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Anna Dubinina

GoEuro Gets $45M To Make Long Distance Trips By Public Transport As Easy As Uber | Tech... - 1 views

  • European travel planner platform GoEuro has today announced a $45 million Series B round, led by Goldman Sachs
  • It’s more fitting to think of GoEuro as a long distance version of another European transportation startup
  • While maintaining its pan-European travel focus, GoEuro does also support worldwide air travel routes
Anna Dubinina

Relationships with Robots: Good or Bad for Humans? - 0 views

  • making robots look like humans or cute animals, we may develop emotional affinity toward the machines
  • . This could help promote trust with users—but perhaps also overtrust?
  • Robots are tools, but they are tools that sometimes hold meaning for people that interact with them, or through them, as when robots are teleoperated at a distance
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  • In addition, sometimes robot operators insert a very clear extension of themselves into the robot, much like we see people invest in game avatars
  • I’d also categorize extending a sense of oneself into a robot as a form of attachment.
  • In ten or twenty years, when humanlike and animal-like robots are employed in a more drone-like way from a greater distance, will a similar user self-extension or new human-robot social phenomenon cause any hesitation during human-directed tasks and effect mission outcomes?
  • As AI and robots become more involved in our models of everyday life, I believe there will be a spectrum of emotional responses toward robots depending on their roles (for instance, caregiver, educator, industrial, companion, etc.) and individual user tendencies.
  • A consequence of purposeful design for attachment is that objects of attachment trigger the owner’s emotions in situations like decision making, and so can be agents of persuasion or otherwise effect someone’s actions
  • The bottom line is that these human-AI/robot interactions are transactions and not reciprocal, and therefore probably not healthy for most people to rely on as a long-term means for substituting organic two-way affectionate bonds, or as a surrogate for a human-human shared relationship
  • Is attachment to a robot problematic ethically?
alexbelov

UK government invests £60 million in Skylon 'super-plane' that could cut Lond... - 0 views

  • UK government invests £60 million in Skylon 'super-plane' that could cut London to Sydney flights to just four hours
  • Its 'Sabre' engine - a hybrid rocket and jet propulsion system which theoretically allows travel anywhere on Earth in four hours or less - could become a reality in a decade.
  • A full ground-based engine test is currently planned for 2020.
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  • The super-plane will rely on cooling an incoming airstream from 1,000 degrees C to minus 150 C almost instantly, at close to 1/100th of a second.
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    Aerospace flight research aiming to speed up long-distance flights. However investment volume seems inadequate for such a huge project.
Vladimir Antonov

Project Skybender: Google's secretive 5G internet drone tests revealed | Technology | T... - 0 views

  • Google is testing solar-powered drones at Spaceport America in New Mexico to explore ways to deliver high-speed internet from the air
  • Project SkyBender is using drones to experiment with millimetre-wave radio transmissions, one of the technologies that could underpin next generation 5G wireless internet access
  • High frequency millimetre waves can theoretically transmit gigabits of data every second, up to 40 times more than today’s 4G LTE systems. Google ultimately envisages thousands of high altitude “self-flying aircraft” delivering internet access around the world.
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  • “The huge advantage of millimetre wave is access to new spectrum because the existing cellphone spectrum is overcrowded. It’s packed and there’s nowhere else to go,” says Jacques Rudell
  • However, millimetre wave transmissions have a much shorter range than mobile phone signals. A broadcast at 28GHz, the frequency Google is testing at Spaceport America, would fade out in around a tenth the distance of a 4G phone signal. To get millimetre wave working from a high-flying drone, Google needs to experiment with focused transmissions from a so-called phased array. “This is very difficult, very complex and burns a lot of power,” Rudell says
  • The SkyBender system is being tested with an “optionally piloted” aircraft called Centaur as well as solar-powered drones made by Google Titan, a division formed when Google acquired New Mexico startup Titan Aerospace in 2014. Titan built high-altitude solar-powered drones with wingspans of up to 50 metres
  • Project SkyBender is part of the little-known Google Access team, which also includes Project Loon, a plan to deliver wireless internet using unpowered balloons floating through the stratosphere.
  • In 2014, Darpa, the research arm of the US military, announced a program called Mobile Hotspots to make a fleet of drones that could provide one gigabit per second communications for troops operating in remote areas.
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    Could this be a next gen. technology that would bring hi-speed internet access literally to every place in the world?
Vladimir Antonov

Self-driving cars: Honda aims for highway-capable model by 2020- Nikkei Asian Review - 0 views

  • - Honda Motor plans to offer cars that can drive themselves on highways by around 2020
  • With Toyota Motor and Nissan Motor having announced their plans, the three largest domestic carmakers now have timelines for self-driving vehicles.
  • Honda this year started adopting what it calls Sensing technologies
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  • automatic braking, help avoid hitting pedestrians and perform other functions
  • Autonomous cars are expected to reduce traffic congestion and accidents, in addition to easing the burden of long-distance driving for the elderly and others
  • speeding up development of related technologies such as mapping features and sensors.
  • Western automakers and technology giants like Google are also developing self-driving vehicles
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    Honda Motor plans to offer cars that can drive themselves on highways by around 2020, part of an attempt by Japanese automakers to move ahead of foreign rivals in this new high-tech field.
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