Monthly Archives: July 2017

BARCELONA (Reuters) - Battered by its emissions scandal, Audi launched its latest technology-packed A8 luxury saloon on Tuesday, aimed at overtaking rivals Mercedes-Benz and BMW as it struggles to overcome its biggest-ever corporate crisis.

Last week Munich prosecutors arrested an Audi employee in connection with "dieselgate", the latest setback to Volkswagen's (VOWG_p.DE) luxury car arm and main profit driver, after the German government a month earlier had accused Audi of cheating on emissions tests.

On Tuesday Audi shifted the focus back to its products with its top management hosting 2,000 guests in Barcelona to unveil the new A8, whose Level-3 self-driving technology enables the car to completely control driving at up to 60 kilometers (37 miles) per hour, beating the Mercedes S-Class and the BMW 7-Series.

Having slipped behind its two German rivals on global sales last year, Audi has risked stalling without innovation and needed a new prestige product, said Stefan Bratzel, head of the Center of Automotive Management think-tank near Cologne.

"Innovation is key in premium car-making," Bratzel said. "The new A8 will polish the brand's image and line-up at a critical time."

Even Audi acknowledged that amid ongoing investigations, persistent pressure on its chief executive for his crisis management and analysts' criticism of Audi's ageing vehicle design, the new A8 creates an opportunity for a clean break.

"It's gratifying that we are able to set a positive sign for real 'Vorsprung durch Technik', advancement through technology," R&D chief Peter Mertens said.

Mercedes and BMW have accelerated their autonomous-driving development programs with Mercedes owner Daimler joining forces with car parts maker Robert Bosch [ROBG.UL] in April and BMW collaborating with other firms including U.S. parts maker Delphi and chipmaker Intel.

Featuring a more distinctive design and a foot massager for rear-seat passengers, the new A8 heralds the start of a series of redesigns and new model launches at Audi including an electric sport-utility vehicle (SUV) to take on Tesla's Model X, the all-new Q4 and Q8 SUVs and redesigned A6 and A7 model lines.

A source at Audi said development of the A8, which took about five years, suffered from changes at the brand's research and development department, though assiduous work by division heads helped ensure that delays were kept in check. The A8 will reach German dealerships in the fourth quarter.

Audi is on its third development chief since dieselgate broke in late 2015, with Mertens, who took office in May, the brand's fifth R&D boss since 2012.

"The top brass at VW group and Audi are so preoccupied with the diesel issue that the company's management is lastingly distracted," said Christian Strenger, a supervisory board member at Deutsche Bank's retail asset management arm DWS.

With the new A8's retail price up almost 8 percent on its predecessor at 90,600 euros ($103,000), Audi will also struggle to narrow the gap with its traditional rivals, research firm IHS Markit said.

A8 sales in the core markets of Europe, China and the Americas may climb 3.2 percent to 35,571 cars by 2025 from 34,468 next year, IHS said.

By comparison, IHS expects deliveries of BMW's 7-Series to fall 7.6 percent to 52,238 cars by 2025 and deliveries of Mercedes' S-Class to jump 24 percent to 85,389 cars.

S-Class and 7-Series prices start at 88,447 euros and 78,100 euros respectively, according to company data.

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Audi seeks to eclipse emissions scandal with new technology-packed A8 car - Reuters

Bristol Braille Technology, which won the accessibility award, created an affordable braille electronic reader, designed with, by and for blind people. Photograph: AbilityNet

With so much coverage about the dark underbelly of the internet and how many of our technological advances have been hijacked for nefarious activities whether its our computers having the potential to spy on us, Russian hackers interfering with democratic elections or our hospitals IT systems being hacked it was a relief to be asked to judge this years AbilityNet Tech4Good awards. As the name suggests, these awards showcase the people and organisations using technology to make the world a better place. And Im pleased to report that there are many amazing tech entrepreneurs working across the globe to create a brighter digital future.

Among the winners in the eight categories who were announced yesterday, are Bristol Braille Technology, the winner of the accessibility award. The social enterprise has created an affordable braille electronic reader, designed with, by and for blind people. Unlike existing readers which can only display a single line of text, Bristol Brailles device can show a full page of words and numbers. This means users can deliver speeches, use spreadsheets easily and read music notation, scientific and mathematical formulas. Currently being trialled in Britain, Ireland and the US, the social enterprise hopes to launch the device later this year or early 2018 for around 600800.

Chatterbox, another communications aid, was developed by Mursal Hedayat, a refugee from Afghanistan, to provide language tutoring. It recruits, trains and supports talented individuals who are refugees through a website to find work as language tutors. Refugees, who are dispersed across the UK, are linked up with individuals and organisations often based somewhere else which require those language skills.

One of the most inspiring categories this year was the digital health award. The winner, Haiyan Zhang, developed a wireless sensor, Fizzyo, in her free time, to make physiotherapy exercises more fun for two teenage brothers with cystic fibrosis. By connecting the sensor to their physiotherapy equipment, she turned the exercises into controls for video games. Working in conjunction with Great Ormond Street hospital, Zhang is developing the sensor further, so it can be trialled in 100 homes around the UK to study the long-term efficacy of physiotherapy treatment.

Another entry in this category, which also won the public vote for the best entry, aims to improve cancer diagnosis. Co-founded by two doctors based at Kings College London, C the Signs hopes to improve earlier diagnosis of cancer. With over 200 different types of cancer, it is hard for GPs to spot all the potential signs of cancer in a 10-minute appointment. C the Signs, available on smartphones and as a website, allows GPs to enter patients symptoms and see what tests or urgent referrals the patient may need, in under 30 seconds. A pilot launches this week by Herts Valleys and Luton clinical commissioning groups, where the tool will be used by 1,000 GPs covering a population of 850,000 patients.

It was also good to see the Guardian 2014 Charity Awards winner, Sky Badger, pick up an award from the tech community for helping parents with disabled children through its extensive website and social media platform.

A new category, in conjunction with Comic Relief, recognised the contribution of technology to improving lives in sub-Saharan Africa. The winning entrant, Praekelts MomConnect project, allows pregnant women in South Africa with a mobile phone to access vital information and advice to improve maternal health during pregnancy.

Technology can seem remote and tricky to grasp. But as in previous years, the 2017 Tech4Good winners prove that it can not only improve peoples lives, but save them.

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Technology can save lives, not just improve them - The Guardian

The president was seething.

His problem was with the press, yes, but also with the technology they used. Electronic media had changed everything. People were glued to their screens. I have never heard or seen such outrageous, vicious, distorted reporting, he said in a news conference.

The age of television news, Richard Nixon told reporters gathered that day in October 1973, was shaking the confidence of the American people. He didnt yet know his presidency would reach a calamitous end. When Nixon announced he would resign, in August 1974, he spoke directly into a television camera. The recording remains stunning half-a-century latermostly because of the historic nature of the moment, but also because of the power of broadcast.

Even in an informational era transformed by the web, video is a gripping format. In the chaos of real-time news, especially, theres an advantage to being able to see something with your own eyes.

Or, there used to be.

At a time when distrust in journalistic institutions is swelling, technology that further muddies the ability to discern whats real is rapidly advancing. Convincing Photoshop-esque techniques for video have arrived, and the result is simultaneously terrifying and remarkable.

Computer scientists can now make realistic lip-synched videosostensibly putting anyones words into another persons mouth.

The animated gif that you see above? Thats not actually Barack Obama speaking. Its a synthesized video of Obama, made to appear as though hes speaking words that were actually inputted from an audio file.

The clip comes from researchers at the University of Washington, who developed an algorithm to take audio of someone talking and turn that into a realistic video of someone speaking those words. In the video below, you can see a side-by-side comparison of the original audiowhich came from actual Obama remarksand the generated video.

Obama was a natural subject for this kind of experiment because there are so many readily available, high-quality video clips of him speaking. In order to make a photo-realistic mouth texture, researchers had to input many, many examples of Obama speakinglayering that data atop a more basic mouth shape. The researchers used whats called a recurrent neural network to synthesize the mouth shape from the audio. (This kind of system, modeled on the human brain, can take in huge piles of data and find patterns. Recurrent neural networks are also used for facial recognition and speech recognition.) They trained their system using millions of existing video frames. Finally, they smoothed out the footage using compositing techniques applied to real footage of Obamas head and torso.

The researchers wrote a paper about their technique, and they plan to present their findings at a computer graphics and interactive techniques conference next month.

The idea is to use the technology for better communication between people, says Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, a co-author of the paper and an assistant professor in the department of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. She thinks this technology could be useful for video conferencingone could generate a realistic video from audio, even when a systems bandwidth is too low to support video transmission, for example. Eventually, the technique could be used as a form of teleportation in virtual reality and augmented reality, making a convincing avatar of a person appear to be in the same room as a real person, across any distance in space and time.

What Makes Tom Hanks Look Like Tom Hanks

Were not learning just how to give a talking face to Siri, or to use Obama as your GPS navigation, but were learning how to capture human personas, says Supasorn Suwajanakorn, a co-author of the paper. Not surprisingly, several major technology companies have taken notice: Samsung, Google, Facebook, and Intel all chipped in funding for this research. Their interest likely spans the realms of artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and robotics. I hope we can study and transfer these human qualities to robots and make them more like a person, Suwajanakorn told me.

Quite clearly, though, the technique could be used to deceive. People are already fooled by doctored photos, impostor accounts on social media, and other sorts of digital mimicry all the time.

Imagine the confusion that might surround a convincing video of the president being made to say something he never actually said. I do worry, Kemelmacher-Shlizerman acknowledged. But the good outweighs the bad, she insists. I believe its a breakthrough.

There are ways for experts to determine whether a video has been faked using this technique. Since researchers still rely on legitimate footage to produce portions of a lip-synched video, like the speakers head, its possible to identify the original video that was used to create the made-up one.

So, by creating a database of internet videos, we can detect fake videos by searching through the database and see whether there exists a video with the same head and background, Suwajanakorn told me. Another artifact that can be an indication is the blurry mouth [and] teeth region. This may be not noticeable by human eyes, but a program that compares the blurriness of the mouth region to the rest of the video can easily be developed and will work quite reliably.

It also helps if you have two or more recordings of a person from different views, Suwajanakorn said. Thats much harder to fake. These are useful safeguards, but the technology will still pose challenges as people realize its potential. Not everyone will know how to seek out the databases and programs that allow for careful vettingor even think to question a realistic-looking video in the first place. And those who share misinformation unintentionally will likely exacerbate the increasing distrust in experts who can help make sense of things

My thought is that people will not believe videos, just like how we do not believe photos once were aware that tools like Photoshop exist, Suwajanakorn told me. This could be both good and bad, and we have to move on to a more reliable source of evidence.

But what does reliability mean when you cannot believe your own eyes? With enough convincing distortions to reality, it becomes very difficult to know whats real.

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The Technology That Will Make It Impossible for You to Believe What You See - The Atlantic

(TNS)-- Were a year into the Innovation District, a testing zone for technologies that could make Las Vegas run more productively. That translates to added conveniences, environmental safeguards and security enhancements, playing off the citys motto: Building community to make life better.

The Las Vegas City Council unanimously passed a resolution last February to establish the district downtown. If we can build applications that make residents and visitors safe while theyre here enjoying the area, or provide better transportation options, thats what we want to do, said Michael Sherwood, director of information technology and innovation for the city.

The district is a proving ground, with tests being run on multiple programs that carry out similar functions. The plan is to use the standouts long-term and on a much larger scale.

The city is partnering with these firms in the hope of creating a safer, smoother travel environment. Numinas sensing platform tracks the street flow of all objects to help city planners maximize features for the ways theyre most used. Motionlofts hardware and software count vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians in real time and analyze behaviors tied to transportation. Both systems reveal areas prone to jaywalking, putting the city in a position to strategically curb unsafe activity.

Hitachis sophisticated optics can be used for traffic management, but in the Innovation District theyll scan for danger. The camera can detect if someone leaves a backpack at an intersection, and then can send out a police or fire response, said Sherwood, adding that the city was finalizing its agreement with Hitachi and should roll out the pilot program in 30 to 60 days. The system also counts parking spaces and tracks vacancies, data that will be used to help motorists find parking through the soon-to-launch GoVegas app.

Ciscos cloud-based service collects data on traffic and parking and even how full garbage bins are. But its environmental sensing might be most exciting. It monitors idling cars for carbon emissions and can change a light from red to green and make successive lights turn green faster to maximize flow and minimize pollution. The city of Las Vegas is 100 percent sustainable. All the electricity we consume, we produce, Sherwood said. If we lower the carbon footprint in the city, it makes the community better.

The autonomous shuttle Arma, developed by Paris-based Navya, completed its first stateside road test in Las Vegas in January tied to the Consumer Electronics Show. And its set to return to the district in September. This time it will go live in traffic with passengers onboard, in conjunction with the launch of dedicated short-range communications (DSRC). DSRC sends traffic-signal timing data to the shuttle, which adjusts its speed to avoid hitting any red lights. Arma eventually will operate in a loop, starting around the Container Park area on Fremont Street down to the Mob Museum on Stewart Avenue, and rides will be free.

Sometime this year, the city hopes to add infrared cameras and sound sensors to the testing zone. If a fire broke out, the cameras would detect the temperature spike and alert emergency dispatch, cutting response time and the chance that flames would spread and cause more damage. And the sensors would pick up sounds such as glass breaking, prompting cameras to view the area so a system monitor could alert authorities if someone were breaking into a vehicle or building.

2017 the Las Vegas Sun (Las Vegas, Nev.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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4 Smart Technology Tests Happening in Las Vegas - Government Technology

Those are some of the advantages that helped Texas win the Governor's Cup for the most new and expanded corporate facility projects in the nation for the fifth year in a row. Over the past year, Texas welcomed Kubota Tractors, Farmer Brothers and Serenova, along with new facilities for Amazon, Facebook and GM Financial, to name just a few. Tech giants Apple, Oracle, Google and Microsoft are also expanding their corporate presence and jobs in Texas' innovation corridor.

In fact, Texas is in the middle of an innovation renaissance. From biotech and defense tech to wearable tech and clean tech, technologies developed in the Lone Star State are changing the world in which we live.

Texas is also where the tech talent wants to live, with Austin, San Antonio, Houston and Dallas ranking among the top metro areas for startup activity.

The Texas model is proof that limited government secures economic liberty and encourages unlimited opportunity.

To spur even greater economic expansion, I will continue to fight back against overregulation by the federal government and rein in regulatory regimes at the local level that create a patchwork of compliance complexities.

The freedom to experiment with new business models, like transportation network companies, should be permitted by default. Across industries, we need to remove barriers to entry, encourage competition, enact consistent consumer safety regulations and then empower consumers to choose.

By unleashing the power of entrepreneurs and innovators, and securing the freedom to aspire, Texas will long remain the best state for business.

By Texas Gov. Greg Abbott

Editor's note: This commentary was written before the release of the Top States 2017 data. The governor did not have knowledge of the rankings or the comprehensive data.

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A Texas-size boom in technology: Gov. Abbott - CNBC

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea's intelligence agency does not believe North Korea has secured re-entry capabilities for its intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program, a South Korean lawmaker said on Tuesday, disputing Pyongyang's account.

North Korea launched what was said to be a nuclear-capable ICBM last week as it presses on with its nuclear and missile programs in defiance of United Nations sanctions.

Pyongyang's state media said last week's test successfully verified the atmospheric re-entry of the warhead loaded on the test-launched missile, which experts say may be able to reach the U.S. state of Alaska.

However, Yi Wan-young, who is also a member of South Korean parliament's intelligence committee, told reporters during a televised briefing that South Korea's National Intelligence Service has not been able to confirm that re-entry was successful.

"Considering how North Korea does not have any testing facilities (for re-entry technology), the agency believes (North Korea) has not yet secured that technology," he said.

Yi said the agency believed the missile launched last week was a modified version of the KN-17 intermediate range missile that was tested in May.

He also said the agency had not detected any unusual activity at North Korea's Punggye-ri nuclear test site.

Reporting by Se Young Lee; Editing by Paul Tait

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South Korea says North doesn't have ICBM re-entry technology - Reuters

In the past month, the pace of change in Londons office market has moved up a gear.

Despite the start of the Brexit negotiations, uncertainty on the future of Londons financial cluster, and the inconclusive general election result, demand for office space has increased.

Office demand in the first half of 2016 was 6.4 million sq ft up from 5.5 million sq ft in the six months to June2016.

On the face of it, this feels disingenuous, given the very real obstacles facing the London economy. While no one has seen the final Brexit deal, one would have to be a huge optimist to imagine the capital will not lose some financial jobs to EU cities like Dublin or Frankfurt.

Yes, the London office market would probably be seeing higher demand today without the political uncertainty, but Brexit has not been an insurmountable barrier to doing deals.

This is because in the property world now, the bread-and-butter...

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Why technology is driving the City's office boom - Telegraph.co.uk