A fleet of driverless street cleaning vehicles has begun trial operations at an industrial park in Shanghai, according to the Shanghai-based news portal The Paper on Friday.
The convoy, which includes a 6m-long truck and a 3m-long minibus, has been designed and developed by Autowise.ai, a Shanghai technology company, for different road widths.
Continue reading… “Driverless street cleaning trucks begin trial operations in Shanghai”
The city with the world’s tiniest and costliest living spaces may soon convert drainpipes into homes. The aim is to get young people on the property ladder – but how small is too small?
“Both indoors and out, life in Hong Kong can feel pretty suffocating at times,” says 39-year-old finance worker Wai Li, who rents a 200 sq ft (19 sq m) “nano flat” by herself in Hong Kong’s Sheung Wan neighbourhood. Li’s living area is little more than the size of two standard Hong Kong parking spaces.
Continue reading… “Pipe dreams: can ‘nano apartments’ solve Hong Kong’s housing crisis?”
A Chinese high school in Hangzhou is using facial-recognition technology that scans students every 30 seconds.
The system is analyzing students’ emotions and actions in the classroom as well as replacing ID cards and wallets at the library and canteen.
Facial-recognition technology is widespread in China, where it is being used to predict crime.
The Chinese tech giant Alibaba is expanding aggressively into physical retail through investments in a variety of product categories to push its “New Retail” strategy of combining online and offline shopping.
Its most critical New Retail venture has been Hema Xiansheng, a futuristic supermarket launched in 2015 that offers free 30-minute delivery and payment using facial-recognition technology.
Deeply integrated with Alibaba’s technology and services, Hema provides a window into where Amazon may try to take Whole Foods in the future.
The social credit system in China has blocked people from taking more than 11 million flights and 4 million train trips.
The social credit system is used to punish citizens for bad behavior with numerous blacklists preventing them from traveling, getting loans or jobs, or staying in hotels, and even by limiting internet access.
In a truly remarkable feat of innovation, scientists have figured out how to create “hybrid” solar cells that generate power not just from sunlight but also from raindrops. This means we may soon see all-weather solar panels that work when it is cloudy and even at night, if it’s raining.
Solar has soared in recent years, as panel prices have dropped so fast that solar keeps crushing its own record for the cheapest power “ever, anywhere, by any technology” — even without a subsidy.
Continue reading… “Breakthrough solar panel can harvest power from raindrops — day or night”
3D Concrete Printing Market – The Biggest Trends to Watch out for in Near Future 2024
3D concrete printing is a technologically advanced and innovative method used for constructing predesigned building components with the help of 3D concrete printers. The technology holds the promise of substantially optimizing the construction industry in terms of construction cost, time, error reduction, flexibility in design, and environmental impact. Past experiments have successfully acknowledged the technology’s expertise on all these fronts and the technology is being steadily adopted on a larger scale around the globe. The field of 3D concrete printing is receiving increased focus from construction companies across the globe. These companies mainly focus on experimenting with different concrete mixes and printing machines to bring about further developments in this construction technique.
With construction companies making continuous efforts to bring 3D concrete printing in mainstream construction, the global 3D concrete printing market is projected to gather significant momentum in the next few years. The report provides a 360-degree overview of the market, covering crucial market-related details about the key elements and segments of the market. The report examines the impact of the major growth drivers, challenges, and trends on the market’s future growth prospects, underlining both the most lucrative and the most unprofitable investment areas.
Continue reading… “3D concrete printing market – the biggest trends to watch in the near future”
Didi suspended its ride-sharing service after a 21-year-old woman was murdered. Carlos Jasso/Reuters
Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride-sharing giant, said it would remove creepy passenger ratings from its app after a woman was allegedly murdered by her driver.
Didi’s Hitch service lets people share rides, but was suspended last week after the murder.
Didi said it would also remove passenger photos and was even considering voice recording every trip to resolve passenger disputes.
The ride-sharing service has 450 million users, and has little competition after Didi acquired Uber’s Chinese business in 2016.
As SoundHound looks to leverage its ten-plus years of experience and data to create a voice recognition tool that companies can bake into any platform, it’s raising another big $100 million round of funding to try to make its Houndify platform a third neutral option compared to Alexa and Google Assistant.
While Amazon works to get developers to adopt Alexa, SoundHound has been collecting data since it started as an early mobile app for the iPhone and Android devices. That’s given it more than a decade of data to work with as it tries to build a robust audio recognition engine and tie it into a system with dozens of different queries and options that it can tie to those sounds. The result was always a better SoundHound app, but it’s increasingly started to try to open up that technology to developers and show it’s more powerful (and accurate) than the rest of the voice assistants on the market — and get them to use it in their services.
Continue reading… “SoundHound has raised a big $100M round to take on Alexa and Google Assistant”
Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing is nearing an agreement with Volkswagen (VW) to deploy a “purpose-built” fleet of VW vehicles in its home country, according to The Wall Street Journal.
As part of the joint venture, the German carmaker would provide around 100,000 vehicles, electric and autonomous vehicle technology, and manage the fleet.
The cameras, which have been rolled out in 40 cities, work by capturing a two-second film of a honking car.
The police analyze the footage to determine whether drivers who honked had a fair reason to do so — if not, they could receive a $16 fine.
This may be the first step to link car honking with further penalties for drivers.
Children walking to school wearing smog pollution masks in Britain. Residents in many developing countries are exposed to toxic air both outdoors and inside their homes.
More than 95% of the world’s population breathe unsafe air and the burden is falling hardest on the poorest communities, with the gap between the most polluted and least polluted countries rising rapidly, a comprehensive study of global air pollution has found.
Continue reading… “More than 95% of world’s population breathe dangerous air, major study finds”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
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