Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, gave the opening keynote at CES this year. That’s hardly surprising. From a company that operated on the fringes of mainstream awareness (those guys that do gamer graphics), they finished 2016 as the top-performing company in the S&P 500, returning revenue growth of 35% (forecast). That’s startup… Read More
Tesla’s (and Uber’s) Teflon to be Tested in 2017
For the past two years the impression has been spreading that Tesla Motors can do no wrong. (I can’t really say the same for Uber after the recent San Francisco licensing debacle.) There is no question that Tesla’s legal department is growing by the month as fights persist over opening stores and forestalling liability… Read More
Will Lawsuits Stall Automotive AI?
The roster of automotive artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives is growing rapidly with Softbank working with Honda on the Emotion Engine for the Neuv self-driving commuter vehicle, IBM’s collaboration with General Motors and BMW, and, now, reports of Microsoft bringing AI to Volvo in the form of Cortana. It was Google… Read More
Crowd-Sourcing Morality for Autonomous Cars
Questions are being raised on how autonomous vehicles should react in life-or-death situations. Most of these have been based on thought experiments, constructed from standard dilemmas in ethics such as what should happen if the driver of a car or an autonomous car is faced with either killing two pedestrians or killing the occupants… Read More
Vox Clamantis in Deserto
If you are headed to Las Vegas for your New Year’s celebration, the annual Consumer Electronics Show or just a good time, beware! According to some estimates Nevada is the fourth most dangerous state for pedestrians and Las Vegas is ground zero for what the city calls an ePEDemic of roadway fatalities.
It’s difficult… Read More
They Kill Pedestrians, Don’t They?
I came upon the scene of a crash investigation yesterday afternoon in my hometown of Herndon, Va. A mother and two children were hit by a 20-year-old motorist making a right turn at an intersection. I did not see the crash, but I strongly suspect the motorist was looking left to anticipate oncoming traffic and never noticed the pedestrians… Read More
Real Time Virtualization, How Hard Can it Be?
My first exposure to running something virtual on a computer was when I decided to run the Windows OS on my MacBook Pro using software provided by Parallels. With that virtualization I was able to run the Quicken app under Windows on my MacBook Pro, along with the popular Internet Explorer web browser. The app performance on virtualized… Read More
Asimo Creator Talks to Waymo
It’s been 16 years since the debut of Honda’s Asimo robot. By now, millions of people around the world have seen Asimo and its offspring at trade shows and on television. The robot is still capable of drawing a crowd wherever it is found especially since it is not only capable of walking and running but also of recognizing… Read More
NetSpeed Leverages Machine Learning for Automotive IC End-to-End QoS Solutions
A couple of weeks back I wrote an article about the use of machine learning and deep neural networks in self-driving cars. Now I find that machine learning is also being applied to help build advanced end-to-end QoS (quality of service) solutions for the automotive IC market. With the advent of self-driving cars comes requirements… Read More
Driverless Cars and our Global Economy
While traveling to California this year I had my first Uber trip after a concierge in Santa Clara recommended it as the best way to get to the airport, instead of the usual and expensive taxi ride. Later in the year I had my first Lyft ride after my road bike broke down and I needed a ride back home. Our transportation choices are shifting,… Read More
Selling the Forges of the Future: U.S. Report Exposes China’s Reliance on Western Chip Tools