Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

There's a lot of excitement about the potential of autonomous drones, be they nimble quadcopters or longer-range fixed wing or hybrid aircraft. A group of students from Singularity University, for example, has a project called MatterNet working to provide transportation infrastructure for light cargo in regions of Africa where roads wash out for half the year.

Closer to home, these drones are not yet legal for commercial use, while government agencies are using them secretly.

One of my first rules of robocars is "you don't change the infrastructure." Changing infrastructure is very hard, very expensive, requires buy-in from all sorts of parties who are slow to make decisions, and even if you do change it, you then have a functionality that only works in the places you have managed to change it. New infrastructure takes many decades -- even centuries, to become truly ubiquitous.

Like most people, I have a lot of different passwords in my brain. While we really should have used a different system from passwords for web authentication, that's what we are stuck with now. A general good policy is to use the same password on sites you don't care much about and to use more specific passwords on sites where real harm could be done if somebody knows your password, such as your bank or email.

I'm doing a former-cold-war tour this month and talking about robocars.

This Friday, May 11, I will be giving the 2301st lecture for the Philosophical Society of Washington with my new, Prezi-enabled robocars talk. This takes place around 8pm at the John Wesley Powell Auditorium. This lecture is free.

A week later it's off to Moscow to enjoy the wonders of Russia.

There will be a short talk locally in between at a private charity event on May 14.

I found this recent article from the editor of the MIT Tech review on why apps for publishers are a bad idea touched on a number of key issues I have been observing since I first got into internet publishing in the 80s.

I have not intended for this blog to become totally about robocars but the news continues to flow at a pace more rapid than most expected.

Over the years I have reported on the efforts of many teams attempting to build robocars all over the world.

I've collected a summary of all these teams, including both car companies, Google and academic efforts.

You can read about it at Summary of Robocar Teams.

If you know of additional efforts and teams, please let me know and I will update the list.

A round-up of interesting robocar news this week:

While Mercedes has been reported as promising a traffic-jam autopilot in the 2013 S class due later this year, I was surprised to learn that Honda briefly made claims that their 2006 "Accord ADAS" in the UK was a self-driving car.

This CBS video from January 2006 described the car as a self-driving car, and has a honda rep touting how game-changing it is.

GM's Cadillac division has reported they plan to release a "super cruise" feature in models mid-decade.

It's been interesting to see how TV shows from the 60s and 70s are being made available in HDTV formats. I've watched a few of Classic Star Trek, where they not only rescanned the old film at better resolution, but also created new computer graphics to replace the old 60s-era opticals. (Oddly, because the relative budget for these graphics is small, some of the graphics look a bit cheesy in a different way, even though much higher in technical quality.)

The earliest TV was shot live. My mother was a TV star in the 50s and 60s, but this was before videotape was cheap. Her shows all were done live, and the only recording was a Kinescope -- a film shot off the TV monitor. These kinneys are low quality and often blown out. The higher budget shows were all shot and edited on film, and can all be turned into HD. Then broadcast quality videotape got cheap enough that cheaper shows, and then even expensive shows began being shot on it. This period will be known in the future as a strange resolution "dark ages" when the quality of the recordings dropped. No doubt they will find today's HD recordings low-res as well, and many productions are now being shot on "4K" cameras which have about 8 megapixels.

But I predict the future holds a surprise for us. We can't do it yet, but I imagine software will arise that will be able to take old, low quality videos and turn them into some thing better. They will do this by actually modeling the scenes that were shot to create higher-resolution images and models of all the things which appear in the scene. In order to do this, it will be necessary that everything move. Either it has to move (as people do) or the camera must pan over it. In some cases having multiple camera views may help.

When an object moves against a video camera, it is possible to capture a static image of it in sub-pixel resolution. That's because the multiple frames can be combined to generate more information than is visible in any one frame. A video taken with a low-res camera that slowly pans over an object (in both dimensions) can produce a hi-res still. In addition, for most TV shows, a variety of production stills are also taken at high resolution, and from a variety of angles. They are taken for publicity, and also for continuity. If these exist, it makes the situation even easier.

By now, you've probably heard of the proposal from the White House to abolish April Fool's Day as a national holiday starting in 2015. Some in the comedy community are upset at the end of an old tradition and a day devoted to what we love.

But it's time to face facts. It's just not working any more. When I was a kid, April 1st was mostly a day of physical pranks or very short gags. You would replace the sugar with salt or put a white powder in an envelope. But the internet changed it and made every gag global.

I recently updated my book recommendation box to list the very best recent SF to read from the last few years. This is SF that meets my goals for great SF. I see somewhat "hard" SF that speaks about important and real ideas, while being entertaining writing at the same time.

Today Google released a new 3 minute video highlighting advanced self-driving car use. Here I embed the video, discussion below includes some minor spoilers on surprises in the video. I'm pleased to see this released as I had a minor & peripheral role in the planning of it, but the team has done a great job on this project.

This video includes active operation of the vehicle on not just ordinary streets, by private parking lots for door to door transportation. You can click on it to see it in HD directly on Youtube.

For some time, the US Postal Service has allowed people to generate barcoded postage. You can do that on the expensive forms of mail such as priority mail and express mail, but if you want to do it on ordinary mail, like 1st class mail or parcel post, you need an account with a postage meter style provider, and these accounts typically include a monthly charge of $10/month or more. For an office, that's no big deal, and cheaper than the postage meters that most offices used to buy -- and the pricing model is based on them to some extent, even though now there is no hardware needed.

Sometimes when I travel I see a great idea that hasn't yet spread everywhere yet. A parking garage I parked at in Tel Aviv had LEDs visible on the roof above every stall. These were red and green if the stall was full or empty. So it was quick to find an empty stall. This probably makes the garage more efficient because people don't have to circle hunting for a spot, and this justifies the cost. (The main cost of these is probably wiring the power for them.)

I've seen studies claiming that in busy areas, up to 30% of the traffic is cars circling looking for parking. Mostly they are looking for free parking or convenient on-street parking, since parking garages, though expensive can usually be found and entered quickly. Indeed, while on-street parking is often much more convenient, in many cases this is an artifact of parking being subsidized (because it's free, or free to people who live in an area) or cheaper than commercial parking markets. But we don't seem ready to fix that, though many cities put restrictions on street and metered parking, limiting the number of hours so that it is in theory only for visitors rather than all-day parkers.

There are many companies trying to see if they can improve parking using mobile devices and the internet. There are companies with sensors that manage parking spaces, companies that let you find spaces on a mobile device and even enter a garage with your mobile device. In some cases you can even extend your parking (if you prepaid) over the phone. Cities have been moving away from traditional meters to things like block meters (where you get a ticket and then put it on your dash) or fancy enforcement vehicles with licence plate cameras that spot not only if you are in a spot too long, but if you move within the busy zone to another spot.

As a user of parking, I would like to know I've got a good spot lined up before I get to my destination, and just pull right into it. I want a competitive market but I don't want to waste time and gas hunting. There are companies trying to address this, though mostly in commercial lots. It's mostly pretty basic right now -- it's considered fancy to even have sites like parkopedia or bestparking with a database of the parking in a city with the prices so you can comparison shop the parking lots.

So now for some rambling on what might be done on street.

You may not know the name of Continental, but they are a major supplier of components to the big automakers. A story in the Detroit Free Press details their latest project in autonomous driving. This is a VW Passat using radar Automatic-Cruise-Control combined with lane-keeping, similar to projects announced by Mercedes and VW/Audi itself. The story has a video showing the screen of the car displaying its lane-keeping.

I'm back from our fun "Singuarlity Week" in Tel Aviv, where we did a 2 day and 1 day Singularity University program. We judged a contest for two scholarships by Israelis for SU, and I spoke to groups like Garage Geeks, Israeli Defcon, GizaVC's monthly gathering and even went into the west bank to address the Palestinian IT Society and announce a scholarship contest for SU.

A recent article on bicycles and pedestrians in the robocar world appears at the Greater Washington web site, which has taken an interest in robocar topics. In particular they are concerned about the vision of a reservation-based intersection, which does not use traffic signals. These designs from U of Texas got a lot of press in the last few weeks after a presentation at AAAS, but they've been around for years and I have a number of links to them.

In our effort to reduce the corruption in politics, one of the main thrusts in campaign finance regulation has been for transparency. Donations to candidates must be declared publicly. We want to see who is funding a candidate. This applies even to $100 donations.

While the value of such transparency seems clear -- though how effective it's been remains less clear -- there are some things that have bothered me about it.

1. It's quite a violation of privacy. We demand secret ballot, but supporting a candidate gets us in a database and a lot of spam.
2. Some people are so bothered by this invasion of privacy that they actually refrain from making donations, even small ones, to avoid it.

What if we reversed that thinking. What if we demanded that donations to candidates be anonymous?

• A special agency would be created. All donations would flow into that agency, along with which candidate they are meant for.
• Only the agency would know who the money went to. After auditing was done to assure the agency was distributing the money correctly, the info would be destroyed. Before that it would be kept securely.
• Money would be given to candidates in a smoothed process with a randomized formula every few weeks, to avoid linking donations with dates. This might mean delays in getting some money to candidates.
• While anybody could say that they donated, to offer, solicit, show or receive proof of donation would be a crime. An official method of hiding donations in corporate P&Ls would need to be established.
• In general, all donations in any given period (a month or quarter?) must be given as a lump sum, with a list of how much to give each candidate. So even if you're sure a donor would never give anything but party X, you don't know which candidates in party X.

Now it would not be impossible to hide things entirely. If the Koch brothers say they gave a big donation, and you believe them, it's fairly safe to say it wasn't to Obama. At least for now, this will buy them more access to candidates on their side. But this gets harder over time. And the common corporate strategy of donating to both sides of a race to assure access no matter who wins becomes vastly less valuable. While you might convince somebody you are a regular donor and will pull your donation if you don't get what you want, it becomes very hard for you to prove.