Keeping a vehicle well-localized within a prebuilt-map is at the core of any autonomous vehicle navigation system. In this work, we show that both standard SIR sampling and rejection-based optimal sampling are suitable for efficient (10 to 20 ms) real-time pose tracking without feature detection that is using raw point clouds from a 3D LiDAR. Motivated by the large amount of information captured by these sensors, we perform a systematic statistical analysis of how many points are actually required to reach an optimal ratio between efficiency and positioning accuracy. Furthermore, initialization from adverse conditions, e.g., poor GPS signal in urban canyons, we also identify the optimal particle filter settings required to ensure convergence. Our findings include that a decimation factor between 100 and 200 on incoming point clouds provides a large savings in computational cost with a negligible loss in localization accuracy for a VLP-16 scanner. Furthermore, an initial density of $\sim$2 particles/m$^2$ is required to achieve 100% convergence success for large-scale ($\sim$100,000 m$^2$), outdoor global localization without any additional hint from GPS or magnetic field sensors. All implementations have been released as open-source software.

Image and face recognition platforms and solutions have been a major focus in the technology sector over the past two decades. Images and face recognition technology are used in many industries, including healthcare, security, e-commerce and security. This has resulted in remarkable progress. Experts believe this technology can perform at or even surpass human-level in many medical diagnoses and security domains. Many brands now use image recognition technology to harness the intersection of visual analytics and text to understand the industry and target audience, and to deploy visual intelligence to drive meaningful communications.

In 2015, Elon Musk guessed that the industry should expect fully autonomous vehicles by 2018--but that never happened. In 2014, Nissan promised multiple, commercially viable driverless vehicles on the market by 2020. While the COVID-19 pandemic did not help the situation, this is another unmet promise. Why do auto manufacturers have to keep moving the goalposts on driverless vehicles? According to a research paper recently published in Nature Communications by the Center for Connected and Automated Transportation (CCAT), one of the obstacles that has hindered the development of autonomous vehicles comes down to a severe inefficiency in the way autonomous vehicle testing and evaluation is performed.

At Topos, we are fascinated by exactly this type of variation and believe it provides a powerful view into the culture of a location. While data sources like the United States Census are useful for understanding broad demographic trends over decades, they give little insight into what defines the moment-to-moment culture of a city, a neighborhood, a street corner. Inspired by thinkers like Walter Benjamin, who, in his unfinished Arcades Project examined subjects as varied as fashion, construction materials, poetry, lighting, and mirrors in order to understand Paris in the 19th century, we are fascinated by the way seemingly simple, ubiquitous subjects like the coffee we drink or the concerts we go to define a place. However, unlike Benjamin, we are interested in constructing this understanding in a way that can dynamically scale across the globe, allowing us to understand how different locations relate to one another, and how locations evolve in real time. To achieve this, we use data from dozens of different sources and techniques from a wide range of technologies and disciplines including computer vision, natural language processing, statistics, machine learning, network science, topology, architecture and urbanism.

Elon Musk is reportedly launching an investigation into an employee who sabotaged the company. Elon Musk, Chief Executive Officer of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, speaks on the final day of the 68th International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia, on Sept. 29, 2017. Elon Musk has called lidar a crutch. The Tesla CEO believes he can build self-driving and semi-autonomous cars without relying on the technology, which uses lasers to help the cars map and navigate their surroundings. Instead, Tesla has looked to cameras and radar -- without lidar -- to do much of the work needed for its Autopilot driver assistance system.

This listing is intended as an introduction to the literature on Artificial Intelligence, €”i.e., to the literature dealing with the problem of making machines behave intelligently. We have divided this area into categories and cross-indexed the references accordingly. Large bibliographies without some classification facility are next to useless. This particular field is still young, but there are already many instances in which workers have wasted much time in rediscovering (for better or for worse) schemes already reported. In the last year or two this problem has become worse, and in such a situation just about any information is better than none. This bibliography is intended to serve just that purpose-to present some information about this literature. The selection was confined mainly to publications directly concerned with construction of artificial problem-solving systems. Many peripheral areas are omitted completely or represented only by a few citations.IRE Trans. on Human Factors in Electronics, HFE-2, pages 39-55