Items tagged with uber
Researchers around the world are working on new types of artificial intelligence (AI) that can dominate in games created by humans. Typically, these AI complete video games with much higher scores than a human is capable of achieving. A team of Uber AI researchers has developed a new set of algorithms capable of defeating any Atari 2600 game, and it's called Go-Explore. The developers say that Go-Explore can defeat Atari 2600 games with "superhuman" scores, including games that previous AI had trouble with. The team says the key to their new system is that it remembers promising states and returns to the states before it begins exploring the game. Uber AI researchers say that Go-Explore improved...
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A National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report outlines findings in its investigation into a fatal accident with an Uber autonomous vehicle and a pedestrian. As part of its investigation, the NTSB disclosed that Uber's vehicles had been involved in 37 crashes over the prior 18 months. With the investigation complete, the NTSB could use its findings in the Uber AV investigation, which is the first fatal self-driving car accident, to make recommendations that could impact the entire self-driving vehicle industry. A meeting is scheduled for November 19th to determine the probable cause of the March 2018 accident that happened in Tempe, Arizona. That accident resulted in the death of 49-year-old...
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You might think that a criminal planning a bank robbery would at least do a little research beforehand; rule numero uno is that you never rent the getaway vehicle in your own name. An alleged bank robber named Luca Mangiarano clearly didn't do his research. Police allege that 19-year-old Mangiarano robbed a BBVA Compas bank located in downtown Austin, Texas on December 18th. According to a bank teller, a young man in a black hoodie walked up to her station and handed her a note that demanded cash. She gave the man the money he asked for, and the man turned and walked out of the bank. Another bank employee saw a person fitting that description exit the bank and climb aboard an Uber Jump scooter...
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After over 10 million miles of miles of testing with its ever-growing fleet of self-driving vehicles, Google's Waymo is now ready for a commercial launch of its ride-hailing service. The paid service is called Waymo One, is available 24-7, and is accessible with an app (just like Uber and Lyft). Right now, the service is only available in the Metro Phoenix area, serving the cities of Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, and Tempe. The self-driving Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans can accommodate up to three adults and one child per trip, and at first will be limited to what Waymo describes as "early riders". Early riders -- which numbers in the hundreds -- were previously part of Waymo's...
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We're now getting some official details on a fatal crash that occurred back in March between an Uber self-driving Volvo XC90 and a woman walking a bicycle across the street. Preliminary findings that were leaked earlier this month claimed that the Volvo did see Elaine Herzberg as she was crossing the street at night. The report did not, however, explain why the vehicle still proceeded along its intended path, crashing into Herzberg. The official National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) preliminary report is shedding additional light on the situation, and confirms that the Volvo did indeed see the pedestrian. According to the report, the vehicle operator left the...
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It looks as though we're now receiving some preliminary findings on what went terribly wrong when a self-driving Uber Volvo XC90 failed to identify a pedestrian walking across a road at night, striking her at full speed. The impact killed 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg. The Information is reporting that the vehicle's onboard sensors likely did "see" Herzberg, but instead of correctly determining that she was an object that clearly needed to be avoided (either by applying the brakes or steering around the obstacle) it determined her to be a "false positive". As a result, the sensor suite acting as if she wasn't there and continued on its intended path (which tragically lead to the impact)....
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Something went terribly wrong on a Tempe, Arizona road last week, when a pedestrian crossing the street was struck and killed by an autonomous Uber Volvo XC90. The vehicle's sensors didn't detect the pedestrian, meaning that the brakes weren't automatically applied to prevent the crash (or at least lessen its severity). Perhaps more tragically, the human "babysitter" behind the wheel wasn't even paying attention at the time of the crash -- she was looking elsewhere in the cabin instead of keeping an eye on the road ahead. Now, a new report from Reuters suggests that Uber's decision to skimp on the number of safety sensors that continuously scan ahead, to the side, and rear of the vehicle to gauge...
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While Uber's autonomous driving trials are understandably on hold for the moment, computers Waymo is moving right ahead with new partnership to advance the field. Today, Waymo announced that it has signed an agreement with Jaguar to deliver up to 20,000 self-driving I-PACE electric crossovers over the next few years. Waymo's current fleet consists primarily of Lexus RX 450h Hybrid crossovers (which are being phased out) and Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans. "Imagine a world where you can take a self-driving minivan to the baseball game with family, and a self-driving I-PACE home after a night out — in both cases, a car perfectly suited for your needs," said the Waymo Team in a Medium posting....
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We were all stunned last week when it was revealed that an Uber self-driving Volvo X90 crossover struck a pedestrian crossing the street at night, killing her. While there was a human driver behind the wheel at the time of the crash, the Volvo was operating in fully autonomous mode when the accident occurred. 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, who was walking across the street (outside of the crosswalk area) was hit, and died on the scene. Uber's public relations team and its CEO were quick to offer the condolences and vowed to cooperate with the police in the investigation. The company also took the precautionary measure of removing all of its autonomous vehicles from public roads -- for now. A video...
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Uber and the autonomous driving sector at large are under close scrutiny after one of the ride sharing service's self-driving cars struck and killed a pedestrian on Sunday. However, the police chief of Tempe, Arizona, the place where the fatal accident occurred, says a preliminary investigation into the matter reveals that Uber is "likely" not at fault for what happened, and that it would have been difficult to avoid the outcome whether a human driver was in charge or a series of sensors and cameras. To be clear, there was a human driver behind the wheel, though the self-driving Volvo SUV was in full autonomous mode when the accident happened. The vehicle was traveling 38 miles per hour in a...
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We have some sad news to report in the world of autonomous vehicles. It was reported that earlier this morning, an Uber self-driving vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona. Tempe is one of several cities where Uber's autonomous vehicle trials are taking place, with the others being Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto. While there was a human driver behind the vehicle when 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg was struck, the vehicle was operating in fully autonomous mode at the time. This is the first accident [that we know of] involving an autonomous vehicle that has resulted in the death of a pedestrian. Self-driving vehicles have been sharing the roadways with everyday drivers (and...
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When you think of Sony, you would probably think about the PlayStation 4 game console and digital cameras first and foremost (and if you're a bit older, maybe the Walkman). Sony is very diversified, and a report is making the rounds that claims Sony is set to launch a ride-hailing service in Japan. Sony announced its plans along with partnerships that it has forged with several taxi firms in Japan. image via wiiii Sony will work with Daiwa Motor Transportation Corporation and five other taxi firms. The goal is to launch the new ride-hailing company this spring. The six taxi firms that are working with Sony have 10,000 vehicles combined and provide services mainly in Tokyo. Sony plans to...
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Alphabet's Waymo and Uber have agreed to bury the hatchet and settle a lawsuit revolving the latter's self-driving vehicle aspirations. As a result, Uber will pay Alphabet a hefty sum (in the eyes of mere mortals): $244 million. But in the grand scheme of things, it's still a relatively small figure for Uber, which has value of $72 billion. Waymo alleged that Anthony Levandowski, who headed up Waymo/Google's self-driving car division, took confidential intellectual property (roughly 10GB of data files that were downloaded from corporate servers) with him when he left in early 2016 to start Otto. Otto was a self-driving truck company that would end up being purchased by Uber. Alphabet's thinking...
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Back in September 2016, NVIDIA first introduced us to a brand new ARM64 architecture called Xavier. Xavier is a custom octa-core processor architecture that features NVIDIA’s latest Volta GPU (512 CUDA cores). When Xavier was originally announced, NVIDIA expected to begin sampling in Q4 2017, with volume production slated for 2018. Tonight, NVIDIA announced that its first samples of Xavier chips are now on the way to customers. It's been a long time coming, but NVIDIA says that Xavier is the culmination of $2 billion in research and development, along with the hard work over 2,000 engineers. NVIDIA says that Xavier can process 30 trillion operations per second while consuming just 30 watts...
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Travis Kalanick is the embattled former CEO of ride-hailing service Uber. He stepped down from his post as CEO of the company last summer after investors sent him a letter demanding his immediate resignation (although he remained on the board of the company). Kalanick said at the time, "I love Uber more than anything in the world and at this difficult moment in my personal life I have accepted the investors request to step aside so that Uber can go back to building rather than be distracted with another fight." Bloomberg reports that Kalanick has long been one of the wealthiest people in the world, at least on paper. The former executive is now set to become a real billionaire for the first time...
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Malware writes are a shifty bunch. If anyone needs further proof of that, Symantec has it, in the form of a warning over a new Android "Fakeapp" malware variant that spoofs Uber, the popular ridesharing service, to cover its tracks. While it may look innocent, the Fakeapp malware pulls its usual dirty tricks, including the theft of personal and sensitive information such as credit card details. "The Fakeapp variant we found had a spoofed Uber application user interface (UI) which pops up on the user’s device screen in regular intervals until the user gets tricked into entering their Uber ID (typically the registered phone number) and password," Symantec explains. After receiving the pop-up,...
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Uber has been on an incredible losing streak over the past year; granted much of its troubles have been at its own hands with scandal after scandal. The most recent of those scandals started with an ex-employee who sent a letter detailing all the hacking and bribery that Uber has allegedly engaged in over the years. The latest setback came as the European Union's highest court ruled that Uber is a taxi service. That means that Uber will now have to comply with tougher rules within the European Union that govern taxi associations. Image Source: Wikimedia Commons (Dllu) The ruling was handed down by the European Court of Justice, the highest court in the Union, and the ruling made it clear that...
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Uber has been in hot water over the last few months for some very unsavory allegations. Among them was that Uber was hacked resulting in the data of 57 million customers being stolen. The company allegedly paid the hacker $100,000 to delete the data. The latest issue stems from a 37-page letter that Ric Jacobs, a former member of the Uber security team, sent to management earlier this year detailing all the shady things the company has done over the years. Image Source: Wikimedia Commons (Dllu) Until this week, only portions of the letter, called the Jacobs Letter, had been revealed, but now a redacted copy of the letter is part of the litigation between Uber and Waymo. The letter claims that...
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Uber suffered a data breach back in October 2016 that affected tens of millions of people, and it is just now letting the public know about it, as 2018 rolls into view. This latest incident is yet another black eye for a company that has been beat up in the media over questionable decision making in the past, such as using special software to evade detection from authorities, but better late than never, right? To be fair, this is not th fault of Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who recently replace Travis Kalanick as the ridesharing company's boss. And to Khosrowshahi's credit, he responded to knowledge of the security breach with the fury of someone who wants to make it clear that this kind of thing...
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Volvo and Uber have announced a deal that will see Volvo providing 24,000 SUVs over the coming years for Uber's autonomous driving push. Volvo will provide Uber with top of the line XC90 SUVs along with some XC60 mid-size SUVs. Volvo doesn't make self-driving cars at this time and notes that Uber will be adding its own sensors and self-driving hardware to the vehicles. The partnership between the two firms is non-exclusive, meaning that Uber could add additional vehicles from other manufacturers if wanted. Uber already has a deal in place to get some vehicles from Mercedes-Benz. The XC90 is an expensive SUV with an MSRP starting at around $46,000. "The automotive industry is being disrupted by...
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Waymo's legal battle with Uber over autonomous driving technology just got a little bit trickier to navigate for the Alphabet-owned company. Adding to a growing list of unfavorable rulings for Waymo, a federal judge in San Francisco threw out key testimony from the company's damages expert, Michael Wagner, making it more difficult to prove allegations that Uber stole trade secrets related to self-driving vehicle technology. The judge also denied a trade-secret theft claim, along with one of the defendants in the case, ultimately making it more difficult for Waymo to prove that Uber engaged in misconduct independent of whether the engineer stole proprietary information from the company.Image Source:...
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Security researcher Will Strafach has discovered that Uber had been granted access to an undocumented, private app permission allowing its app to access the screen-recording feature on iPhones. To be able to access this screen capturing feature, Uber had to be granted special permission by Apple. That screen recording feature is said to be off limits to most app developers and is something known as an "entitlement". The screen recording feature in question is taken advantage of by screen recording apps on jailbroken iPhones, allowing apps like iRec to capture screens without needing permission directly from Apple. The security researcher says that based on thousands of app binaries that he has...
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