More than a dozen teams brought driverless cars to the Formula Studentcompetition last week in Hockenheimring, Germany. It was the first event of its type, but many participants were diligent veterans of Formula Student Electric races and had tested their cars at different types of sites leading up to the main event. “We knew from the electric season that testing is really crucial,” says Manuel Dangel, vice-president of the Formula Student Driverless team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. Then the rain started falling. Continue reading Students Race Driverless Cars in Germany in Formula Student Competition
Tag Archives: Technology
Carmakers Take to the (Self-Driving) Test Track
Researchers from academia and industry took rides in experimental cars at a public test-track event in Teesdorf, Austria, last week, but the main draw may have been the other attendees.
The event gave smaller companies a chance to try out driverless technology on a shared large-scale test track. Formal vehicle testing on closed tracks can cost up to £1000 (US $1320) a day. “We thought we could do something that was a bit different: combine the opportunity for small companies and university teams,” says event organizer Alex Lawrence-Berkeley, of Sense Media Group in London, England. Continue reading Carmakers Take to the (Self-Driving) Test Track
Taxonomy Goes Digital: Getting a Handle on Social Bots
Incoming messages for straight men on dating sites are… rare. Yet many of the dashing men who tried out Ashley Madison, a site aimed at the already-married, got messages soon after signing up. To see the messages, the men had to pay. The more perceptive among them soon noticed that their pen pals wrote similar come-ons, logged in and out at the same time every day, and oddest of all, had not visited the men’s profiles. Ashley Madison was using more than 70,000 bots to lure in users, Gizmodo found in a 2015 investigation.
The message-sending profiles were one iteration of a growing army of bots that populate our online social networks, affecting everything from our wallets to our politics. Now they are attracting academic study and government research dollars. Continue reading Taxonomy Goes Digital: Getting a Handle on Social Bots
Formula E Ends First Season Wheel-to-Wheel
Formula E, the electric version of Formula One racing, completed its first season this weekend in London with back-to-back races. NextEV driver Nelson Piquet Jr. came from behind to win the series driver championship and Virgin Racing driver Sam Bird also came from behind to win Sunday’s tight race.