apple engineer
Apple Engineers Are Inspecting Bacon Packaging to Help Level Up US Manufacturers
Initial participants in the new Apple Manufacturing Academy tell WIRED that the tech giant's surprising frankness and hands-on support are already benefiting their bottom lines. An instructor at the Apple Manufacturing Academy in Detroit demonstrates how an iPhone and optical inspection software can be used to photograph and automatically identify an issue with a part. About 10 Apple employees spent some of their valuable hours over recent months on a project that might seem unusual for the tech giant: customizing an open source AI tool for ImageTek, a small manufacturer in Springfield, Vermont whose lines of business include printing millions of labels for food packaging. The Apple engineers developed a computer vision system to automatically identify color errors, and on one run it picked up bacon labels with a far-too-pinkish beige before they got shipped, according to Marji Smith, ImageTek's president. She says the timely catch helped ImageTek from losing a crucial customer.
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Tesla settles lawsuit over Autopilot crash that killed Apple engineer
Electric carmaker Tesla has settled a lawsuit brought by the family of an Apple engineer who was killed when his Model X swerved off a California highway while on autopilot. Tesla settled with the family of Wei Lun Huang in the wrongful death suit they filed over the crash in Mountain View, California in 2018, court filings showed on Monday. The settlement means that Tesla will avoid a jury trial that would have focused scrutiny on its self-driving technology months ahead of the scheduled launch of its self-driving Robotaxi in August. The amount Tesla paid to settle the case was not disclosed in court documents after the company asked that it remain under seal. Huang's family filed a negligence and wrongful death lawsuit in 2019 accusing Tesla of liability due to exaggerated claims about the firm's self-driving technology.
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Tesla settles lawsuit over 2018 fatal Autopilot crash of Apple engineer
Tesla has settled a lawsuit over a car crash which killed an Apple engineer in 2018 after his car veered off a highway near San Francisco, court documents showed on Monday. The settlement was made as the trial was about to start over the high-profile accident involving Tesla's driver assistant technology, ending a five-year legal battle over the case. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed. The case involves a highway accident that killed Walter Huang. Tesla had contended Huang misused the system because he was playing a video game just before the accident.
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Tesla settles case over fatal 2018 crash of an Apple engineer
Details of the settlement, which were released in a court filing Monday -- the day before the trail was set to begin -- were not disclosed. Tesla is currently facing several lawsuits regarding its Autopilot technology heading to trial this year, and this case appears to be the first time the company has settled in one of these cases.
Tesla video promoting self-driving was staged, senior engineer testifies
A 2016 video that Tesla used to promote its self-driving technology was staged to show capabilities like stopping at a red light and accelerating at a green light that the system did not have, according to testimony by a senior engineer. The video, which remains archived on Tesla's website, was released in October 2016 and promoted on Twitter by Elon Musk as evidence that "Tesla drives itself". But the Model X was not driving itself with technology Tesla had deployed, Ashok Elluswamy, director of Autopilot software at Tesla, said in the transcript of a July deposition taken as evidence in a lawsuit against Tesla for a 2018 fatal crash involving a former Apple engineer. The previously unreported testimony by Elluswamy represents the first time a Tesla employee has confirmed and detailed how the video was produced. The video carries a tagline saying: "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself."
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Apple engineer arrested for stealing secret files on tech giant's automated car plans
An ex-Apple engineer has been charged with stealing secret blueprints for the tech giant's automated car project before trying to flee the US for China. Xiaolang Zhang was arrested by FBI agents at San Jose airport in California on Saturday when he passed through a security checkpoint. He is accused of downloading the plan for a circuit board for the automated car just days before he quit to go to a Chinese self-driving car startup. The charge is punishable by 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. A criminal complaint filed on Monday said Zhang was hired by Apple in December of 2015 to develop software and hardware for the company's autonomous vehicle project, where he designed and tested circuit boards to analyze sensor data.
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Apple's Plans to Bring Artificial Intelligence to Your Phone
Apple describes its mobile devices as designed in California and assembled in China. You could also say they were made by the App Store, launched a decade ago next month, a year after the first iPhone. Inviting outsiders to craft useful, entertaining, or even puerile extensions to the iPhone's capabilities transformed the device into the era-defining franchise that enabled Uber and Snapchat. Craig Federighi, Apple's head of software, is tasked with keeping that wellspring of new ideas flowing. One of his main strategies is to get more app developers to use artificial intelligence tools such as recognizing objects in front of an iPhone's camera. The hope is that will spawn a new generation of ideas from Apple's ecosystem of outsourced innovation.
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Apple's Plans to Bring Artificial Intelligence to Your Phone
Apple describes its mobile devices as designed in California and assembled in China. You could also say they were made by the App Store, launched a decade ago next month, a year after the first iPhone. Inviting outsiders to craft useful, entertaining, or even peurile extensions to the iPhone's capabilities transformed the device into the era-defining franchise that enabled Uber and Snapchat. Craig Federighi, Apple's head of software, is tasked with keeping that wellspring of new ideas flowing. One of his main strategies is to get more app developers to use artificial intelligence tools such as recognizing objects in front of an iPhone's camera. The hope is that will spawn a new generation of ideas from Apple's ecosystem of outsourced innovation.
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Tesla says vehicle in fatal crash was on Autopilot even though victim complained repeatedly about it
Tesla says the vehicle in a fatal California crash was operating on autopilot, the latest accident to involve self-driving technology. The automaker says 38-year-old Walter Huang, who was killed in the accident on March 23, did not have his hands on the steering wheel for six seconds before the crash. But according to Huang's family, the Mountain View resident complained'before' the accident about the car's autopilot feature. His brother, Will, alleged that Walter raised concerns that '7-10 times the car would swivel toward that same exact barrier during autopilot.' But according to Huang's family, the Mountain View resident complained'before' the accident about the car's autopilot feature He added: 'Walter took it into dealership addressing the issue, but they couldn't duplicate it there.'
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Apple Stepping Up Plans for Amazon Echo-Style Smart-Home Device
Apple Inc. is pressing ahead with the development of an Echo-like smart-home device based on the Siri voice assistant, according to people familiar with the matter. Started more than two years ago, the project has exited the research and development lab and is now in prototype testing, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing unannounced Apple projects. Like Amazon Inc.'s Echo, the device is designed to control appliances, locks, lights and curtains via voice activation, the people said. Apple hasn't finalized plans for the device and could still scrap the project. If a product reaches the market, it would be Apple's most significant piece of new hardware since the company announced the Apple Watch in 2014.