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Tech Update

Lyft team steers toward open self-driving tech (Update)

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

An Amp glows on the dashboard of a driver’s car in San Francisco

US ride-share startup Lyft on Friday dedicated a new team focused on speeding up its effort to create a self-driving vehicle platform, which would be open to use by other companies.

The San Francisco based company earlier this year announced what it billed as the world’s first open self-driving platform, inviting car manufacturers and rival autonomous navigation systems to plug into the network.

“In the years ahead, we will continue to bring the world’s leading automotive and technology companies onto this single platform to serve a nationwide passenger network,” Lyft vice president of engineering and former Google executive Luc Vincent said in an online post.

“We aren’t thinking of our self-driving division as a side project; it’s core to our business.”

Lyft is devoting an in-house division to self-driving technology, according to Vincent.

The team will be based in a Silicon Valley facility called “Level 5 Engineering Center” and its ranks will grow in coming months, the company said.

Lyft operates in 350 cities in the US, and plans to run its own self-driving cars on the network, which partners will be free to use and learn from.

“Because we’re doing all of this on an open platform, it won’t just enhance Lyft’s self-driving system,” Vincent said.

“It will accelerate our partners’ efforts, too.”

Driverless future

Lyft announced last month that it would begin testing autonomous ridesharing in Boston under a partnership with the technology startup nuTonomy.

The two companies will collaborate to research “all aspects of ensuring a passenger’s comfort and safety” in self-driving vehicles, a joint statement about the alliance said.

Lyft’s move follows a similar effort by Uber, which has been using autonomous vehicles in a test program in some US cities.

Earlier this year, Waymo, the self-driving car unit of Google parent Alphabet, reached an agreement with Lyft to test self-driving car technology, according to the companies.

Waymo and Lyft are allies against ridesharing giant Uber, which is racing to develop its own self-driving vehicles.

“We’re looking forward to working with Lyft to explore new self-driving products that will make our roads safer and transportation more accessible,” a Waymo spokesman told AFP at the time.

Waymo and Uber are currently engaged in a bitter legal dispute.

In February Waymo filed a lawsuit claiming that a former manager took technical data when he left to launch a competing venture that was later acquired by Uber.

Most major automakers and several other technology firms have been investing in developing autonomous driving, contending these systems will eliminate the vast majority of road accidents. Apple is the latest to have obtained a testing permit in California.

German luxury carmaker Daimler and auto parts supplier Bosch have announced plans to work together to create completely driverless cars in the next few years.

US-based Tesla is also stepping up efforts, as are several Chinese technology firms and the major US, Asian and European manufacturers.

[“Source-phys”]

 

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Tech Update

UPDATE: At Georgia Tech, demolition signals move toward a tech-oriented library

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

UPDATE: This article has been updated with information provided by Georgia Tech. The library will not be “book-less” as previously indicated. Rather, 30,000 books, including Sci-Fi, popular, and core collections will remain.

With a decrease in physical book usage in the digital age—in favor of online publications—academic libraries have been forced to adapt to the changing ways of research.

Now, Georgia Tech is in the midst of renovating their main library in order to create a “research library of the 21st Century.” Demolition has begun on the library’s Crosland Tower as part of the Library Nextinitiative.

Crews have spent the past few months stripping the tower—which used to be filled with books—readying it to be a lighter, brighter home for technologically focused media.

Renderings indicate a glassy new facade will replace the existing red brick. The university plans to merge their book collection with Emory University at an offsite location, freeing up the renovated library building for a range of non-book research uses. While the core collection will remain on campus, officials from Georgia Tech note that 95 percent of the collection is now in storage.

Once renovations on the library tower wrap next fall, operations of the library will transition from the building next door. By 2020, if all goes according to plan, the entire Price Gilbert Library will be renovated and reopened.

In the meantime, students can expect construction fences and work crews to accompany their academic pursuits.

source:-atlanta.c

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Internet

SAN FRANCISCO JUST TOOK A HUGE STEP TOWARD INTERNET UTOPIA

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Last week, San Francisco became the first major city in America to pledge to connect all of its homes and businesses to a fiber optic network.

I urge you to read that sentence again. It’s a ray of light. In an era of short-term, deeply partisan do-nothing-ism, the city’s straightforward, deeply practical determination shines. Americans, it turns out, are capable of great things—even if only at the city level these days.

You might think: Big deal, San Francisco is our tech capital, the last place that needs this. But for years, San Francisco has had a major problem. True, it’s the tech capital of the country and a progressive leader among US cities, but before last week it had no plan to ensure that it had world-class data connectivity for its residents at a reasonable price. Techies frequently bemoan this fact, showing one another screenshots of spinning wheels. San Francisco’s dilemma is a compact form of the crisis in communications facing the rest of the country: Although fiber is the necessary infrastructure for every policy goal we have—advanced healthcare, the emergence of new forms of industries, a chance for every child to get an education, managed use of energy, and on and on—the private sector, left to its own devices, has no particular incentive to ensure a widespread upgrade to fiber optic connections.

Comcast dominates access in the city, but has no plans to replace its cable lines—great at downloads, not so great at uploads, no opportunity to scale to the capacity of fiber thanks to the laws of physics, and expensive to subscribe to—with fiber. And its planned enhancements to its cable lines have, in other cities, resulted in a product costing $150 per month. AT&T will say it’s upgrading to fiber in San Francisco, but so far its work in many other US cities has been incremental, confined to areas where it has existing business customers to serve or where it already has fiber in place. Other, smaller providers similarly have no plans to do a city-wide upgrade, leaving San Francisco with a deeply uneven patchwork of connectivity.

Just as in the rest of the country, poorer and less-well-educated San Franciscans tend not to subscribe to a wire at home, but instead rely wholly on smartphone data plans—no substitutes, given their expense and throttled capacity, for what’s possible using a wired connection.

It’s taken San Francisco a number of tries to get to the point of suggesting a city-controlled utility fiber network that private-sector retail operators can use as a neutral platform. Like Bill Murray’s Phil Connors in Groundhog Day, the city has been steadily learning. 10 years ago, the failure of a much-hyped city partnershipwith Google and Earthlink for a city-wide wifi network was caused by inexperience on all sides: No one was up to the job of accounting for the number of hotspots and the amount of backhaul that would be necessary for a wifi network to serve San Francisco’s data-hungry citizens in their homes and businesses. Eight years ago, a city-commissioned report recommended a fiber network, but plans didn’t proceed because of lack of leadership and the absence of a concrete plan.

The city has finally gathered both sufficient expertise and the political will to move ahead. Last week, Mayor Ed Lee and Supervisor Mark Farrell released a substantial reportfrom expert consultant CTC Technology & Energy that essentially provides a detailed, thorough blueprint for a fiber network connecting every home and business in the city. (Disclosure: I’m the co-chair, with Supervisor Farrell, of the unpaid advisory committee he convened to look at the issue. I have no clients or consulting arrangements, and receive no income or other compensation, direct or indirect, from any telecom-related company.)

This CTC document isn’t just another report. It is a pioneering and carefully nuanced study that marches deliberately through a range of public-private options for network construction, and suggests that the city separate “dark” from “lit” fiber planning. The “dark” fiber would be passive, public-works-like construction of basic fiber infrastructure, and would include no retail customer-service relationship. The “lit” fiber would be retail data-flow internet access service to customers.

The most interesting and simplest version of a public-private partnership suggested by CTC is found on page 93, deep in the report: The city would issue a franchise to a private company to build a dark fiber network reaching every home and business (adding to the 170-plus miles of dark fiber already owned by the city), and then would turn around and have a publicly controlled entity lease that fiber to private operators. Private operators, in turn, would install the electronics that “light” the network and would connect up customers to the internet.

The city would not be in the business of competing with existing providers in this model, but would, instead, be providing basic infrastructure that any company could use—the connectivity equivalent of a city street grid. The cost to the public of borrowing the money to build this basic network—estimated at about $1.5 billion by CTC—would be significantly lowered by leasing revenue from advance arrangements with operators. The city would subsidize low-income residents wishing to subscribe for fiber services from those private operators. CTC sets forth a detailed timeline for getting all of this done.

What’s great about this suggestion is that it removes any political argument that the city is somehow undermining the private market for internet access services. At the same time, a dark fiber public-private partnership would dramatically lower the cost for the private market to do what it does best: directly serve customers in a competitive environment that, on its own, produces low costs and innovation. There are undoubtedly well-funded private entities out there that will gather themselves to lease the city’s fiber; indeed, CTC strongly recommends that the city start seeking out those lessees right away. Public comment on all of this will also be essential.

Fiber is, or should be, a utility available to all Americans. All of our advanced-wireless dreams, all the Internet of Things amazingness, depends on having a solid, dependable, ubiquitous fiber infrastructure reaching everyone at a reasonable cost. San Francisco, after years of study, has finally gotten to the point of readiness to take this step. Bravo to Mayor Lee and Supervisor Farrell for their commitment to the future of their beloved city. Here’s hoping that other US cities follow suit.

Source:-wired.

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