bot" automates the cleaning process, using pulsing xenon lamps that quickly knock out germs lingering in a room’s corners and surfaces.

Xenex’s robots are already in more than 500 hospitals around the world — including Italy, Spain, Japan and the United Kingdom — and that number is growing daily due to the coronavirus outbreak. Specialized cleaner robots, like those made by Xenex and others, are more useful than ever right now. They not only help hospitals reduce coronavirus transmission from surfaces, their work also frees up staff to spend more time focusing on tasks that require a human element — attending to sick patients, for instance.

There will be growing scenarios for curb-to-door robots. Such autonomous vehicles could roll up to a household for patient testing, garbage collection, and sanitizing services. One of the added benefits of such a tiered approach to delivery automation is that robots can also be tasked with safely delivering testing kits, then collecting test samples from quarantined populations. This is a logistical challenge for local, state, and federal agencies. Community and landlord-operated robots could also be tasked with collecting and disposing of garbage from quarantined households in a manner that would limit unnecessary exposure and contamination.

But such work still exposes human workers to the threat of contracting COVID-19, among other health risks. Here is an opportunity for coronavirus-immune alternatives like autonomous vehicles and drones to prove they can save the day.

Google Users in the UK to fall under US, not EU data protection rules

According to Reuters, Google is planning to move its British users' accounts out of the control of European Union privacy regulators, placing them under U.S. jurisdiction instead:

The shift, prompted by Britain's exit from the EU, will leave the sensitive personal information of tens of millions with less protection and within easier reach of British law enforcement. The change was described to Reuters by three people familiar with its plans. Google intends to require its British users to acknowledge new terms of service including the new jurisdiction.
Ireland, where Google and other U.S. tech companies have their European headquarters, is staying in the EU, which has one of the world's most aggressive data protection rules, the General Data Protection Regulation. Google has decided to move its British users out of Irish jurisdiction because it is unclear whether Britain will follow GDPR or adopt other rules that could affect the handling of user data, the people said. If British Google users have their data kept in Ireland, it would be more difficult for British authorities to recover it in criminal investigations.

Want to Stop a Pandemic? Start with Flying

For an excellent analysis of aviation's response to the ongoing Wuhan Novel Coronavirus problem, we read at Lexology:

A large number of international airlines have suspended their flights to mainland China. Those airlines which are still flying have allowed cabin crew to wear face masks, and crew layover time has been reduced or ended altogether. Some airlines have also modified their in-flight services, for instance by no longer providing pillows or blankets, suspending duty-free sales, and changing the nature of meal service.
Based on experience from previous epidemics, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) has produced an Emergency Response Plan for use by airlines in the event of a public health emergency. Although a number of airlines do have an emergency response plan to deal with public health emergencies, the template Emergency Response Plan has been issued by IATA for those airlines that do not. It details the roles and responsibilities of the emergency response team, along with specific checklists to be adopted.
In relation to suspected communicable disease generally, IATA has also issued various best practice guidelines for airline employees and agents. These cover, for example:

• Cabin crew: setting out how to identify passengers with a suspected communicable disease, and the actions to take once such a person is identified. These include informing the Captain, who is required to report the suspected case to air traffic control under international regulations. Similar guidance for cabin crew has been issued by the US Centers for Disease Control and Protection, which has also issued recent recommendations for dealing with the 2019-nCov virus.
• Cleaning crew: setting out the procedures to follow to clean and disinfect an arriving aircraft with a suspected case of communicable disease.
• Cargo and baggage handlers: drawing on previous experience with SARS, avian flu and Ebola, this guideline notes that there is no evidence that these infections could be transmitted by cargo or baggage handling. Although it recommends proper hand hygiene, no specific measures are advised.
• Guidance has also been issued by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), who issued a Safety Information Bulletin on 27 January 2020. EASA recommended that airlines provide information to crew members as to how to identify and manage a case of acute respiratory infection on board an aircraft. It also recommended that airlines performing passenger flights to or from affected countries should be equipped with protection kits for crew members assisting with potentially infectious cases. In addition, the Bulletin calls upon airlines and airport operators to collaborate as much as possible with public health authorities, in order to provide support in tracing passengers in the event of flights where 2019-nCov infection has been confirmed.

As far as airports are concerned, the responsibility for managing the risk of communicable diseases at airports rests with both national and local public health authorities and the relevant airport operator. 

As of Feb 6, 2020, the WSJ is writing: "World Health Authorities Warn Virus Hasn’t Peaked After China’s Deadliest Day - Death toll in country now stands at 636, with more than 31,000 cases."

Alphabet (Google) Wing Drone Delivery Service Debuts in Virginia

Alphabet's Wing drone delivery service made its first commercial delivery in Christiansburg, Virginia on October 18, 2019. Wing is a spinoff from Google's parent company, Alphabet. The drone (UAV) service delivered a package through the air from a distribution center to a home in Christiansburg, Virginia, on behalf of FedEx.

Wing received Federal Aviation Authority approval for door-to-door drone delivery. Wing’s partners for this service include FedEx Express, Walgreens, and Sugar Magnolia (a local Virginia retail operation). This constitutes the first businesses in the United States to offer this form of local air delivery to customers.

FedEx is also participating in the U.S. Department of Transportation's Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Pilot Program in conjunction with the Memphis Shelby-County Airport Authority, conducting drone operations on airport property to generate data to help inform future UAS policymaking.

During the trial, Wing drones will transport select FedEx packages to qualifying homes in Christiansburg, demonstrating last-mile delivery service.

Read more here and here

Waymo Placing Fully Autonomous Vehicles on the Road

Waymo, the autonomous vehicle business under Alphabet (neé Google), sent an email to customers of its ride-hailing app in Phoenix, Arizona (USA) that their next trip might not have a human safety driver behind the wheel. Fully autonomous / robot cars are here!

Waymo opened a testing and operations center in Chandler, Ariz. in 2016. Since then, the company has ramped up its testing in Chandler and other Phoenix suburbs, launched an early rider program and slowly crept toward commercial deployment. The early rider program, which required vetted applicants to sign non-disclosure agreements to participate, launched in April 2017.

Read more about the service here...

Google is Delivering Packages via Drone in Australia

Touted as the world's first commercial drone deliveries, a Google-funded startup won approval from the Australian aviation authority. Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) gave approval to Wing -- a subsidiary of Google's parent company Alphabet -- to deliver packages via unmanned aerial vehicle. An earlier trial of the service proved successful. At the moment, about 100 homes in a suburb of Canberra will initially be eligible for the drone deliveries. A wider roll-out is expected. The Wing team started as an ambitious "moonshot" project inside Google X, testing drones in Australia since 2014.

Read more here...

Bender Would Be Happy

Robots need liquor... Now, they can serve themselves...

As part of a small partnership with Anheuser-Busch, Otto, the self-driving trucking startup acquired by Uber, delivered 45,000 beers from a weigh station in Fort Collins, Colo. to Colorado Springs.

Read more here...

The Government says A.I.s are to be treated the same as Humans

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has made it possible for Google to create a self-driving car that doesn't also have a human driver inside the vehicle that can take over if necessary. In this setup, the autonomous driving software itself would be the vehicle's legal "driver"; none of the human passengers would require a driving license.

"In this setup, the autonomous driving software itself would be the vehicle's legal 'driver'; none of the human passengers would require a driving licence." \\

Read more over here...

Google Cars Don't Have to Be Perfect, Just Better Than the Average Driver

Autonomous cars dont need to be perfect -- just a bit better than people texting, being drowsy, fiddling with the GPS, slightly inebriated, etc. And Google Cars are... learning...

Bad weather is just one obstacle to drivers, but by being even just a little better than the average driver, self-driving cars will decrease accidents, reduce injury and death, and save us all money. Think about it: radar isn't affected by rain or fog or nighttime. Can you see in the dark or a downpour?

"As we're developing the technology, we've made sure our cars are aware of how rain may affect their ability to drive," says Google. "Our cars can determine the severity of the rain, and just like human drivers they drive more cautiously in wet conditions when roads are slippery and visibility is poor."

D.I.Y. Auto-Drive

Tired of waiting for a solution, George Hotz designed a self-driving car. Himself. Although his self-driving configuration is more like an autopilot feature on a Tesla -- meant for highways, not city streets. Nevertheless, impressive engineering feat, from the original iPhone hacker.



Read more at Bloomberg

Google Cars in the Wild - Someone's Impressions

Read about Google Cars in California...

Int4resting how "polite" the GoogleCar seems to be... the author comments (regarding his motorcycle riding):

Once, I got a little caught out as the traffic transitioned from slow moving back to normal speed. I was in a lane between a Google car and some random truck and, partially out of experiment and partially out of impatience, I gunned it and cut off the Google car sort of harder than maybe I needed too... The car handled it perfectly (maybe too perfectly). It slowed down and let me in. However, it left a fairly significant gap between me and it. If I had been behind it, I probably would have found this gap excessive and the lengthy slowdown annoying. Honestly, I don't think it will take long for other drivers to realize that self-driving cars are "easy targets" in traffic.

Seems like California, home of the American big car culture of the 10950s, the suburban / commute phenomenon and other automobile trends, is a perfect petri dish for autonomous vehicles.

Robot Cars Fight it Out!

This past Thursday, two self-driving prototype cars, one operated by Google Inc and the other by Delphi Automotive Plc, had a close call on a Silicon Valley street, according to Reuters -- possibly the first such incident involving two vehicles specially equipped for automated driving.

The incident occurred Tuesday on San Antonio Road in Palo Alto, said John Absmeier, director of Delphi's Silicon Valley lab and global business director for the company's automated driving program, who was a passenger in one of the cars. No collision took place. The Delphi vehicle was a prototype Audi Q5 crossover vehicle equipped with lasers, radar, cameras and special computer software, with a person at the wheel as a backup.

As the Delphi vehicle prepared to change lanes, a Google self-driving prototype - a Lexus RX400h crossover fitted with similar hardware and software - cut off the Audi, forcing it to abort the lane change, Absmeier said.

Google declined to comment.

Check out The Register...

Steve Jobs jumped in bed too soon with micr$oft in the 80s, Google in the double-oughts

When Steve Jobs recruited Microsoft to be the first outside developer of applications for the Macintosh in 1981, he was concerned that they might try to copy Apple's ideas into a PC-based user interface. As a condition of getting an early start at Macintosh development, Steve Jobs made Microsoft agree not to ship any software that used a mouse until at least one year after the first shipment of the Macintosh.

In 1983, after his visit to Apple, Bill Gates made an exciting announcement at the industry's biggest trade show, Comdex -- he had a new, mouse-based graphical user interface called Windows. It worked just like the top-secret one Steve Jobs had shown him. Bill gates had stolen Steve's thunder before the Macintosh had been released yet. When Steve found out, he went ballistic. A rift that took decades to heal was formed. And the crucial lead in bringing a product to market was hampered.

Fast forward to this century. Apple allied itself with Google,

In 2001, when Google was a noob start-up with roughly $50 million in revenues, Google's co-founders met Steve Jobs and wanted him to become Google's CEO. Having just developed the iconic iPod, Jobs demurred and took Larry Page and Sergey Brin under his wing and mentored them.

In secrecy, Apple started development of the iPhone in 2004. In August 2005, Google quietly bought the Android start-up, when no one outside of Apple was supposed to know that Apple was working on the iPhone. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt joined Apple's Board in August 2006.

Apple launched the iPhone in 2007; later that year Google showed a video that compared Google-Android's original pre-iPhone "before" prototype -- it looked and operated more like a Blackberry than the "smart" phone look we all know today. That video compared the old look to a post-iPhone-launch "after" prototype that heavily-resembled the look-and-feel of iOS. This new look incorporated many of Apple's signature touch-screen innovations.

Google's leaders betrayed a longtime personal trust and friendship of Steve Jobs, stealing what he believed was Apple's most prized possession.

In Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs famously quoted,

"…I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."

Steve Jobs is widely regarded as a visionary leader but could be harsh with people working around him. Leaders with a high degree of emotional intelligence know what they're feeling, what their emotions mean, and how these emotions can affect other people. For many, high levels of emotional intelligence is essential for success.

Will Apple thrive as a creative company without Jobs? Did Steve Jobs balance emotion and intelligence as a leader? I believe he did -- his mistakes were from honest efforts at cooperation and collaboration, and an emotional commitment to others. Sure he was flawed -- we all are -- but his creative instincts were coupled with his emotional side. Even with some mistakes, we all move forward, if we persevere.

Last week - magazine suck on tablets. This week: tablets can save the newspaper business

If you believe Google, the newspaper industry has been in decline since 1972 and that online journalism as a threat to newspapers is only a continuation of broadcast journalism’s inexorable encroachment, but that newspapers have a new opportunity to profit from old-school long-form journalism by paying special attention to tablets. So says Google Chief Economist Hal Varian in this speech.

Although printing and distribution costs are decimated by the shift to online news, competition is exponentially fiercer. To fight the advance of bloggers, citizen journalists, and other competition, newspapers have resorted to publishing shorter, shallower pieces to cater to the traditionally attention span-stunted Internet public. This has largely compromised the “analytic depth” the printed word affords. Varian suggests that it doesn’t have to be this way -- by focusing on tablets and other innovative ways to keep eyeballs glued to the news, online journalism can step up profits even while rescuing the Fourth Estate from irrelevance.

Roger Fidler was one of the original proponents of these portable "electronic tablets" when he ran the Knight Ridder Information Design Lab in the early 1990s. These devices, known as 'flat panels' or 'tablets,' will combine the readability and convenience of paper with the technological abilities of video and sound. In the same way that ink-on-paper printing has defined the present era, it now appears certain that electronic 'presses' and multimedia publishing will define the new one," Fidler wrote in an October 1992 AJR article called "What Are We So Afraid Of?" In October, the Society for News Design presented Fidler, a founding member of SND, with its Lifetime Achievement Award for his groundbreaking and innovative work.
Fidler started his journalism career in 1962 writing and illustrating a science column for Oregon's Eugene Register-Guard. The following year, he also began writing feature stories and creating maps for the paper while attending the University of Oregon. Fidler had originally planned to become an astronomer, but a chronic illness that he developed in high school forced him to switch his major to journalism. In 1990 he produced an animated video of a tablet newspaper scenario in collaboration with RayChem, a company that was developing an electronic paper display technology. A year later, Fidler became a Freedom Forum Media Studies Fellow at Columbia University. There he created an operational prototype of a digital newspaper optimized for his media tablet. He frequently demonstrated the prototype on Macintosh computers.


Read the full article here on SlashGear. And check out the forward-looking video here.

Autonomous cars - who do you trust more, Detroit, or Google?

Surprise, the answer is... Google. Nearly every automaker is working on some form of autonomous vehicle technology, but according to a new study, consumers are more interested in a self-driving car from Google than General Motors. The study, conducted by U.S. audit and advisory firm KPMG, polled a diverse group of drivers from both coasts and in between

Some cool stuff from the Wired article/report:

“We believe that self-driving cars will be profoundly disruptive to the traditional automotive ecosystem,” said Gary Silberg, KPMG auto expert and author of the report. The company’s polling bears that out, although KPMG is quick to add the caveat that while “focus group discussions are valuable for the qualitative, directional insights they provide; they are not statistically valid.”

California drivers were significantly more interested in autonomous vehicles from the onset of the discussions, with L.A. residents ranking their willingness to use a self-driving car at 9 out of 10. Chicago residents came in at four, and New Jersey drivers’ median was six.

Additionally, premium vehicle owners — who made up nearly a third of the focus group — were more interested in autonomous vehicles and self-driving technology.

In Silberg’s estimation, the reason is that Audi, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz drivers are “already accustomed to high-tech bells and whistles, so adding a ‘self-driving package’ is just another option.” Throw in the possibility of a special lane on highways for autonomous vehicles and the ability to turn the system on and off at will, and premium buyers were sold on the option full-stop.

But the major takeaways from the study are that consumers — while still concerned about safety and liability — are increasingly interested in autonomous cars, as long as the benefits outweigh the costs, and the company manufacturing is seen as being at the top of their game. And while 0-60 times and horsepower may be of interest to consumers now, if you’ve ceded control to the machine, style and functionality will trump performance and driver engagement.

--

Like any complex product, I can see a further diversification of offerings -- sports cars, hybrids, sport-ute/SUVs, and others demonstrate this slicing of the offerings. Why not a self-drive, too?

Self-Driving Car - the Race gets Electric

From Reuters News Service: Electric car company Tesla Motors is working to produce a car capable of running on "auto-pilot" within the next three years, CEO Elon Musk said, joining tech giant Google and rival carmakers in the race to roll a driverless car into the market. The California-based company's autonomous car would allow the driver to hand 90 percent of the control of the car over to the vehicle's computer system, Musk said in an interview with the Financial Times newspaper.

The electric automaker posted a job opening for an Advanced Driver Assistance Systems Controls Engineer that will help the company develop technology for fully autonomous vehicles. The listing says the engineer "will be responsible for developing vehicle-level decision-making and lateral and longitudinal control strategies for Tesla's effort to pioneer fully automated driving." Tesla wants this engineer to not only develop self-driving features for future electric cars, but also retrofit such systems to its Model S sedan.

Wired first reported the listing, Tesla has plenty of catching up to do when it comes to automation. The Model S lacks features that are commonplace in many other top-tier luxury vehicles such as adaptive cruise control, automated lane changing, and self-parking.

Read more...