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adriansmithcarslove · 7 years

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Betting the Future on Artificial Intelligence – Technologue

I spent a week in Vegas with Yui, Sam, Otto, Kuri, Aristotle, and Ara. No, it wasn’t a bachelor party. It was the Consumer Electronics Show.

Artificial intelligence made a huge splash at January’s CES techstravaganza with Amazon’s Siri-trumping Alexa standing tallest amid a crowd of animatronic assistants bearing the aforementioned cool, folksy names. By means of introduction, Yui is Toyota’s AI presence, then there’s SAM (Nissan/NASA), Otto (Samsung’s Siri/Alexa wannabe), Kuri (Bosch’s $700 ambulatory Alexa), Aristotle (Mattel’s $300 robo-nanny/tutor), and Ara (Kolibree’s brainy toothbrush).

Yui lives in Toyota’s Concept-I, a futuristic vehicle that (refreshingly) encourages driving. Its controls don’t even fold away! Toyota Research Institute CEO Gill Pratt freely admitted to the technorati gathered at CES that nobody is even close to providing full Level 5 autonomy, so Yui merely seeks to add comfort and safety to our driving experience. She’ll operate secondary controls for us while observing our facial expression and then use her machine learning to infer our emotional state. When a darkening mood is detected, she’ll try mood-elevating lighting, music, or even conversation to soothe us. Hopefully she’ll have an off button for times when computer conversation is the stress elevator.

Nissan’s SAM proposes to bring Mars Rover autonomy down to Earth. NASA’s rovers explore the red planet autonomously until they encounter an impediment, at which point they stop and phone home for human assistance. Similarly, SAM proposes to handle all the driving until indecipherable conditions (such as cops manually directing traffic around a crash) trigger him to pull over and solicit mission control assistance from a remote human. Of course the NASA budget to keep operators standing by to assist its two-rover fleet might not scale to servicing millions of Level 5 autonomous SAMs.

If the NASA connection conjures unpleasant recollections of named AI computers going rogue— think 2001: A Space Odyssey or the Terminator movies—perhaps you’ll derive greater comfort from one of the squillions of AI technologies introduced at CES without pet names.

One that jumped out was insurance giant Liberty Mutual, which operates a tech startup incubator in Boston called Solaria Labs. Based on customer research, Liberty Mutual has developed two applications that leverage AI and big data to provide new customer value: a crash-damage estimator app and enriched navigation based on a trove of accident data.

Say you’re in a hurry, rushing out of an unfamiliar parking space before your car’s backup camera has sprung to life, when BAM! Where’d that low pole come from, and how much is this going to cost to fix? You upload a photo of the damage and enter the car’s year, make, and model info, and cloud-based computers analyze your photo pixel by pixel.

The Liberty Mutual system endeavors to determine where the smoothly tooled original bodywork ends and the accident damage begins, how deep the damage is, and what parts might have been harmed beneath the crumpled surface. The system probes the insurer’s vast archive of crash damage photos to search for reasonable comps, compiling an average repair cost. The program can then apply correction factors based on the vehicle, considering things such as parts-cost premiums for low-production specialty vehicles or higher body-shop rates for carbon-fiber or aluminum-intensive structures. The best part: no waiting around for an adjuster.

Then there’s the idea of hacking your commute. Safe routing delves into Liberty Mutual’s vast archive of time-stamped geographic crash data, which can identify the riskiest intersections and stretches of roadway along a particular route while noting the most dangerous hours of the day for each. Drivers can use this information in different ways. Trips can be scheduled or routed to avoid the worst roads and intersections entirely. Or a typical shortest/quickest route can be plotted with the system in order to warn the driver of the heightened risk areas, enhance vigilance, and reduce risk in those areas.

How will Liberty Mutual monetize these products? “We’re still figuring out what a go-to-market strategy would look like,” says Ted Kwartler, Liberty Mutual assistant VP of innovation. “We definitely will have a free tier because our focus here is on safety—on helping people understand risk and helping people have less worry.”

Sounds good. Just please refrain from naming your AI unit Libby and making me talk to it.

Read more by Frank Markus here:

Your Next Car Might Change Its Own Oil

How 3-D Printing Could Save Automakers Millions of Dollars

High-Octane Fuels: The Key to Efficiency?

Drown Your Global-Warming Sorrows in Ethanol

The post Betting the Future on Artificial Intelligence – Technologue appeared first on Motor Trend.

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lancecarr · 6 years

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Watch цirst Man,ҠThen Watch These Movies

Damien Chazelle‘s last movie, La La Land, wore a lot of its influences on its sleeve. In fact, there were 24 movies I could recommend to fans of the Oscar-winning musical to watch afterward. With his Neil Armstrong biopic, First Man, the only earlier movie with blatant DNA visible and audible onscreen is 2001: A Space Odyssey, to which the new film pays homage. Of course, there are also tons of other precursors involving real-life and fictional space missions. So many, that this week’s Movies to Watch After… is focused on titles directly related in subject matter.

There were some more random movies I thought of while watching First Man, such as Loving during the home-life scenes. And as Justin Chang points out in his review for the Los Angeles Times, the climactic landing on the Moon shares something with Dorothy’s arrival in Munchkinland in The Wizard of Oz. But I’m going with a streamlined lesson here, even if it means overlapping with numerous listicles released lately in anticipation of Chazelle’s entry into the subgenre of astronaut dramas. Below, I highlight 10 films and one miniseries, but each specific recommendation comes with additional suggestions.

A Trip to the Moon (1902)

Inspired by the writings of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, Georges Melies’ iconic sci-fi short was not the filmmaker’s first work involving the Moon. The previous works, known as A Nightmare and The Astronomer’s Moon, are centered around dreams and the Moon being a creature sort of existing on the same plane as the Earth. A Trip to the Moon depicts the first mission to the Moon, which is also famously portrayed as a giant face, by spacecraft. Melies is more interested in fantasy, however, than the real physics of space travel, which Verne’s novel “From the Earth to the Moon” is astoundingly prescient about.

Many sci-fi movies released in the years ahead of NASA’s actual missions are also total fantasies — see Fritz Lang’s 1929 silent picture Woman in the Moon — though some such as the 1958 Verne adaptation From the Earth to the Moon and 1950’s Destination Moon do also try for technical accuracy. There have been cinematic trips to the Moon made after the real visits that ignored scientific fact, too, such as the 1989 Wallace and Gromit short A Grand Day Out and Pixar’s 2011 short La Luna, as well as Terry Gilliam’s Melies-inspired 1989 feature The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

Countdown (1967)

Throughout the 1960s, more sci-fi movies were made that attempted to correspond with the actual space missions. They range from Richard Lester’s silly Space Race satire from 1963, The Mouse on the Moon, to John Sturges’ drama Marooned, which came out just after Armstrong’s historical feat and deals with astronauts in an emergency situation that eerily sort of prophesized the Apollo 13 mission’s problems, except here a rescue effort was needed. Then there’s the early Robert Altman movie Countdown, which opened in the US in 1968 within months of the release of 2001. Based on the 1964 novel “The Pilgrim Project,” the serious drama is very much attuned to the real US space program and its competition with the Soviets.

NASA even cooperated with the production of Countdown, and Altman filmed the launch of the Gemini 11 to be used as a mission launch in his movie. The book was also inspired by a real proposal to NASA of a one-way trip to the Moon, submitted around the time that Neil Armstrong was being interviewed to become an astronaut, as depicted in First Man including his own take on how to achieve a lunar mission. The new film also references how NASA kept having to rethink and evolve their missions, and that’s part of the scenario of Countdown, that NASA has to go with their alternative plan for Project Pilgrim, sending James Caan to the Moon to try to beat the Russians, a plan that would basically purposefully strand the first man on the Moon there until the Apollo program was perfected and could send a mission to retrieve the astronaut.

High School (1968)

While 2001 seems to be the only explicit influence on First Man, editor Tom Cross told The Hollywood Reporter of some of the less obvious inspirations: “We watched movies like The Battle of Algiers and The French Connection…A lot of our conversations had to do with the Maysleses and D.A. Pennebaker and Frederick Wiseman, and those cinema verite documentaries of the 1960s — how they were put together and the ways you could join shots in such a way that it felt emotionally continuous, but actually wasn’t.”

Chazelle also referenced the documentary influence to The Washington Post; “If 2001 is the grand movie-movie treatment of space and the greatest possible version of that, you��re never going to beat that…(We thought), could we do the documentary version of that? Could we do the gritty, camera on the shoulder, 16mm, cinema verite version of space and make it feel like D.A. Pennebaker had crawled into the capsule with the astronauts?”

Neither Pennebaker nor the other named documentarians made any films about NASA or actual space travel, but Wiseman does have one film involving a space mission — well, it’s a simulation with students at Philadelphia’s Northeast High School featured in the classic feature High School. A pretty authentic-looking simulation with kids dressed as astronauts or playing members of a mission command. Twenty years later, Wiseman made Missile, which deals with nuclear missile command silos, and it features a memorial service for the Challenger astronauts killed in 1986.

Moonwalk One (1970)

As for docs about the actual Moon landing, the first to arrive was 1969’s Footprints on the Moon: Apollo 11, but this is the best-remembered — and is referenced by Chazelle to The Hollywood Reporter. While the earlier film is mostly a straight presentation of the record of the Moon landing, Moonwalk One chronicles a lot more of the preparations for Apollo 11 and the routines of Armstrong and the other astronauts as well as a lot of the aftermath, including the parades and other recognitions of the achievement. And, of course, there’s all the stuff on the lunar surface, including the planting of the American flag. Where Footprints puts the mission in the context of Verne and fantasy, Moonwalk One does so in the context of scientific history.

In the almost 50 years since Apollo 11, many other docs have been about the first Moon landing and subsequent missions. Another essential acknowledged by Chazelle is Al Reinert’s Oscar-nominated 1989 feature For All Mankind, which focuses specifically on the Apollo missions and features narration from Apollo 11 pilot Michael Collins (played by Lukas Haas in First Man) and Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell (Pablo Schreiber in First Man) among others. There’s also 2007’s In the Shadow of the Moon, which includes interviews with 10 Apollo astronauts, including Collins, Lovell, and Buzz Aldrin. And if you saw First Man on an IMAX screen, you’ll appreciate the 2005 IMAX doc Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D.

Capricorn One (1977)

Considering how well the Moon scenes were produced for movies like Countdown and 2001, the claims that the Apollo 11 mission was a fake would seem to have some weight. And this movie, out almost a decade later, suggests the concept of faking a space mission to Mars that certainly hints at what happened with an attempt to go to the Moon. Director Peter Hyams apparently got the idea while working on the CBS broadcast of Apollo 11, years before the first public claim of a Moon landing conspiracy theory in the mid-1970s. What Capricorn One supposes is, had NASA astronauts not wanted to agree to the faking of a space mission, they’d have been assassinated and their deaths would publicly be presented as a re-entry disaster.

If this entertaining thriller starring the amazing trio of James Brolin, Sam Waterston, and O.J. Simpson, plus Elliott Gould as an investigative reporter, isn’t suggestive enough, how about the supposed hints made by 2001 director Stanley Kubrick in his 1980 Stephen King adaptation The Shining that he had staged the Moon landing? Wait, what? For that claim, watch Rodney Ascher’s cult hit documentary Room 237. Other recent movies have recently dramatized the concept that Apollo 11 was fake, including Moonwalkers from 2015, but better is the documentary-style Operation Avalanche released a year later.

The post Watch ‘First Man,’ Then Watch These Movies appeared first on Film School Rejects.

https://filmschoolrejects.com/movies-to-watch-first-man/

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automaticar · 7 years

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MY PERSONAL REASONS FOR THE MUSICAL CHOICE: MYTHODEA Though the lyrics of Movement IX say that the mother (of Life) is coming, to earth, I do not see the mother other than Earth herself, and her Nature. The music Vangelis composed, the way Kathleen Battle and Jessye Norman sing the words on the notes in movement IX, how the chorus creates magical powerful sound-energies, express what I feel when I am watching nature, when I am in nature. Mythodea is a symphony! Nature, pure nature, healthy, untouched nature, wilderness, is what especially Movement 9 expresses, and in my experiences Vangelis goes even beyond the beauty of Beethoven, with his symphony number 6, the Pastoral Symphony, an ode to nature. Also the reality of the time we live in, with the catastrophic disappearing of pure wilderness, the catastrophic climate change, the catastrophic pollution, the growing use of pesticides that kill insects, the food for birds, and because of that the disappearing of what were once the most common bird species, makes me deeply aware of the power of nature, and what is (thank God) still there. The power and intense beauty of this music is like an elegy for one of the last Nature Paradises on earth: Rhodopes Mountains. ~ THE RODOPI MOUNTAIN RANGE NATIONAL PARK The Rodopi Mountain Range National Park (RMRNP) is located at the central-west massif of the mountain range of Rodopi. Its boundary is defined by the north-east slopes of Falakro Mountain and it continues following the north riverbank of Nestos, to the Greek – Bulgarian borders and the mountainous area of Xanthi. The RMRNP was characterized as “National Park” according to the Joint Ministerial Decision 40379/01-10-2009 because of the plethora of the flora and fauna species listed on the Annexes III, IV and V of the Habitats Directive 92/43/EEC. ~ DOCUMENTARY YouTube video with the amazing documentary about the Rodopi Mountain Range National Park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOjatnK3H74 ~ THE GREEK RHODOPES The Greek Rhodopes are the part of the Rhodope Mountains that is located in Greece. The Rhodope regional unit in the northern part of the country is named after the region. This area includes the Rodopi Mountain Range National Park. The Greek Rhodopes are characterized by numerous peaks of relatively low altitude. Their highest peak is Delimposka (1.953) in the mountain of Frakto, near the Greek-Bulgarian border. Nowadays the Southern Rhodopes is an area almost deserted. After World War II and Greek Civil War most villages depopulated permanently and their inhabitants never returned. Even the Sarakatsani stockbreeders abandoned the difficult life of Rhodopes. The depopulation of the region, that has not been grazed fore more than 50 years, combined with high rainfall and its geographical location has contributed to the creation and maintenance of a biological paradise. There grow coniferous trees, such as the Norway Spruce and the Silver Birch, that cannot be found elsewhere in Greece. More: http://ift.tt/2pY3rLM ~ THE MUSIC: VANGELIS ~ MYTHODEA, MOVEMENT IX Mythodea — Music for the NASA Mission: 2001 Mars Odyssey is a 1993 choral symphony by Greek electronic composer and artist Vangelis. Originally premiered in concert in 1993, it was published in 2001 by Vangelis' new record label Sony Classical, which also set up the NASA connection and promoted a new concert. The 2001 version of Mythodea was recorded and played on-stage by: Vangelis on synthesizers and keyboards, the London Metropolitan Orchestra augmented by two harpists, sopranos Kathleen Battle and Jessye Norman, the chorus of the Greek National Opera, and, for the concert only, the Seistron and Typana percussion ensembles. The concert was held in Athens, Greece on June 28, 2001, and the record was officially released on October 23, 2001, to coincide with the 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft entering the orbit of planet Mars. A video of the concert was released in early 2002. More: http://ift.tt/2pvvHme Amazon: http://ift.tt/2pYhjpu ~ MOVEMENT IX, WITH KATHLEEN BATTLE AND JESSYE NORMAN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kpU67eJlxw ~ MYTHODEA, THE FULL CONCERT AND THE LYRICS https://www.youtube.com/user/VangelisMythodea/featured ~ This video has been uploaded in my YouTube channel Fond of Greek https://www.youtube.com/user/FondOfGreek/

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