Lyft is partnering with Magna, one of the largest tier-one automotive industry suppliers in the world, on autonomous vehicle technology. Lyft CEO and co-founder Logan Green explained that this will help them get their self-driving tech into various automaker vehicles around the world. Lyft will be working directly with Magna on “co-developing” an autonomous driving system, with collaborative teams from both companies working on the project.
Magna is also investing $200 million in Lyft in exchange for an equity stake. The goal is to build not only autonomy into production vehicles, but also to put direct access to Lyft’s hailing platform into future autonomous vehicles using the platform. Lyft will lead the development effort of the autonomous driving platform from the Level 5 autonomous driving engineering center in Palo Alto, and Magna will take point on manufacturing, working on site at Lyft’s facility in collaboration with the ride-hailing company’s own engineers.
Green explained that the company’s goal has been to “improve how transportation works” from the very beginning, citing a childhood growing up in traffic, trying to figure out how to avoid traffic, as a motivating factor. He also noted that it’s “wildly expensive” for individuals to own and operate their vehicles.
All ridesharing makes up just 0.5 percent of all miles traveled, and Lyft’s goal is to move that to more than 80 percent, Green said. He cited examples like Netflix as showing what he wants to achieve in the transportation industry, in terms of moving from ownership to subscriptions.
In terms of helping Lyft to scale its vision, teaming up with Magna could be a big help: The supplier knows the ins and outs of putting certified, mass-produced key components and systems into vehicles that make their way to public roads and consumers from the world’s leading automakers.
Lyft and Magna are not sharing any info with regards to a timeline for when we might see the results of this partnership put into practice, in testing or in production, but Magna noted in a press release detailing the news that it should be “market-ready over the next few years” if all goes to plan. Initially, according to Green, the collaboration will aim to deploy SAE Level 4 autonomous driving tech first, but ultimately the aim is to produce the best Level 5 system available. The product of the collaboration will be “joint intellectual property,” per Lyft Chief Strategy Officer Raj Kapoor, who also explained that both companies will leverage data resulting from testing and use of the AV platform.
As for Lyft’s own efforts with developing autonomous vehicle systems thus far, the company said during a press event about the news that it’s already testing vehicles at the GoMentum autonomous vehicles proving ground in California, just five months after making its autonomous engineering efforts official.
Source: TechCrunch
Someone having a stomach full of worms is totally possible, though.
Source: Wired
Google said that starting in June, its AdWords advertisement platform will no longer support ads based on cryptocurrencies and related services. The move is in response to the uncertainties of digital cash and related scams.
The post Google will ban cryptocurrency ads from its AdWords network in June appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
YouTube has a plan to combat the abundant conspiracy theories that feature in credulous videos on its platform; not a very good plan, but a plan just the same. It’s using information drawn from Wikipedia relevant to some of the more popular conspiracy theories, and putting that info front and center on videos that dabble in… creative historical re-imaginings.
The plan is being criticized from a number of quarters (including this one) for essentially sloughing responsibility about this harmful content on to another, volunteer-based organization. But it turns out that’s not even a responsibility that Wikipedia even know it was taking on.
Wikimedia Foundation exec director Katherine Maher notes that YouTube did this whole thing “independent” of their organization, and an official statement from Wikimedia says that it was “not given advance notice of this announcement.”
Everyone on the Wikimedia side is taking this pretty much in stride, however, expressing happiness at seeing their content used to drive the sharing of “free knowledge,” but it does seem like something that YouTube could’ve flagged in advance before announcing the new feature on stage at SXSW.
Maybe YouTube couldn’t say anything because the Illuminati bound them to secrecy… because of the chemtrails.
Source: TechCrunch
In response to the Parkland shooting, students are walking out of class for 17 minutes. Here’s the view from Twitter and Instagram.
Source: CNET
Advancements in A.I. technology has paved the way for breakthroughs in speech recognition, natural language processing, and machine translation. A new startup called Voicery now wants to leverage those same advancements to improve speech synthesis, too. The result is a fast, flexible speech engine that sounds more human – and less like a robot. Its machine voices can then be used anywhere a synthesized voice is needed – including in new applications, like automatically generated audiobooks or podcasts, voiceovers, TV dubs, and elsewhere.
Before starting Voicery, co-founder Andrew Gibiansky had worked at Baidu Research, where he led the deep learning speech synthesis team.
While there, the team developed state of the art techniques in the field of machine learning, published papers on speech constructed from deep neural networks and artificial speech generation, and commercialized its technology in production-quality systems for Baidu.
Now, Gibiansky is bringing that same skill set to Voicery, where he’s joined by co-founder Bobby Ullman, who previously worked at Palantir on databases and scalable systems.
“In the time that I was at Baidu, what became very evident is that the revolution in deep learning and machine learning was about to happen to speech synthesis,” explains Gibiansky. “In the past five years, we’ve seen that these new techniques have brought an amazing gains in computer vision, speech recognition, and in other industries – but it hasn’t yet happened with synthesizing human speech. We saw that if we could use this new technology to build speech synthesis engines, we could do it so much better than everything that currently exists.”
Specifically, the company is leveraging newer deep learning technologies to create better synthesized voices more quickly than before.
In fact, the founders built Voicery’s speech synthesis engine in just two-and-half months.
Unlike traditional voice synthesizing solutions, where a single person records hours upon hours of speech that’s then used to create the new voice, Voicery trains its system on hundreds of voices at once.
It can also use varying amounts of speech input from any one person. Because of how much data it takes in, the system sounds more human as it learns the correct pronunciations, inflections and accents from a wider variety of source voices.
The company claims its voices are nearly indistinguishable from humans – it even published a quiz on its website that asks visitors to see if they can identify which ones are synthesized and which are real. I found that you’re still able to identify the voices as machines, but they’re much better than the machine reader voices you may be used to.
Of course, given the rapid pace of technology development in this field – not to mention the fact that the team built their system in a matter of months – one has to wonder why the major players in voice computing couldn’t just do something similar with their own in-house engineering teams.
However, Gibiansky says that Voicery has the advantage of being the first out of the gate with its technology that capitalizes on the machine learning advancements.
“None of the currently published research is quite good enough for what we wanted to do, so we had to extend that a fair bit,” he notes. “Now we have several voices that are ready, and we’re starting to find customers to partner with.”
Voicery already has a few customers piloting the technology, but nothing to announce at this time as those talks are in various stages.
The company is charging customers an upfront fee to develop a new voice for a customer, and then charges a per usage fee.
The technology can be used where voice systems exist today, like in translation apps, GPS navigation apps, voice assistant apps, or screen readers, for example. But the team also sees the potential for it to open up new markets, given the ease of creating synthesized voices that really sound like people. This includes things like synthesizing podcasts, reading the news (think: Alexa’s “Flash Briefing”), TV dub-ins, voices for characters in video games, and more.
“We can move into spaces that fundamentally haven’t been using the technology because it hasn’t been high enough quality. And we have some interest from companies that are looking to do this,” says Gibiansky.
Voicery, based in San Francisco, is bootstrapped save for the funding it has received by participating in Y Combinator’s Winter 2018 class. It’s looking to raise additional funds after YC’s Demo Day.
Source: TechCrunch
The World Warrior invades the real world in this unofficial ARKit version of Street Fighter II.
Source: CNET
For how massive Reddit is in terms of user base, it’s really gotten by for a long time having a product that advanced about as quickly as Drudge Report. That’s been changing lately, as the company has looked to mature their platform with user-centric features that make surfing content easier and keep everything a bit more connected.
The company didn’t raise $200 million from top investors just because they thought the company could deliver memes more beautifully. The company has — in fact — barely touched advertising, and few entities know more about its users interests than Reddit .
Next week, the company will launch native promoted post ads on its Reddit iOS app with an Android following soon after. The company informed advertisers of this in an email, MarketingLand reports. The apps have had rocky starts but have proven to offer a vastly improved user experience over what came before it. There are still some blind spots here and there, but for how slowly the company moved previously, the apps are fairly impressive.
Few user bases are more vocal or hesitant to change than the hundreds of million of monthly active Redditors, and advertisers are likely similarly hesitant to get involved with a platform that has churned out controversy at a steady pace over the past few years. Nevertheless, Reddit has already set its course towards building out a better ads product and native promoted ads represent a big step towards that.
Source: TechCrunch
Abhishek Singh’s ARKit adaptation of Street Fighter II is multiplayer and is played on actual streets. Or your coffee table.
Source: CNET
Everyone wants a monitor, sure, but not just any monitor. You want a display with the highest resolution, the largest screen, and the most customization options to be had. Thankfully, we’ve got your back.
The post The best monitor you can buy appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends