Category Archives: IEEE Spectrum

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

Danish Electric Bike-Sharing Dodges Failure

Copenhagen’s public electric bikes are kind of a pain to get started: they are heavy and their coaster brake prevents riders from kicking the pedal around to a convenient starting place. The business side of the operation has also had a rough start, marked by delivery delays, bankruptcy, and restructuring. Once you do manage to push the bikes to a start, however, their 250-W electric motors kick in and they are a breeze to power around Copenhagen’s well-marked and protected bike lanes.

It may not have been electricity, but something has also boosted the Copenhagen bike-sharing program: Usage grew from just 169,000 rides in 2015 to 933,000 last year and the program, called Bycyklen, is on track for similar usage this year. That might be just enough to keep Bycyklen from falling over. Continue reading Danish Electric Bike-Sharing Dodges Failure

How Bots Win Friends and Influence People

Every now and then sociologist Phil Howard writes messages to social media accounts accusing them of being bots. It’s like a Turing test of the state of online political propaganda. “Once in a while a human will come out and say, ‘I’m not a bot,’ and then we have a conversation,” he said at the European Conference for Science Journalists in Copenhagen on June 29. Continue reading How Bots Win Friends and Influence People

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