The Innovation Report
Airbus Using Drones to Spot Refugees Crossing the Mediterranean
Airbus and two Israeli arms companies will be paid €100m (£91m) to operate unmanned drones to spot refugees and migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean sea to Europe, according to EU contracts. Drone operations over the Mediterranean will start next year, after...
Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ Software Rolling Out to Select Customers
Tesla sent out the first “Full Self-Driving” beta software update to a select group of customers this week, CEO Elon Musk tweeted Tuesday. On an earnings call Wednesday, Musk said more Tesla owners would get the update as the weeks progress, with the goal of a “wide...
Robots to Feed Students, Staff at Oregon State University
Robots with bright orange flags will soon roam Oregon State University's more than 500-acre campus in Corvallis. The fleet of 20 delivery robots will bring food to students, staff, and faculty members, carrying up to 20 pounds of grub per trip. The university had been...
Rural North Carolina Residents Get Drone-delivered Meds
Drones have already shown that they can reliably deliver vital shipments of blood across Rwanda, drop off prescriptions to senior citizens in Florida, and help quarantining families stay safe with contactless deliveries. Now they’re going to be...
U.S. Works to Block Huawei from Brazil’s 5G Networks
Washington has stepped up its offensive against Huawei, offering financing to Brazil to get the Chinese telco effectively blocked from the nation’s next-generation 5G networks. During a trip to Brasilia on Tuesday, officials from the Export-Import Bank of the United...
Waymo Launches Fully Self-driving Cars – Again
In 2018, the company started taking passengers in a programme called Waymo One, but the only passengers allowed on board were people that had been vetted by Waymo, which involves signing an NDA barring them from disclosing any information about trips. According to the...
Ford Unveils New Self-driving Test Vehicle
Ford Motor plans to launch its self-driving commercial business in 2022 with vehicles based on the Ford Escape Hybrid crossover, the company said Tuesday. The vehicles are the automaker’s fourth-generation self-driving test vehicles in partnership with Argo AI, a...
Deep Learning AI Monitors Volcano Movements
RADAR satellites can collect massive amounts of remote sensing data that can detect ground movements—surface defomations—at volcanoes in near real time. These ground movements could signal impending volcanic activity and unrest; however, clouds and other atmospheric...
University of San Diego Fighting Pandemic with AI
If you're walking into a store or office you have to wear a mask. Some places are even asking for temperature checks to protect people inside. Now artificial intelligence is joining in on the fight against COVID-19. "We have a thermal scanner on top of the device...
Cornell Researcher Proposes New Blockchain Consensus Method
A Ph.D. dissertation On Scalability of Blockchain Technologies has become the most downloaded dissertation at Cornell University in the past eight years. The paper was penned by Adem Efe Gencer in 2017, under the direction of computer...
