Four short links: 13 May 2016
Self-Driving Redundancy, Nerds v the Law, 3D Insides, and Parsey McParseface
- Volvo’s Self-Driving Program, and Redundancy (IEEE) — So far, driver-assistance features have enjoyed the inherent redundancy that comes from having a human being behind the wheel. “If antilock brakes fail in a car today, the driver steps on the brake,” says Erik Coelingh, a leader of the project. “In a self-driving car, if ABS fails you need a backup ABS. You need two systems for everything.”
- Nerd Subculture is on Trial — I’m sure Larry Lessig gets no pleasure from saying “I told you so.”
- Google 3D-Scanning Indoors — Project Tango (depth + image capture from cellphones) is taking off, but the real story is that Google will have a massive data pile of information about The Real World, regardless of which of the VR/AR technologies eventually wins. Clever! See also Inside the ScorpionCam about correcting 360-degree stereo video capture, with optics inspired by scorpion eyes.
- SyntaxNet — Google open sources a neural network framework for TensorFlow that provides a foundation for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems. Our release includes all the code needed to train new SyntaxNet models on your own data, as well as Parsey McParseface, an English parser that we have trained for you, and that you can use to analyze English text.
