Two experts say video of a deadly crash involving a self-driving Uber vehicle shows the sport utility vehicle’s laser and radar sensors should have spotted a pedestrian, and computers should have braked to avoid the crash.

Authorities investigating the crash in a Phoenix suburb released the video of Uber’s Volvo striking a woman as she walked from a darkened area onto a street.

Experts who viewed the video told The Associated Press that the SUV’s sensors should have seen the woman pushing a bicycle and braked before the impact.

Also, Uber’s human backup driver appears on the video to be looking down before crash and appears startled about the time of the impact.

“The victim did not come out of nowhere. She’s moving on a dark road, but it’s an open road, so Lidar [laser] and radar should have detected and classified her” as a human, said Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor who studies autonomous vehicles.

Sam Abuelsmaid, an analyst for Navigant Research who also follow autonomous vehicles, said laser and radar systems can see in the dark much better than humans or cameras and that the pedestrian was well within the system’s range.

“It absolutely should have been able to pick her up,” he said. “From what I see in the video it sure looks like the car is at fault, not the pedestrian.”

The video could have a broad impact on autonomous vehicle research, which has been billed as the answer to cutting the 40,000 traffic deaths that occur annually in the U.S. in human-driven vehicles.

Proponents say that human error is responsible for 94 percent of crashes, and that self-driving vehicles would be better because they see more and don’t get drunk, distracted or drowsy.

But the experts said it appears from the video that there was some sort of flaw in Uber’s self-driving system.

The video, Smith said, may not show the complete picture, but “this is strongly suggestive of multiple failures of Uber and its system, its automated system, and its safety driver.”

Tempe police, as well as the National Transportation Safety Board and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are investigating the Sunday night crash, which occurred outside of a crosswalk on a darkened boulevard.

The crash was the first death involving a fully autonomous test vehicle. The Volvo was in self-driving mode traveling about 40 mph (64 kph) with a human backup driver at the wheel when it struck 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, police said.

The lights on the SUV did not illuminate Herzberg until a second or two before impact, raising questions about whether the vehicle could have stopped in time.

Tempe Police Chief Sylvia Moir told the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this week that the SUV likely would not be found at fault.

But Smith said that from what he observed on the video, the Uber driver appears to be relying too much on the self-driving system by not looking up at the road.

“The safety driver is clearly relying on the fact that the car is driving itself. It’s the old adage that if everyone is responsible no one is responsible,” Smith said. “This is everything gone wrong that these systems, if responsibly implemented, are supposed to prevent.”

The experts were unsure if the test vehicle was equipped with a video monitor that the backup driver may have been viewing.

Uber immediately suspended all road-testing of such autos in the Phoenix area, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto.

An Uber spokeswoman, reached Wednesday night by email, did not answer specific questions about the video or the expert observations.

“The video is disturbing and heartbreaking to watch, and our thoughts continue to be with Elaine’s loved ones. Our cars remain grounded, and we’re assisting local, state and federal authorities in any way we can,” the company said in a statement.

Tempe police have identified the driver as 44-year-old Rafael Vasquez. Court records show someone with the same name and birthdate as Vasquez spent more than four years in prison for two felony convictions — for making false statements when obtaining unemployment benefits and attempted armed robbery — before starting work as an Uber driver.

Tempe police and the NTSB declined to say whether the Vasquez who was involved in the fatal crash is the same Vasquez with two criminal convictions.

Attempts by the AP to contact Vasquez through phone numbers and social media on Wednesday afternoon were not successful.

Local media have identified the driver as Rafaela Vasquez. Authorities declined to explain the discrepancy in the driver’s first name.

The fatality has raised questions about whether Uber does enough to screen its drivers.

Uber said Vasquez met the company’s vetting requirements.

The company bans drivers convicted of violent crimes or any felony within the past seven years. Records show Vasquez’ offenses happened before the seven-year period, in 1999 and 2000.

The company’s website lists its pre-screening policies for drivers that spell out what drivers can and cannot have on their record to work for Uber.

 Their driving history cannot have any DUI or drug-related driving offenses within the past seven years, for instance. They also are prevented from having more than three non-fatal accidents or moving violations within the past three years.
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Facebook is coming under intense criticism following reports that information from 50 million users was gathered by a voter data firm. Lawmakers are demanding answers, and Facebook stock has lost about $35 billion in its value. Michelle Quinn reports on the threats the company faces.
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A British tech company is using donated human heart tissue to replicate the “beating” action of heart muscle to aid preclinical testing of new drugs. Faith Lapidus reports.
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Silicon Valley is less than 3% black, with an even smaller numbers of Africans. The race gap is actually much larger than the gender gap, and it’s growing. Join us for a live screening of “Beyond the Unicorn,” a VOA documentary about the issue, followed by a Q&A session from Silicon Valley, the capitol of the U.S. technology sector.
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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a rare television interview Wednesday that Facebook clearly made a mistake in its part in an illegal data collection scandal.

“This was a major breach of trust. I am really sorry this happened. We have a basic responsibility to protect people’s data,” he told CNN.

Zuckerberg did not elaborate on what mistake Facebook made, but he promised to check all apps and do a full forensic audit.

He also told CNN he is sure someone is trying to meddle in the upcoming November midterm U.S. congressional elections. He said Facebook is “really committed” to stop anyone from interfering in the elections through Facebook, including upcoming votes in Brazil and India.

WATCH: Facebook Under Fire for Data Misuse

Since 2015

Facebook disclosed on Friday that it has known since 2015 that British researcher Aleksandr Kogan illegally shared users’ information with a research firm, after collecting that data legally through an application for a personality quiz. The research firm is alleged to have illegally used the data of an estimated 50 million Facebook users to build profiles for U.S. political campaigns, including the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

Facebook has been criticized for failing to alert its users to the incident in 2015. Wednesday was the first time Zuckerberg publicly addressed the issue.

Included in his statement was a timeline of events that said Facebook demanded in 2015 that Cambridge Analytica delete all improperly acquired data. He said last week he learned from news outlets that the company may not have deleted the data, despite providing certification of having done so. 

Cambridge Analytica has denied that it kept the data. One Facebook executive in charge of security is reportedly leaving the firm as a result the matter.

Zuckerberg said the incident amounted not only to a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook but also “a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it.”

New safeguards

The Facebook founder outlined new precautions his social media platform will take to protect user data in future: identifying any other application developers found to have misused personal data, restricting the types of data available to developers, and ending their access to a user’s data if the user has not used the app in the past three months. He also said Facebook will make it easier for users to revoke apps’ permission to use their data, by putting the tool at the top of a user’s news feed.

Within an hour of its posting, Zuckerberg’s message had garnered more than 32,000 “likes” or other reactions and had been shared more than 10,000 times. User comments varied from fan club-style expressions of support to bitter complaints about Zuckerberg’s failure to speak sooner.

While controversy has swirled, Facebook’s stock value has taken a significant hit. The company has lost more than $45 billion of its stock market value over the past three days. 

Questions about regulation

The probe over Cambridge Analytica is just the latest flashpoint around Facebook’s role in the 2016 election and comes as the company faces questions about how it should be regulated and monitored going forward.

With its more than 2 billion monthly users and billions of dollars in profit, Facebook has become a powerful conduit of news, opinion and propaganda, much of it targeted at individuals based on their own data. The social media site and investigators have found that Russia-backed operatives had used Facebook to spread disinformation and propaganda. 

In recent months, the company, along with YouTube and Twitter, has changed some of its practices to reduce the power of automated accounts and propaganda.  Facebook has said it would hire 10,000 security employees.
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When you are watching a television show and see someone get their heart shocked back into a rhythm, you will see their entire body rise up in the air. That’s what happens when a defibrillator is used, because the shock is that powerful. As VOA’s Carol Pearson reports, scientists are now working on better, more effective, and less-shocking ways to get a heart to start beating once again.
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Heat exchangers are some of the most widely used energy-transfer devices, helping cool everything from car engines to power plants.

At the recent ARPA-e conference, organized by the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists from the University of Maryland showcased an advanced 3-D printer that, combined with a wire-laying head, cuts in half the time needed to manufacture heat exchangers.

David Hymas, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland, said that in most cases in a heat exchanger, the heat is transferred by forcing air over pipes or tubes with circulating water, which is often pumped from a nearby river or lake.

Reduce water use

“Currently power plants draw about 40 percent of all the freshwater supply in the United States,” Hymas said. Water consumption, he added, could be cut in half if lightweight air-cooled heat exchangers were created in 3-D printers.

“The water would flow in through one manifold entering these water tubes, right here, and then flow out through the other manifold. Air would blow across it, cooling these fins,” he said.

Printing a heat exchanger

At the school’s Advanced Heat Exchangers and Process Intensification Laboratory, Hymas showed off a heat exchanger manufactured in a lab-size 3-D printer that includes a wire-laying device. The first head in the machine builds up layers of polymer tubes, while another head lays copper or aluminum wire across them.

The printer used for testing the idea took almost 24 hours to create a shoebox-size heat exchanger, but research associate Farah Singer says the industrial-scale prototype machine proved to be much faster.

“It has 10 polymer heads and it is capable of printing, of laying at the same time, 45 fibers, 45 metal fibers, so we are talking about a full layer,” she said. “This machine is capable of printing in eight hours a 1 meter square heat exchanger. We are talking almost 20 kilowatts or 30 kilowatt heat exchanger.”

Reduction in weight and cost for 3-D-printed heat exchangers reaches 50 percent, depending on the application, which can range from power plants to air conditioning to cooling electronic devices.

“For the electronic cooling, for example, so far our experimental results have shown that we could have up to 52 percent reduction in cost while we have 26 percent increase in performance,” Singer said.

An added advantage is that 3-D printers allow creating very complex geometries, with the resolution between the cooling wires as low as 100 microns. The project was partially funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
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3-D printing is rapidly changing the process of industrial manufacturing as researchers find innovative ways to employ the new technology. At the recent ARPA-e conference, organized by the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists from the University of Maryland showcased an advanced 3-D printer, combined with a wire-laying head, that cuts in half the time needed to manufacture heat exchangers, an important part used in many devices from computers to power plants. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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China is testing unmanned tanks that could be equipped with artificial intelligence, a state-run newspaper said Wednesday, as the country continues with its military modernization program.

State television showed images this week of the unmanned tanks undergoing testing, the Global Times newspaper reported.

Footage showed a Type 59 tank being driven by remote control, in what the paper said was the first time a Chinese-made unmanned tank has been shown in a public forum.

The Type 59 tank is based on an old Soviet model first used in China in the 1950s and has been produced in large numbers and has a long service life, it said.

“A large number of due-to-retire Type 59 tanks can be converted into unmanned vehicles if equipped with artificial intelligence,” Liu Qingshan, the chief editor of Tank and Armored Vehicle, told the newspaper.

Unmanned tanks will be able to work on other unmanned equipment, integrate information from satellites, aircraft or submarines, the report added.

China is in the middle of a modernization program for its armed forces, including building stealth fighters and new aircraft carriers, as President Xi Jinping looks to assert the country’s growing power.
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Social media giant Facebook faced new investigations Tuesday in both Britain and the United States about the vast troves of information compiled by the company about their users and how that data has been deployed to influence elections by Cambridge Analytica, a British voter profiling business.

British information commissioner Elizabeth Denham said she is seeking a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica’s London headquarters to see whether Facebook did enough to protect users’ personal information about themselves and their friends.  Weekend reports said Cambridge Analytica had improperly used information about more than 50 million Facebook users, including $6 million in work to influence Americans to vote for real estate mogul Donald Trump in his successful 2016 run for the U.S. presidency.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg News reported the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether Facebook violated terms of a consent decree it had agreed to with the agency and allowed Cambridge Analytica to use the personal data based on information Facebook users post online about themselves.  Facebook has suspended Cambridge Analytica from its vast social network.

Several U.S. lawmakers have called on Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg to testify in Congress about his firm’s use of its users’ information.

“We want to know how this happened,” Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar said.  “What’s the extent of the damage?  Fifty million of these Facebook profiles were basically stolen, hijacked, including information of people’s residence.  And then how did it happen?  Why did it happen?  And how are they going to fix this?”

White House spokesman Raj Shah told Fox News that Trump “believes that Americans’ privacy should be protected.  You know, if Congress wants to look into the matter or other agencies want to look into the matter, we welcome that.”

Denham told BBC Radio, “We are looking at whether or not Facebook secured and safeguarded personal information on the platform and whether when they found out about the loss of the data they acted robustly and whether or not people were informed.”

Investors have reacted negatively to Facebook’s role in the data breach, with its stock price dropping by nearly 10 percent in the last few days, and the company losing billions of dollars in valuation.

British television station Channel 4 News broadcast surreptitious footage Monday showing an undercover interview one of its reporters conducted with Cambridge Analytica chief executive Alexander Nix in which he claimed to have used “a web of shadowy front companies” to influence elections.

According to the broadcast, with the reporter posing as someone who wanted to influence an election in Sri Lanka, Nix suggested using an attractive woman to seduce a candidate the client was looking to defeat, or sending someone posing as a wealthy developer to pass on a bribe to a politician.

After the telecast, the company said Nix’s answers came in a discussion with “ludicrous hypothetical scenarios.”

In a statement, Nix said, “I am aware how this looks, but it is simply not the case.  I must emphatically state that Cambridge Analytica does not condone or engage in entrapment, bribes or so-called ‘honeytraps,’ and nor does it use untrue material for any purpose.”

The company has disputed reports about its use of vast data troves from Facebook.

Facebook says its data was initially collected by a British academic, Aleksandr Kogan, who created an app on Facebook that was downloaded by 270,000 people, which provided not only their personal data, but also that of their friends they had exchanged information with.  Facebook claims Kogan then violated the company’s terms by passing the information on to Cambridge Analytica.

Britain’s Cambridge University, where Kogan teaches, on Tuesday asked Facebook for all information it has about Kogan’s relationship with Cambridge Analytica.

Kogan has told colleagues at the university he would answer questions from U.S. and British lawmakers, along with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, about his data collection from Facebook users, but so far no one has asked to interview him.
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The Facebook backlash is intensifying.

Congressional leaders, regulators in the United States and Europe and state officials are putting pressure on Facebook to answer questions about fresh allegations over how the social networking giant was manipulated in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The Senate Commerce Committee has sent questions to the company about how a data consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, allegedly used 50 million Facebook users’ data to aid political campaigns.  British and U.S. lawmakers called for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify.  The company is reportedly holding an employee meeting Tuesday to answer questions.

Among the tough questions the company faces is why it did not inform the affected users about the issue.  On Monday, the firm’s stock dropped nearly seven percent, losing $36 billion in value, Facebook’s biggest one day decline in nearly four years.  In early trading Tuesday, Facebook shares were down about three percent.

The probe over Cambridge Analytica is just the latest flashpoint around Facebook’s role in the 2016 election and comes as the company faces questions about how it should be regulated and monitored going forward.

With its more than two billion monthly users and billions of dollars in profit, Facebook has become a powerful conduit of news, opinion and propaganda, much of it targeted at individuals based on their own data.  The social media site and investigators have found that Russia-backed operatives had used Facebook to spread disinformation and propaganda.

In recent months, the company, along with YouTube and Twitter, has changed some of its practices to reduce the power of automated accounts and propaganda.  Facebook has said it would hire 10,000 security employees.

A professor and the data-mining company

Facebook’s most recent troubles began in 2013 when an app called “Thisisyourdigitallife” developed by Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge University professor, offered users a personality survey.  The users were invited to download the app, which then gathered user information about their profiles and that of some of their friends.

The professor shared data with Cambridge Analytica, the data-mining firm that worked with U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign, according to The New York Times and The Observer.

While the gathering of the data was legitimate at the time, Facebook says the professor did not abide by the company’s rules when he passed the data to a third party – Cambridge Analytica – thus violating Facebook’s terms and conditions.  Facebook discovered the violation in 2015 and required Cambridge Analytica to delete the data, but didn’t tell affected users.

Cambridge Analytica has denied that it kept the data.  One Facebook executive in charge of security is reportedly leaving the firm as a result the matter.

Facebook suspends accounts

Last week, as the story broke, Facebook suspended the accounts of Cambridge Analytica and other parties, including the professor. 

Facebook says its policies around outside parties and data collection have since changed.  Now all apps requesting detailed user information go through the company’s App Review process.  The company has hired a digital forensics firm to conduct an audit of Cambridge Analytica to see if the data was deleted.

“If this data still exists, it would be a grave violation of Facebook’s policies and an unacceptable violation of trust and the commitments these groups made,” Facebook said

What to do about Facebook

In recent months, privacy advocates, regulators and lawmakers have discussed new ways of regulating Facebook.  At the moment, lawmakers are calling for answers.

“They’ve got responsibility to make sure that that information is used in an appropriate way, so we want to find out how it was gotten, how it was used, and we want Facebook obviously to be transparent about that,” said U.S. Senator John Thune, a Republican representing South Dakota.  

“I have serious concerns about the role @Facebook played in facilitating and permitting the covert collection and misuse of consumer information by Cambridge Analytica,” tweeted U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat.

 
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A fatal pedestrian crash involving a self-driving Uber SUV in a Phoenix suburb could have far-reaching consequences for the new technology as automakers and other companies race to be the first with cars that operate on their own.

The crash Sunday night in Tempe was the first death involving a full autonomous test vehicle. The Volvo was in self-driving mode with a human backup driver at the wheel when it struck 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg as she was walking a bicycle outside the lines of a crosswalk in Tempe, police said.

Uber immediately suspended all road-testing of such autos in the Phoenix area, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto. The ride-sharing company has been testing self-driving vehicles for months as it competes with other technology companies and automakers like Ford and General Motors.

Though many in the industries had been dreading a fatal crash they knew it was inevitable.

Tempe police Sgt. Ronald Elcock said local authorities haven’t determined fault but urged people to use crosswalks. He told reporters at a news conference Monday the Uber vehicle was traveling around 40 mph when it hit Helzberg immediately as she stepped on to the street.

Neither she nor the backup driver showed signs of impairment, he said.

“The pedestrian was outside of the crosswalk, so it was midblock,” Elcock said. “And as soon as she walked into the lane of traffic, she was struck by the vehicle.”

The National Transportation Safety Board, which makes recommendations for preventing crashes, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which can enact regulations, sent investigators.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi expressed condolences on his Twitter account and said the company is cooperating with investigators.

The public’s image of the vehicles will be defined by stories like the crash in Tempe, said Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor who studies self-driving vehicles. It may turn out that there was nothing either the vehicle or its human backup could have done to avoid the crash, he said.

Either way, the fatality could hurt the technology’s image and lead to a push for more regulations at the state and federal levels, Smith said.

Autonomous vehicles with laser, radar and camera sensors and sophisticated computers have been billed as the way to reduce the more than 40,000 traffic deaths a year in the U.S. alone. Ninety-four percent of crashes are caused by human error, the government says.

Self-driving vehicles don’t drive drunk, don’t get sleepy and aren’t easily distracted. But they do have faults.

“We should be concerned about automated driving,” Smith said. “We should be terrified about human driving.”

In 2016, the latest year available, more than 6,000 U.S. pedestrians were killed by vehicles.

The federal government has voluntary guidelines for companies that want to test autonomous vehicles, leaving much of the regulation up to states.

Many states, including Michigan and Arizona, have taken a largely hands-off approach, hoping to gain jobs from the new technology, while California and others have taken a harder line.

California is among states that require manufacturers to report any incidents during the testing phase. As of early March, the state’s motor vehicle agency had received 59 such reports.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey used light regulations to entice Uber to the state after the company had a shaky rollout of test cars in San Francisco. Arizona has no reporting requirements. Hundreds of vehicles with automated driving systems have been on Arizona’s roads.

Ducey’s office expressed sympathy for Herzberg’s family and said safety is the top priority.

The crash in Arizona isn’t the first involving an Uber autonomous test vehicle. In March 2017, an Uber SUV flipped onto its side, also in Tempe. No serious injuries were reported, and the driver of the other car was cited for a violation.

Herzberg’s death is the first involving an autonomous test vehicle but not the first in a car with some self-driving features. The driver of a Tesla Model S was killed in 2016 when his car, operating on its Autopilot system, crashed into a tractor-trailer in Florida.

The NTSB said that driver inattention was to blame but that design limitations with the system played a major role in the crash.

The U.S. Transportation Department is considering further voluntary guidelines that it says would help foster innovation. Proposals also are pending in Congress, including one that would stop states from regulating autonomous vehicles, Smith said.

Peter Kurdock, director of regulatory affairs for Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety in Washington, said the group sent a letter Monday to Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao saying it is concerned about a lack of action and oversight by the department as autonomous vehicles are developed. That letter was planned before the crash.

Kurdock said the deadly accident should serve as a “startling reminder” to members of Congress that they need to “think through all the issues to put together the best bill they can to hopefully prevent more of these tragedies from occurring.”
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