Mercedes-Benz owner Daimler and supplier Robert Bosch are teaming up to develop self-driving cars in an alliance aimed at accelerating the production of “robo-taxis.”

The pact between the world’s largest maker of premium cars and the world’s largest automotive supplier forms a powerful counterweight to new auto industry players like ride-hailing firms Uber and Didi, which are also working on self-driving cars.

Technology companies and carmakers are striving to adjust to a shifting landscape in the auto industry as consumers increasingly use smartphones to locate, hail and rent vehicles, rather than buying cars.

The alliance not only ends Daimler’s efforts to develop an autonomous car largely on its own, but moves the auto industry’s ambitions beyond simply developing prototype vehicles toward industrial-scale production of self-driving cars.

The two German companies announced the deal Tuesday. Terms weren’t disclosed.

Software, algorithms

Bosch — founded in 1886, the same year that Mercedes founder Carl Benz patented the motorcar — will develop software and algorithms needed for autonomous driving together with the carmaker.

Bosch said Mercedes would be able to use the jointly developed system for two years before it could be offered to competitors.

The deal will help the automotive supplier make up ground in a competitive autonomous driving system sector where rivals Continental, Delphi, ZF and others have also made heavy investments.

For Daimler and its Mercedes division, teaming up with Bosch helps them throw more engineering resources at autonomous cars, allowing them to speed up the process of creating a production-ready system for autonomous cars by several years.

The autonomous system will now be ready by the beginning of next decade, Daimler said, without disclosing when it had first envisaged the commercial launch of automated taxis.

“The prime objective of the project is to achieve the production-ready development of a driving system which will allow cars to drive fully autonomously in the city,” Daimler said in a statement Tuesday.

The company will continue to build and sell vehicles that can be manually operated by individual drivers.

The market for advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous vehicles is expected to grow from about $3 billion in 2015 to $96 billion in 2025 and $290 billion in 2035, Goldman Sachs said last year.

Daimler is focusing its efforts on the app-based car-sharing and ride-hailing sector dominated by China’s Didi and U.S.-based Uber and Lyft.

Global growth

Like autonomous cars, this market is a big global growth area and is expected to expand by 28 percent a year to 2030, according to consultancy McKinsey.

“Within a specified area of town, customers will be able to order an automated shared car via their smartphone. The vehicle will then make its way autonomously to the user,” Daimler said. “The idea behind it is that the vehicle should come to the driver rather than the other way round.”

The cutthroat competition to launch self-driven cars has forced carmakers to shift strategy from an evolutionary toward a revolutionary approach.

Instead of evolving driver assistance systems to achieve full autonomy, carmakers are now experimenting with radical car designs combined with software-driven development — which has led to alliances with technology companies.

Mercedes-Benz’s archrival BMW teamed up with Israeli autonomous vehicle tech company Mobileye and chip maker Intel last year to develop new technology that could put autonomous cars on the road by 2021.

Intel has since agreed to buy Mobileye for $15.3 billion, a deal that followed Qualcomm’s $47 billion move to acquire Dutch automotive chip supplier NXP.

Before deciding to partner with Bosch, Mercedes-Benz had two engineering teams, totaling about 500 people, working on autonomous vehicles. One took an evolutionary approach, upgrading the capabilities of conventional vehicles, while the other team took a more radical approach to the car’s design.

Bosch and Mercedes did not disclose how many additional engineers they would assign to the teams in Stuttgart and Silicon Valley.

“Cars which do not rely on any driver input have a different architecture and sensor setup, with more radar and cameras,” Christoph von Hugo, a senior Mercedes-Benz safety manager, told Reuters at a recent event to present safety systems.

Different levels of autonomy

The current Mercedes E-Class can cruise without driver input on highways, maintaining the distance to the car in front and staying in lane using a system that has “level 2” autonomy.

Full autonomy — known as an “eyes off, brains off” or “level 5” system — does away with even the need for a steering wheel.

“We don’t want to wait until level 3 has arrived before we start with level 4/5. That will be too late,” von Hugo said, adding the prospect of new revenue streams from maintaining fleets of robo-taxis was a big motivating factor for doubling the carmaker’s R&D efforts.

Autonomous vehicles came closer to road-going reality after Google unveiled a prototype car that it had developed with the help of Bosch in 2012. Mercedes-Benz responded by developing an S-class limousine that drove 103 kilometers (64 miles) between the German towns of Mannheim and Pforzheim a year later.

Real commercial applications for autonomous cars will start to take off between 2020 and 2025, Ola Kaellenius, Daimler board member and head of group research and Mercedes-Benz car development, told Reuters last month.

“If you take the robo-taxi, you start perhaps in a city or several cities or areas of cities, and then you grow from there,” he said. “The key is to get to something that you can commercialize, scale up.”

Bosch is already one of the world’s largest suppliers of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and recently announced an alliance with U.S. tech firm Nvidia to develop a self-driving computer for production cars. Mercedes-Benz and auto supplier ZF also have separate alliances with Nvidia.

The Bosch-Daimler alliance will rely on high-definition mapping systems provided by HERE, the digital mapping firm owned by BMW, Mercedes, Audi and Intel.
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A “massive and growing” mental health burden across the world can only be tackled successfully with a major expansion of online psychiatric resources such as virtual clinics and web-based psychotherapies, specialists said on Tuesday.

With resources tight and the global mental health system only serving around 10 percent of patients even now, specialists speaking at the European Congress on Psychiatry (ECP) said the web is the only option for significant extra treatment capacity.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said last week mental disorders – in particular depression – are now the leading cause of ill health and disability worldwide.

Rates of depression have risen by more than 18 percent since 2005, the WHO says, and a lack of support for mental health combined with a common fear of stigma means many do not get the treatment they need.

Michael Krausz, a professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia in Canada, and a leading specialist at the World Psychiatric Association, said “E-mental health” should be a major part of the answer.

“Through a proactive approach we can create an additional virtual system of care which could build capacity, improve the quality of care and make mental health care more effective,” he told the ECP.

Web-based psychological treatments such as online cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) have proven effective in several conditions including depression and anxiety. Krausz said there is also potential for online CBT to be modified for conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“Online assessments, web-based psychotherapies,… and online research strategies will significantly change the field,” he told the congress.

Technologies like virtual reality and artificial intelligence can also be used in certain therapies for anxiety, and various online games and apps are being developed to support treatment of depression in children.

In another example, scientists at King’s College London have developed an avatar-based system to help treat people with schizophrenia who hear distressing voices.
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Since the 1990’s the U.S. has steadily abandoned coal and instead turned to natural gas and renewables to run America. But coal is back, thanks to President Trump’s recent repeal of restrictions on the coal industry. Most scientists agree that coal is one of the main sources of air pollution and consequently, climate change. Others say the answer is so-called ‘clean coal.’
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After his press secretary blasted it as an example of rampant government overreach, President Donald Trump signed a bill into law Monday that could eventually allow internet providers to sell information about their customers’ browsing habits.

The bill scraps a Federal Communications Commission online privacy regulation issued in October to give consumers more control over how companies like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon share that information. Critics have argued that the rule would stifle innovation and pick winners and losers among internet companies.

The regulation was scheduled to take effect later this year, but Congress used its authority under the obscure Congressional Review Act to wipe it from the books.

With a Republican president in the White House, the GOP-controlled Congress has turned to the 20-year-old law to scrap numerous regulations that Republicans say are costly, burdensome or excessive, many of which were finalized in the closing months of Democrat Barack Obama’s presidency.

Internet companies like Google don’t have to ask their users for permission before tracking what sites they visit, a discrepancy that Republicans and industry group have blasted as both unfair to companies and confusing to consumers.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said last week that the president’s support for the bill was part of a larger effort “to fight Washington red tape that stifles American innovation, job creation and economic growth.”

“The president pledged to reverse this type of federal overreach in which bureaucrats in Washington take the interest of one group of companies over the interest of others,” picking the winners and losers, he said.

Supporters of the privacy measure argued that the company that sells an internet connection can see even more about consumers, such as every website they visit and whom they exchange emails with, information that would be particularly useful for advertisers and marketers.

Undoing the regulation leaves people’s online information in a murky area. Experts say federal law still requires broadband providers to protect customer information — but it doesn’t spell out how or what companies must do, which is what the online privacy rule aimed to do.

The absence of clear privacy rules means companies that supply internet service, and who can monitor how consumers use it, can continue to mine that information for use in their own advertising businesses. Consumer advocates also worry that the companies will be a rich target for hackers.

Ajit Pai, the agency chairman appointed by Trump, has said he wanted to roll back the broadband privacy rules. Pai and other Republicans want a different federal agency, the Federal Trade Commission, to police privacy for both broadband companies like AT&T and internet companies like Google.

Broadband providers don’t fall under the trade commission’s jurisdiction, and advocates say that agency historically has been weaker than the communications commission.

Trump signed three other bills Monday, including one that eliminates a rule that prohibited the use of tactics like baiting and shooting bears from the air on the National Wildlife Refuges in Alaska.
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A new method could turn seawater into drinking water for millions around the world without access to clean water.

Researchers at the University of Manchester in England say they’ve successfully used graphene-oxide membranes to filter common salts from seawater, turning it into drinking water more affordably than current desalination techniques.

Graphene-oxide membranes have already been shown to be effective at filtering small nanoparticles, organic molecules and large salts, but they had not yet been effective in filtering out common salts.

“This is the first clear-cut experiment in this regime,” said professor Rahul Nair, at the University of Manchester. “We also demonstrate that there are realistic possibilities to scale up the described approach and mass produce graphene-based membranes with required sieve sizes.

“Realization of scalable membranes with uniform pore size down to atomic scale is a significant step forward and will open new possibilities for improving the efficiency of desalination technology,” he said.

The United Nations says that by 2025, 14 percent of the world’s population will suffer water scarcity.

Previous attempts to use the membranes saw smaller salts passing through, researchers said, but the Manchester group discovered that the size of the pores on the membrane could be “precisely controlled” allowing it to block smaller salts.

Specifically, the researchers said the graphene-oxide membranes have tiny capillaries that stop the flow of salts, while allowing fresh water to pass through.

“The developed membranes are not only useful for desalination, but the atomic scale tunability of the pore size also opens new opportunity to fabricate membranes with on-demand filtration capable of filtering out ions according to their sizes,” said co-lead author Jijo Abraham.

The study was published Monday in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
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Those handy Android apps on your smartphone are apparently mining your personal information, according to a new study.

The study, done by researchers at Virginia Tech, is the first to study how apps “talk to one another and trade information,” according to a news release.

Researchers say there are two kinds of threats: malware and “apps that simply allow for collusion and privilege escalation.” They add that in the latter group, they can not measure whether the developer intentionally created security breaches.

They describe a leaking scenario, saying, for example, that a flashlight app could work with a receiver app to reveal information like contacts or location.

The team of researchers looked at more than 100,000 apps from Google Play as well as about 10,000 malware apps over three years.

“Researchers were aware that apps may talk to one another in some way, shape, or form,” said assistant professor Gang Wang. “What this study shows undeniably with real-world evidence over and over again is that app behavior, whether it is intentional or not, can pose a security breach depending on the kinds of apps you have on your phone.”

The researchers say the most leaky apps were the “least utilitarian” such as ringtones and emojis.

Researchers said that among the apps tested, they found “thousands of pairs of apps that could potentially leak sensitive phone or personal information and allow unauthorized apps to gain access to privileged data.”

“App security is a little like the Wild West right now with few regulations,” said Wang. “We hope this paper will be a source for the industry to consider re-examining their software development practices and incorporate safeguards on the front end. While we can’t quantify what the intention is for app developers in the non-malware cases we can at least raise awareness of this security problem with mobile apps for consumers who previously may not have thought much about what they were downloading onto their phones.”

The results of the study, which was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as part of its Automated Program Analysis for Cybersecurity initiative, were presented Monday in Dubai at the Association for Computing Machinery Asia Computer and Communications Security Conference.
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Facebook and Mozilla are among the companies and organizations launching a $14 million fund to promote news literacy and increase trust in journalism.

The nonprofit, called the News Integrity Initiative, will be based at the City University of New York. It will run as an independent project of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. 

Others contributing to the fund include Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and the Ford Foundation. 

Recent polls show the public’s trust in the news industry at a low. 

False news and misinformation, often masquerading as trustworthy news and spreading on social media, has gained a lot of attention since the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Companies like Facebook are trying to address the issue. 
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Fed up with the theft of toilet paper from public bathrooms, tourist authorities in China’s capital have begun using facial recognition technology to limit how much paper a person can take.

The unusual move – part of a “toilet revolution” – is another step in China’s vast upgrading of public facilities.

Bathrooms at tourist sites, notorious for their primitive conditions and nasty odors, are a special focus of the campaign, a response to a vast expansion in domestic travel and demands for better-quality facilities from a more affluent public.

“Today in China, people are highly enthusiastic about tourism, and we have entered a new era of public tourism,” said Zhan Dongmei, a researcher with the China Tourism Academy. “The expectation of the public for the toilet is becoming higher.”

At Beijing’s 600-year-old Temple of Heaven, administrators recognized the need to stock the public bathrooms with toilet paper, a requirement for obtaining a top rating from the National Tourism Authority. But they needed a means of preventing patrons from stripping them bare for personal use – hence the introduction of new technology that dispenses just one 60-centimeter (2-foot) section of paper every nine minutes following a face scan.

“People take away the paper mostly because they are worried they can’t find any when they want to use it the next time. But if we can provide it in every toilet, most people will not do it anymore,” Zhan said.

Launched two years ago, the revolution calls for at least 34,000 new public bathrooms to be constructed in Beijing and 23,000 renovated by the end of this year. Authorities are also encouraging the installation of Western-style sit-down commodes rather than the more common squat toilets. Around 25 billion yuan ($3.6 billion) has already been spent on the program, according to the National Tourism Administration.

The ultimate target, Zhan said, “is to have a sufficient amount of toilets which are clean and odorless and free to use.”

At Happy Valley, the largest amusement park in Beijing, around 4 million annual visitors rely on 18 bathrooms, each of which is assigned one or two cleaners who must make their rounds every 10 minutes on busy days.

“People come here to have fun, but if the toilets are disgusting, how can they have a good time here?” said Vice General Manager Li Xiangyang. “It is the least we should do to offer a clean and tidy environment for tourists to enjoy both the tour of the park and the experience of using our toilets.”

Going a step further, the financial hub of Shanghai even opened its first gender-neutral public toilet in November in order to boost convenience and efficiency.

“Women are stuck waiting in longer lines for stalls than men, and it is fair for men and women to wait in line together,” Shanghai resident Zhu Jingyi said after using the facility.

Zhan said the toilet revolution is about 90 percent complete, but warned that it has yet to be won.

“We can’t accept the situation that a lot of investments have been made to build toilets and they turn out to be unsanitary and poorly managed,” he said.
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Snap Inc. said Friday that its Snapchat messaging app would add an option for users to search through photos and videos that users have posted to the public.

The move came days after larger rival Facebook Inc. stepped up efforts to encourage users to take more photos and edit them with digital stickers that show the influence of Snapchat.

Snapchat will enable users to search for photos and videos known as “Snaps” posted to the “Our Story” option on the app, by creating new “Stories” using machine learning technology, the company said in a blog post.

The “Our Story” option is derived from Snap’s widely copied “Stories” feature that is a slideshow of user content that disappears after 24 hours.

“Our Story” allows users to post their Snaps as part of a larger public collection, which users will be able to search through with the latest update.

For instance, users can use the search feature to find “Snaps” related to events such as local basketball games and topics such as puppies.

The search feature, which was rolled out in some cities Friday, is an addition to curated “Stories,” where public “Snaps” about major events like Wimbledon or the Coachella music festival already appear.

Snapchat popularized the sharing of digitally decorated photographs on social media, especially among teenagers, but faces intense competition from larger Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram.

Users will now be able to search for over 1 million “Stories” on Snapchat, Snap said, making the app more accessible.

Snap’s shares were up 1.5 percent in afternoon trading, while Facebook’s stock was down marginally.
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Boris Kiknadze, chief executive of Pawwwn, took a deep breath as he looked out to the crowd of Silicon Valley venture capitalists and began his pitch.

With just 10 minutes to speak, Kiknadze rapidly described his business idea — Pawwwn, an online payment and management system to make transactions easier for pawnshop owners and their customers. The pain point for pawn shops is payment. Pawwwn takes away that pain, he said.

For months, Kiknadze and his co-founder had developed Pawwwn in his home country of Georgia before getting on a plane for San Francisco. Since the firm launched in March, Kiknadze has had 20 customers trying out the service.

But with 1,400 pawnshops in Georgia and 12,000 more in the U.S., Kiknadze saw a big opportunity. And to achieve that, he needs cash — $1 million, which he said he would use to launch Pawwwn in the U.S.

Competing for investors

Kiknadze is part of Startup Georgia, a project administered by Georgia’s Innovation and Technology Agency, that connects U.S. experts and investors with startups in Georgia.

More than 250 entrepreneurs tried out in Georgia to qualify for a week of training in Tbilisi, the nation’s capital. Among those 50 who participated in the training, 20 were selected for seed funding and three months of additional training with a Silicon Valley expert with weekly videoconferencing meetings.

Of those, eight were chosen to travel to the U.S. for a boot camp and to pitch to investors directly.

Georgia, a country of fewer than 4 million people, is looking to the success of small countries, such as Estonia and Israel, to pitch itself as a burgeoning tech hub, said Mark Iwanowski, founder and president of Global Visions-Silicon Valley, which provided the U.S. support for the program.

For U.S. investors, typically reluctant to invest beyond U.S. tech hubs, there is an opportunity to get more value in overseas companies, where labor costs are lower, he said. To attract these investors, foreign companies need to incorporate in the U.S. and set up a team here.

Over the past week in Silicon Valley, the Georgian entrepreneurs received one-on-one mentorship training as they refined their pitches. They heard from lawyers on protecting intellectual property and listened to venture capitalists talk about how to approach investors.

“If a venture capitalist says they love it, it kind of doesn’t mean anything,” said Steve Goldberg, operating partner at Venrock, a venture firm. “My advice is to have people on the team who understand venture-speak.”

“Understand what the investor is looking for,” said Ron Weissman of Band of Angels, Silicon Valley’s oldest seed fund. He suggested approaching investors seeking a conversation — “I’m not here to raise money. I’m here to get a sense of what it would take to interest you.”

Tech’s next ‘unicorn’?

That is the kind of approach honed by Vamekh Kherkheulidze, founder and medical adviser to ORsim, a Georgian operating room virtual reality simulator.

By slipping on a virtual reality headset and a special glove that gives all the sensations of holding instruments and operating on a person, medical students can better learn how to become surgeons, Kherkheulidze said. And that’s important, because there’s a shortage of surgeons both in the U.S. and worldwide.

From potential investors, ORsim is looking “for supporters,” he said. “We promote new ways of education and we want investors who understand that.”

Still, his ambition is big. “We want to expand and expand fast,” Kherkheulidze said. Already, ORsim, with $35,000 in pre-seed funding from Startup Georgia, has an appendectomy simulator.

“Our hope is to be a unicorn,” Kherkheulidze said, referring to the term used to describe startups worth more than $1 billion in valuation. But in addition to greatly improving surgical training worldwide, he sees his company as a way to help his home country.

“If we are worth $1 billion, you can increase the economy. What was Skype’s influence in Estonia?” he said, referring to the Estonian internet communication service bought by Microsoft for more than $8 billion.

After the pitches, the entrepreneurs mingled with investors. No one got investment on the spot, but most are hopeful and are following up with meetings next week.
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“This is nice, it tickles me,” Kaspar the social robot tells four-year-old Finn as they play together at an autism school north of London.

Kaspar, developed by the University of Hertfordshire, also sings songs, imitates eating, plays the tambourine and combs his hair during their sessions, aimed at helping Finn with his social interaction and communication.

If Finn gets too rough, the similarly sized Kaspar cries: “Ouch, that hurt me.” A therapist is on hand to encourage the child to rectify his behavior by tickling the robot’s feet.

Finn is one of around 170 autistic children that Kaspar has helped in a handful of schools and hospitals over the last 10 years.

But with approximately 700,000 people in Britain on the autism spectrum, according to the National Autistic Society who will mark World Autism Day on Sunday, the university want Kaspar to help more people.

“Our vision is that every child in a school or a home or in a hospital could get a Kaspar if they wanted to,” Kerstin Dautenhahn, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Hertfordshire, told Reuters.

Achieving that goal will largely depend on the results of a two-year clinical trial with the Hertfordshire Community NHS Trust, which, if successful, could see Kaspar working in hospitals nationwide.

TRACKS, an independent charity and specialist early-years center for children with autism in Stevenage, have seen positive results from working with Kaspar, who sports a blue cap and plaid shirt for play sessions.

“We were trying to teach a little boy how to eat with his peers. He usually struggled with it because of his anxiety issues,” said deputy principal Alice Lynch. “We started doing it with Kaspar and he really, really enjoyed feeding Kaspar, making him eat when he was hungry, things like that. Now he’s started to integrate into the classroom and eat alongside his peers. So, things like that are just a massive progression.”

Many children with autism find it hard to decipher basic human communication and emotion so Kaspar’s designers avoided making him too lifelike and instead opted for simplified, easy-to-process features.

Autism support groups have been impressed.

“Many autistic people are drawn to technology, particularly the predictability it provides, which means it can be a very useful means of engaging children, and adults too,” Carol Povey, director of the National Autistic Society’s Centre for Autism, told Reuters.

“This robot is one of a number of emerging technologies which have the potential to make a huge difference to people on the autism spectrum.”
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U.S. President Donald Trump is poised to sign legislation overturning privacy protections for Internet users, a move supporters say will level the playing field for providers but critics argue will hurt consumers.

The bill eliminates Obama-era regulations that required Internet service providers, or ISPs, to get permission before collecting or selling sensitive user data, such as Internet browsing history.

Supporters say the bill will create a more even field for ISPs, which are regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. Other Internet companies, such as Facebook and Google, are managed by the Federal Trade Commission, which places fewer restrictions on how they can collect and sell user data.

“Having two privacy cops on the beat will create confusion within the Internet ecosystem and will end up harming consumers,” said Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, on Tuesday.

Democrats, groups object 

Supporters also argue that the reaction has been overblown, noting that the Obama-era FCC rules, which had been approved in December, hadn’t even been put in place yet.

The bill passed Congress this week with the overwhelming support of Republicans. White House officials have previously said Trump will sign the legislation, despite objections from Democrats and privacy advocate groups.

“This legislation will seriously undermine the privacy protections of the overwhelming majority of Americans who believe that their private information should be just that — private — and not for sale without their knowledge,” a group of 46 Democratic lawmakers said this week in a letter urging Trump to veto the bill.

Tom Wheeler, the former head of the FCC, wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times calling the repeal a “dream for cable and telephone companies, which want to capitalize on the value of such personal information.”

U.S. Internet companies have long profited from U.S. privacy regulations, which are generally considered weaker than those in parts of the developed world, such as the European Union.

Big companies make big money from data

Companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon “profit heavily from the mining of consumer data,” says Evan Swarztrauber with the Internet privacy advocacy group TechFreedom.

“It’s at least arguable that the U.S. has more successful tech firms than the EU because the U.S. has a more relaxed privacy framework, which allows for more innovation and experimentation,” he says.

But profit should not be the only consideration, according to critics, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group.

“Should President Donald Trump sign S.J. Res. 34 into law, big Internet providers will be given new powers to harvest your personal information in extraordinarily creepy ways,” Ernesto Falcon, a legislative counsel at EFF, said in an online post.

Bill has limited international impact

Falcon slammed lawmakers who “have decided to give our personal information to an already highly profitable cable and telephone industry so that they can increase their profits with our data.”

The bill itself has limited international impact. Falcon says the bigger concern for global web users is state-sponsored surveillance, such as that conducted by the NSA.

“No real amount of commercial deregulation or regulation would offset the loss of privacy rights that state-sponsored surveillance violates in terms of international issues,” he told VOA.

 
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