Google and Fiat Chrysler aren’t sure who owns self-driving car data
They’re also unsure if they’ll open their car code to others
Google and Fiat Chrysler left a lot of questions unanswered when they unveiled their self-driving car partnership… and that’s because they haven’t answered some of those questions themselves, apparently. Fiat Chrysler chief Sergio Marchionne told guests at an event that the two companies have yet to decide who will own the data from the fleet of 100 autonomous Pacifica minivans. The vehicles need to be “viable” first, he says. He adds that the firms have yet to decide whether or not they’ll offer open source code that would help others build self-driving technology.
Nonetheless, Marchionne is optimistic. Based on his experiences, hebelieves that practical self-driving cars will be ready in 5 years, not the 20 that some have predicted. “It isn’t pie in the sky,” the CEO claims. He’s also suggesting that the partnership could grow once the self-driving minivan is on the road. Think of this as just a start, then — you may see a lot more in the pipeline.
Radiohead fans have been reeling in anticipation of the band’s next albumA Moon Shaped Pool, their first since 2011. Apparently, Google was as well, as the album appeared early on Google Play.
While the album was set for release on Sunday at 2 p.m., many people reported seeing the download available early afternoon. While Google has since taken it down, that didn’t stop some from hearing it early.
iOS 10 reportedly includes a dedicated smart home app
There’s no shortage of devices that support Apple’s HomeKit platform. However, managing those devices is something of a mess — you typically end up visiting separate apps to control your lighting, security and appliances. You might not have to worry about that when iOS 10 rolls around, though. MacRumors says it spotted an Amazon review from an Apple employee (verified after the fact) who claims that the next iOS release will have a “standalone” HomeKit app when it arrives in the fall. The staffer doesn’t say how it’d work, but the implication is that it’d serve as a hub for all your HomeKit-compatible smart home gadgets.
There’s no certainty that this HomeKit app will show up as promised, since there’s always the chance that Apple will either delay it or scrap it entirely. There is evidence that this isn’t just speculation, mind you. Apple used a shell company to file a trademark for a HomeKit icon late last year, so it’s at least thinking about what a dedicated app would look like. As it is, Google isn’t standing still between its OnHub networking and its internet of things platform, Brillo. A full-fledged HomeKit app might give Apple a competitive edge by taking some of the hassle out of automating your household.
SFU Health Research Day 2016: Networking for Innovation
Earlier this week, Health Researchers across different disciplines gathered at the fourth biennial SFU Health Research Day, for an interactive day aimed at building collaborations across the university as they discussed solutions to contemporary health issues.
This year’s Research Day, organized by representatives from seven SFU Faculties, VP Research and SFU Library, is unique from previous years where researchers presented their proposals regarding their resolutions to health concerns in front of an audience.
Instead, researchers from various disciplines broke into groups to have a in-depth dialogue on contemporary health issues ranging from applications and challenges of big data for health research to climate change, health and disease.
The event’s emphasis on dialogue encouraged each group to collaboratively develop a proposal to have their ideas for health solutions funded by a $5,000 grant through VP Research.
At one of the dialogue tables, participants developed an idea for a web-based application, “Tinder for Big Data Research Scientists,” to help researchers identify collaborators across disciplines. Another group of researchers put forth a proposal to mine data collected from mobile technologies such as smart phones and wearables to identify patterns that can help detect, predict, prevent and manage mental illness.
“The participants including faculty members, graduate students, and our partners from Fraser Health, clearly brought their enthusiasm to this event,” says Joy Johnson, vice-president of research at SFU. “They were dedicated to engaging with each other to find solutions to the health problems that are plaguing our communities today.”
Johnson says that the open format was successful in attracting SFU’s health research community to collaborate in a unique way and discuss ideas that will one-day result in brilliant innovations.
A standalone iOS app for Apple’s HomeKit platform could finally arrive in iOS 10 as a new report claimsan Apple employee on the company’s marketing team revealed plans for the launch in an onlinereview. MacRumors found the mention (pasted below) within a product review related to HomeKit andsays it confirmed the person that left the comment was indeed an Apple employee.
As I work in marketing for Apple, we test many Smart Home devices, especially for iOSHomeKit integration. […]
Some advice, there are many third party applications, most free, that offer more control andcustomization(s) with many Smart Home devices. “Yonomi” is a free app that I often use,“Home” is another which cost $14.99. Both offer support for many devices with more addeddaily (including Amazon “Echo”). The next version of iOS due this fall will have a standalone“HomeKit” app as well.
Apple has had plans for a HomeKit app on your iPhone’s home screen for quite a while as it’sdeveloped the platform that currently only allows control of supported home automation accessoriesthrough Siri or third-party apps. We were first to detail some of the planned features for the platformand app back before the release of iOS 9, some which like the app have yet to be released.
The idea is that rather than using various apps each accessory maker builds, you could just open one“Home” app on your iPhone to manage everything. These apps already exist in the form of third-partysolutions like the Hesperus app we reviewed a couple weeks back, but a solution direct from Applewould hopefully mean one of the best implementations yet and maybe some new features that third-party developers don’t have access to in the current crop of apps.
If the report is true, we could finally get our first look at the Home app at Apple’s World WideDevelopers Conference in June where the company is expected to preview iOS 10 alongside its otherupcoming products and developer tools.
Apple Meets With Podcasters to Hear Wide-Ranging Community Grievances
Apple has held a special meeting with leading podcasters in an attempt to address concerns that the company is failing to adequately support the iTunes broadcast community, reports to The New York Times.
According to the piece, the meeting took place last month at the company’s Cupertino headquarters, where seven top iTunes podcasters were invited to air their grievances regarding Apple’s handing of the popular audio format in recent years.
The podcasters expressed in “frank terms” their biggest issues to a room full of Apple employees, according to two attendees, who spoke on condition of anonymity after signing nondisclosure agreements.
Top of the complaints list was a frustration among podcasters at their lack of ability to make money through subscription downloads, mainly due to insufficient access to data about their listeners – data that they argued Apple is in a unique position to provide.
The program producers also took issue with iTunes’ limited sharing features, which take multiple clicks to advertise content on social media. In addition, podcasters said they had been “relegated to wooing a single Apple employee” when it came to discussing issues, such as perceived inconsistencies in the way iTunes elects to promote content.
After the meeting was over, SVP Eddy Cue met with Apple employees separately in a closed-door session to discuss the issues that had been raised by the podcasters, but the company did not make any promises to address their concerns, according to the sources.
Apple essentially gave birth to the mainstream podcasting community in 2005 when it released iTunes 4.9 with native support for podcasts. Within a year, public radio networks like the BBC, CBC Radio One, and National Public Radio had placed many of their radio shows on the platform.
The format’s popularity has surged in recent years, with many amateur podcasters going professional and major media organizations posting new shows every week. In 2014, breakout hit “Serial” garnered 110 million downloads as listeners avidly followed the radio spin-off’s re-examination of a murder case. In 2015, at least 46 million Americans listened to podcasts each month. That figure is expected to reach 57 million by this year’s end, according to a survey by Edison Research.
The report notes that podcasts bring Apple no direct revenue and its iTunes podcasting hub has changed very little since it was introduced, while promotion is decided by a small team that fields pitches and conducts its own outreach.
In a statement to The New York Times, Apple SVP Cue said, “We have more people than ever focused on podcasting, including engineers, editors and programmers.” Cue added, “Podcasts hold a special place with us at Apple.”
With Google and Spotify now actively promoting their own podcast promotion and distribution services, time will tell whether broadcasters agree.
Apple’s stock continued to slump on Friday. It closed at $92.72, down 0.56% on the day, marking the lowest closing price for the stock since June 2014.
Apple stock has lost over 11% of its value since it reported disappointing earnings on April 26, wiping out billions of dollars in market value.
Although the company remains the world’s most valuable company, with a market cap of over $500 billion, investors have real fears that iPhone demand will be lower for the foreseeable future because of overall lower upgrade rates and saturated markets in developed countries.
There’s also concern that the regulatory environment in China might be becoming hostile to Apple as CEO Tim Cook plans a trip to meet with officials there later this month.
Cook said that he believes that Apple is undervalued during an appearance on CNBC earlier this week.
Here’s what Apple’s stock has done over the past two years:
Yahoo Finance
How To Send Self-Destructing Messages — And Other IPhone Messaging Tricks
Could transform telecommunications by increasing speed and reducing size of cell phones, WiFi, and other devices
May 5, 2016
Columbia University engineering researchers have developed a new “circulator” technology that can double WiFi speed while reducing the size of wireless devices. It does this by requiring only one antenna (instead of two, for transmitter and receiver) and by using conventional CMOS chips instead of resorting to large, expensive magnetic components.
Current bulky circulator design (credit: Connecticut Microwave Corporation)
Columbia engineers previously invented a “full-duplex” radio integrated circuit on a conventional CMOS chip. “Full duplex” means simultaneous transmission and reception at the same frequency in a wireless radio, unlike “half-duplex” (transmitting and receiving at different times, used by current cell phones and other wireless devices). Full duplex also allows for faster transmission speeds.
“Full-duplex communications, where the transmitter and the receiver operate at the same time and at the same frequency, has become a critical research area and now we’ve shown that WiFi capacity can be doubled on a nanoscale silicon chip with a single antenna,” said Electrical Engineering Associate Professor Harish Krishnaswamy, director of the Columbia High-Speed and Mm-wave IC (CoSMIC) Lab. “This has enormous implications for devices like smartphones and tablets.”
Prototype of first CMOS full-duplex receiver IC with integrated magnetic-free circulator (credit: Negar Reiskarimian, Columbia Engineering)
By combining circulator and full-duplex technologies, “this technology could revolutionize the field of telecommunications,” he said. “Our circulator is the first to be put on a silicon chip, and we get literally orders of magnitude better performance than prior work.”
How to embed circulator technology on a CMOS chip
CMOS circulator IC on a printed-curcuit board, interfaced with off-chip inductors. (credit: Negar Reiskarimian, Columbia Engineering)
A circulator allows for using only one antenna to both transmit and receive. To do that, it has to “break” “Lorentz reciprocity” — a fundamental physical characteristic of most electronic structures that requires that electromagnetic waves travel in the same manner in both forward and reverse directions.
The traditional way of breaking Lorentz reciprocity and building radio-frequency circulators has been to use magnetic materials such as ferrites, which lose reciprocity when an external magnetic field is applied. But these materials are not compatible with silicon chip technology, and ferrite circulators are bulky and expensive.
Krishnaswamy and his team were able to design a highly miniaturized circulator that uses switches to rotate the signal across a set of capacitors to emulate the non-reciprocal “twist” of the signal that is seen in ferrite materials.
“Being able to put the circulator on the same chip as the rest of the radio has the potential to significantly reduce the size of the system, enhance its performance, and introduce new functionalities critical to full duplex,” says PhD student Jin Zhou, who integrated the circulator with a full-duplex receiver.
Circulator circuits and components have applications in many different scenarios, from radio-frequency full-duplex communications and radar to building isolators that prevent high-power transmitters from being damaged by back-reflections from the antenna. The ability to break reciprocity also opens up new possibilities in radio-frequency signal processing that are yet to be discovered.
The circulator research is published in an open-access paper on April 15 in Nature Communications. A paper detailing the single-chip full-duplex radio with the circulator and additional echo cancellation was presented at the 2016 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference on February 2.
The work has been funded by the DARPA Microsystems Technology Office and the National Science Foundation.
Abstract of Magnetic-free non-reciprocity based on staggered commutation
Lorentz reciprocity is a fundamental characteristic of the vast majority of electronic and photonic structures. However, non-reciprocal components such as isolators, circulators and gyrators enable new applications ranging from radio frequencies to optical frequencies, including full-duplex wireless communication and on-chip all-optical information processing. Such components today dominantly rely on the phenomenon of Faraday rotation in magneto-optic materials. However, they are typically bulky, expensive and not suitable for insertion in a conventional integrated circuit. Here we demonstrate magnetic-free linear passive non-reciprocity based on the concept of staggered commutation. Commutation is a form of parametric modulation with very high modulation ratio. We observe that staggered commutation enables time-reversal symmetry breaking within very small dimensions (λ/1,250 × λ/1,250 in our device), resulting in a miniature radio-frequency circulator that exhibits reduced implementation complexity, very low loss, strong non-reciprocity, significantly enhanced linearity and real-time reconfigurability, and is integrated in a conventional complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor integrated circuit for the first time.
Abstract of Receiver with integrated magnetic-free N-path-filter-based non-reciprocal circulator and baseband self-interference cancellation for full-duplex wireless
Full-duplex (FD) is an emergent wireless communication paradigm where the transmitter (TX) and the receiver (RX) operate at the same time and at the same frequency. The fundamental challenge with FD is the tremendous amount of TX self-interference (SI) at the RX. Low-power applications relax FD system requirements [1], but an FD system with -6dBm transmit power, 10MHz signal bandwidth and 12dB NF budget still requires 86dB of SI suppression to reach the -92dBm noise floor. Recent research has focused on techniques for integrated self-interference cancellation (SIC) in FD receivers [1-3]. Open challenges include achieving the challenging levels of SIC through multi-domain cancellation, and low-loss shared-antenna (ANT) interfaces with high TX-to-RX isolation. Sharedantenna interfaces enable compact form factor, translate easily to MIMO, and ease system design through channel reciprocity.
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