Technology

Daimler has been granted a license to test self-driving vehicles on public roads in Beijing, making it the first international automaker to receive such permission.

The owner of the Mercedes-Benz brand was given the test permit by the Chinese government after extensive closed-course testing, the company said in a statement, adding that it marks a milestone in its research and development efforts in China.

Daimler, which also has licenses in Germany and the U.S., said it will now begin road tests in Beijing.

There are other companies testing autonomous vehicles in China, notably Baidu, which has been on public roads since at least 2016. For Daimler to qualify, the company said it had to add to its Mercedes-Benz test vehicles technical applications from Baidu Apollo platform. Daimler had to undergo testing at the National Pilot Zone (Beijing and Hebei) for Intelligent Mobility, with test drivers receiving rigorous automated driving training.

Daimler has also deepened its relationship with Baidu, specifically in R-D efforts focused on safety and autonomous driving.The goal is to understand the special requirements for automated driving in China, and to develop an early intuition regarding local technical trends, Daimler said.

Earlier this week, Baidu announced an update to itsApollo autonomous driving system, which is capable of Level 4 operations,a designation by automotive engineering associationSAE International that means the vehicles take over all driving in certain conditions.

The Apollo program is an open-source autonomous driving platform that has been under development for years.Baidu isn&t interested in making the actual car — just the software that drives it.And it wants as many companies as possible to use its Apollo platform. Some 116 partners are now on the Apollo platform, including new partners Jaguar Land Rover, Valeo, Byton, Leopard Imaging and Suning Logistics.

The blockchain revolution is coming, but you might not see it. Thatthe view ofBrian Behlendorf, executivedirector of the Linux FoundationHyperledger Project.

Speaking at the TC Sessions: Blockchain event in Zug, Switzerland,Behlendorf explained that much of the innovation that the introduction of blockchains are primed to happen behind this the scenes unbeknownst to most.

&For a lot of consumers, you&re not going to realize when the bank or a web form at a government website or when you go to LinkedIn and start seeing green check marks against peopleclaims that they attended this university — which are all behind-the-scenes thatwill likely involve blockchain,&Behlendorf told interviewer John Biggs.

&This is a revolution in storage and networking and consumers.&

As for where blockchain might make a big impact,Behlendorf said he believes that the area of online identity is particularly ripe for change. Rather than relying on central systems such as Facebook or Twitter to hold information, blockchain solutions can potentially store information more securely and with more utility thanks to self-sovereign ID systems.

&Thatwhat gets me up in the morning more than almost every other use case,&Behlendorf said. &Ithink we&ve got something of a solutionbutonly going to work if the end user experience of managing your identity and your personal data is made easy and made fluid. It [has to] feel something like your wallet when you pull out your driverlicense and show it.&

Hyperledger is providing the framework and tools that the foundation hopes will enable innovation in the blockchain space, andBehlendorf said that it currently has around 10 code bases, of which two are in production use with eight additional frameworks to build blockchains. He added that there are more options coming, thanks toHyperledger focus on &organic& development ideas.

It might seem like an irony that blockchain projects, which can raise enormous amounts of money via token sales, are basing the technologies that power their businesses on open source tools, but Behlendorf said therenothing new in that situation versus how the Linux Foundation traditionally operates.

&There might be a few developers who get involved to improve their skills and reputation but the vast majority work on it because their business is investigating it, wantsto use it or to do a pilot, so they have a responsibility to make sure it works,&Behlendorf explained.

&For them, knowing other companies are using it and making a profit is fine,& he added. &In fact, ita good thing.&

Community spirit is very much the focus, and Hyperledger has had to intervene in the rare cases that members have taken things too far.

&What you want to protect against is any one company benefitting from the brand or reputation that the community creates in a way that is unfair. So we do things like we protect the trademark… because that confuses the marketplace,&Behlendorf said.

&But we want to see companies building services on top of this. In fact, itessential to make this a virtuous circle.&

With long summer evenings comes the perfect opportunity to dust off your old boxes of circuits and wires and start to build something. If you&re short on inspiration, you might be interested in artist and engineer Dan Macnishhow-to guide on building an AI-powered doodle camera using a thermal printer, Raspberry pi, a dash of Python and GoogleQuick Draw data set.

&Playing with neural networks for object recognition one day, I wondered if I could take the concept of a Polaroid one step further, and ask the camera to re-interpret the image, printing out a cartoon instead of a faithful photograph.& Macnish wrote on his blog about the project, called Draw This.

To make this work, Macnish drew on Googleobject recognition neural network and the data set created for the game Google Quick, Draw! Tying the two systems together with some python code, Macnish was able to have his creation recognize real images and print out the best corresponding doodle in the Quick, Draw! data set

But since output doodles are limited to the data set, there can be some discrepancy between what the camera &sees& and what it generates for the photo.

&You point and shoot & and out pops a cartoon; the camerabest interpretation of what it saw,& Macnish writes. &The result is always a surprise. A food selfie of a healthy salad might turn into an enormous hot dog.&

If you want to give this a go for yourself, Macnish has uploadedthe instructions and code needed to build this project on GitHub.