Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) is no stranger to testing out unusual tech in its retail stores. There was that unusual chicken box, for example, that included a built-in battery for charging your phone, not to mention the edible nail polish. Now the company is back with yet another test, this one in collaboration with China' Baidu to launch facial recognition ordering technology at one of its stores in China.
Baidu, the Chinese search engine and internet giant, and Germany's BMW have announced that they're ending the autonomous car technology the pair first announced last summer. A formal product was never announced from the two companies, as the project never went beyond a joint research initiative. Thus far, the project saw Baidu make use of BMW's 3 Series sedans in its public road tests in China, and the plan was to do the same in the US in the near future.
When you speak of NVIDIA, you will mostly like first think of high-end graphics cards mostly used to power gaming rigs and hard-core multimedia computers. Of late, however, the company has been putting its processing power at the service not of gamers only but also of car makers. Earlier this year, it unveiled its new DRIVE PX 2 single-board computers that would drive, pun perhaps intended, hi-tech AI systems inside autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles. Now it is announcing the DRIVE PX 2 for AutoCruise, which is basically a DRIVE PX 2 that has been pared down to a single NVIDIA Parker chip.
Nvidia has announced a new partnership with Baidu, China's largest search engine, to work together on developing an artificial intelligence (AI) platform for self-driving cars. The announcement was made at the Baidu World Conference last week, with Baidu planning to use the jointly-developed technology in its own fleet of autonomous taxis. But the companies also plan to make the platform available to other car manufacturers to who want to add self-driving tech to their vehicles.
Ford and Baidu have pumped $150m into Velodyne LiDAR, the sensor company specializing in the super-precise laser mapping systems many believe are vital to autonomous cars' success. Velodyne is responsible for the "turrets" most self-driving vehicles sprout from their roofs, each containing a laser array that can build up a 3D view of the world around them in real-time.
Chinese authorities have launched new regulations for the nation's search engines and the results they display to internet users. But as a country with some of the tightest controls over the internet, its use, and what information people have access to, China's new rules are actually beneficial for its citizens. Under the new rules, search engines are required to identify paid ads within search results, as well as verify advertisers.
Self-driving cars are the future, and humans have to learn to deal with that. There’s the need to accept that we won’t always be behind the wheel, of course, but it’s more than that — autonomous cars will one day drive as well as humans, but they will also drive differently, and that means both humans and the cities we construct must shift accordingly. Such is the argument recently put forth by Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Chinese company Baidu.
Chinese search giant Baidu is set to bring its driverless car testing to the US in a move that sees the firm advocating coordination with the US government to get self-driving cars on the road. Baidu wants to have a commercially viable automated car available in China by 2018, which is well ahead of the goals set by some firms. Baidu has a tech center in Silicon Valley that will be used for the autonomous car effort.
Most of the autonomous cars you read about these days come from Europe and the US, and at least one from Japan. China, of course, isn't going to take that sitting down. A year ago, Baidu and BMW forged a partnership to bring China's first self-driving to China's highways by 2015. 2015 is all but over but at least Baidu has made some significant progress as far as tests go. The Chinese Internet giant has proudly announced how its modified BMW 3 was put to the test, driving through mixed roads and under very trying conditions. And it was able to arrive at its destination without incident, showing promise for what could be China's first fully-capable autonomous car.
Recently, tech companies have been taking major action to gain a foothold in the ripe market that is China, from Apple's public apology to Google's rumored censorship. The latest to make somewhat of a concession is Microsoft, though the implications are probably far less unprecedented or disruptive. The company has just announced one its latest major partnership in China, which will help it gain access to potentially hundreds of millions of users. But its deal with Baidu is coming at a small price, one that will see Bing out the door in the region.
We’ve all been there: the excitement of getting a new smartphone, the fun of loading it up with your favorite apps, and then the frustration when your handset starts getting weighed-down and your battery runs flat. DU Battery Saver and DU Speed Booster, products from China’s biggest search engine company Baidu, admittedly can’t satiate your upgrade lust for the latest Android flagship. Instead, they promise something perhaps even more useful: the ability to squeeze more performance out of your existing phone and postpone the need to buy a new one. But for the app developers, those benefits are secondary to an even more ambitious goal: helping the environment. If you’re upgrading your phone less frequently, you’re reducing your e-waste footprint and energy usage and putting less strain on the planet.
Chinese tech giant, Baidu, began working with BMW in April 2014 on a project centered around self-driving vehicles. More than one year later, the partnership is getting close to enjoying the fruits of its labor. According to Baidu's senior vice president, Wang Jin, the new self-driving car should be hitting the streets in China by the end of the year. When the arrive, the cars won't be staying on the test track. The goal is to get them on the congested highways in urban centers like Shanghai and Beijing this year.
