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Self-driving cars alone won't ease gridlock
ONE PER CENT
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Self-driving cars alone won’t ease gridlock
Surveil-a-whale With only 500 right whales left in the Atlantic, we need to keep tabs on them. It turns out artificial intelligence is perfect for the job. A competition sponsored by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration asked researchers to train AIs to recognise the whales using the unique pattern on their heads. Now you can pick out the whales just by flying a drone over them.
“WhatsApp will no longer charge subscription fees” Now you're the product. WhatsApp announced on Monday that it would stop charging fees, instead making money by helping customers to communicate with businesses
Is Google sexist? Really, Google? A study from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, finds that websites show men ads for higher paying jobs than those women see. The researchers found the disparity by looking at more than 600,000 targeted ads served on the search engine. It’s not the first discovery of hidden discrimination online. In 2013, Harvard researchers noticed that searches for African American names prompted more ads offering to check for arrest records.
–Go with the flow – 23 January 2016 | NewScientist | 21
Gerard Soury/Getty
has sensors that detect how many cars are approaching on each street and give priority to those with more traffic at any given time. This set-up doesn’t require any communication between the self-driving cars and the traffic lights. All that the cars have to do is detect the colour of the lights ahead. “The advantage of autonomous vehicles is basically that they can react much faster to changes of speed,” says Gershenson. Steven Shladover at the University of California, Berkeley, is critical of the model’s assumption that the amount of time different traffic lights are green for in a given direction will even out over time. He says a more realistic scenario would be for lights to be programmed to display green for longer periods on roads with heavier traffic. But Gershenson defends the smart lights used in the simulation. They were inspired by traffic flow in Mexico City, he says, which is roughly equal in all directions, so it doesn’t make sense to favour any particular one. Shladover is also unconvinced that even smart traffic lights can ease city gridlock. The limitation on an urban traffic grid, he says, is the time it takes a vehicle to start moving when a traffic light changes to green, something autonomous cars don’t improve. Anna Nowogrodzki n
Global Warming Images/REX/Shutterstock
drop their cars onto a crystalline gold surface, kept in an ultra-high vacuum at a chilly -268 °C. The track has a starting line, finish line, and obstacles marked by individual gold atoms. Each team A CAR with no driver, not even a will have a designated “driver” steering wheel, pulls up at your door. whose job it is to find the car on You jump in, bound for the airport the surface and navigate it from and… hit traffic. Even when start to finish. autonomous cars become reality, That description might they won’t help ease the gridlock make the process sound simple, in our cities: for that, we need to but it isn’t. The teams spend overhaul traffic lights too. months or years optimising With ordinary traffic lights, their machines. One surprising autonomous vehicles don’t improve challenge is just picking up and traffic flow at all in most cases, transporting the cars, from the according to computer simulations lab, to Toulouse, then on to the by Carlos Gershenson and Jorge gold surface. The Ohio Bobcat Zapotecatl at the National Nanowagon Team, for instance, Autonomous University of Mexico plans to transport its cars as a in Mexico City. It’s only when purified powder, then vaporise traffic reaches near-gridlock that them so a few will stick to autonomous cars boost efficiency – the gold. and by just 7 per cent. The “racetrack” is massive. But it’s a completely different Picking out one of your nanocars picture if autonomous cars use roads on the field is like trying to find two or three normal cars on a map where intelligent traffic lights have been installed. In this scenario, traffic of the US, says Saw Hla at Ohio University, co-leader of its team. “Combining autonomous Once Hla and the other cars with smart traffic competitors spot one of their lights improves traffic cars, they’ll have to coax it over flow by 200 per cent” to a track. That is done with a scanning tunnelling microscope, an instrument that can image and flow improves 200 per cent compared interact with objects at the atomic with drivers and ordinary traffic level. It comes equipped with four lights, according to Gershenson and Zapotecatl. It also means the grid needles that can be used to zap can handle much higher densities a car with electricity, powering it of traffic before becoming jammed. to move in the desired direction. The smart traffic lights used in the Manually pushing or pulling a simulations are very simple. Each set car is not allowed. Once moving, the nanocars are fairly fast. One team cites speeds of “about 10 nanomiles per hour”, or roughly 10 nanocar lengths per second, the equivalent of a normal car travelling at 170 kilometres per hour. The teams will each have two days and two nights to try to win. The race, and the competitive environment, will help teams improve their cars, Hess says. “In the same ways as the Formula 1 races may help the development of cars, the same thing may occur here.” n
For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology
Self-driving cars alone won’t ease gridlock
Surveil-a-whale With only 500 right whales left in the Atlantic, we need to keep tabs on them. It turns out artificial intelligence is perfect for the job. A competition sponsored by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration asked researchers to train AIs to recognise the whales using the unique pattern on their heads. Now you can pick out the whales just by flying a drone over them.
“WhatsApp will no longer charge subscription fees” Now you're the product. WhatsApp announced on Monday that it would stop charging fees, instead making money by helping customers to communicate with businesses
Is Google sexist? Really, Google? A study from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, finds that websites show men ads for higher paying jobs than those women see. The researchers found the disparity by looking at more than 600,000 targeted ads served on the search engine. It’s not the first discovery of hidden discrimination online. In 2013, Harvard researchers noticed that searches for African American names prompted more ads offering to check for arrest records.
–Go with the flow – 23 January 2016 | NewScientist | 21
Gerard Soury/Getty
has sensors that detect how many cars are approaching on each street and give priority to those with more traffic at any given time. This set-up doesn’t require any communication between the self-driving cars and the traffic lights. All that the cars have to do is detect the colour of the lights ahead. “The advantage of autonomous vehicles is basically that they can react much faster to changes of speed,” says Gershenson. Steven Shladover at the University of California, Berkeley, is critical of the model’s assumption that the amount of time different traffic lights are green for in a given direction will even out over time. He says a more realistic scenario would be for lights to be programmed to display green for longer periods on roads with heavier traffic. But Gershenson defends the smart lights used in the simulation. They were inspired by traffic flow in Mexico City, he says, which is roughly equal in all directions, so it doesn’t make sense to favour any particular one. Shladover is also unconvinced that even smart traffic lights can ease city gridlock. The limitation on an urban traffic grid, he says, is the time it takes a vehicle to start moving when a traffic light changes to green, something autonomous cars don’t improve. Anna Nowogrodzki n
Global Warming Images/REX/Shutterstock
drop their cars onto a crystalline gold surface, kept in an ultra-high vacuum at a chilly -268 °C. The track has a starting line, finish line, and obstacles marked by individual gold atoms. Each team A CAR with no driver, not even a will have a designated “driver” steering wheel, pulls up at your door. whose job it is to find the car on You jump in, bound for the airport the surface and navigate it from and… hit traffic. Even when start to finish. autonomous cars become reality, That description might they won’t help ease the gridlock make the process sound simple, in our cities: for that, we need to but it isn’t. The teams spend overhaul traffic lights too. months or years optimising With ordinary traffic lights, their machines. One surprising autonomous vehicles don’t improve challenge is just picking up and traffic flow at all in most cases, transporting the cars, from the according to computer simulations lab, to Toulouse, then on to the by Carlos Gershenson and Jorge gold surface. The Ohio Bobcat Zapotecatl at the National Nanowagon Team, for instance, Autonomous University of Mexico plans to transport its cars as a in Mexico City. It’s only when purified powder, then vaporise traffic reaches near-gridlock that them so a few will stick to autonomous cars boost efficiency – the gold. and by just 7 per cent. The “racetrack” is massive. But it’s a completely different Picking out one of your nanocars picture if autonomous cars use roads on the field is like trying to find two or three normal cars on a map where intelligent traffic lights have been installed. In this scenario, traffic of the US, says Saw Hla at Ohio University, co-leader of its team. “Combining autonomous Once Hla and the other cars with smart traffic competitors spot one of their lights improves traffic cars, they’ll have to coax it over flow by 200 per cent” to a track. That is done with a scanning tunnelling microscope, an instrument that can image and flow improves 200 per cent compared interact with objects at the atomic with drivers and ordinary traffic level. It comes equipped with four lights, according to Gershenson and Zapotecatl. It also means the grid needles that can be used to zap can handle much higher densities a car with electricity, powering it of traffic before becoming jammed. to move in the desired direction. The smart traffic lights used in the Manually pushing or pulling a simulations are very simple. Each set car is not allowed. Once moving, the nanocars are fairly fast. One team cites speeds of “about 10 nanomiles per hour”, or roughly 10 nanocar lengths per second, the equivalent of a normal car travelling at 170 kilometres per hour. The teams will each have two days and two nights to try to win. The race, and the competitive environment, will help teams improve their cars, Hess says. “In the same ways as the Formula 1 races may help the development of cars, the same thing may occur here.” n