WASHINGTON, April 11 (Reuters) - A major U.S. transport union on Tuesday opposed a request by Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) self-driving unit Waymo and autonomous driving technology company Aurora Innovation Inc (AUR.O) for an exemption from rules on warning devices for large semi-trucks, citing safety issues. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) said last month it received a joint application from Waymo and Aurora seeking a five-year exemption from rules that require drivers to place reflective triangles or a flare around a stopped truck to alert other drivers and help prevent a crash. Aurora and Waymo instead want to use warning beacons mounted on the truck cab to avoid needing human drivers. The Transport Workers Union of America said the petition is "inappropriate, represents an overreach and a misuse of the waiver and exemption process, and would significantly diminish the safety of our roads. It should be rejected in the strongest possible terms."

Post-training quantization (PTQ) is a popular method for compressing deep neural networks (DNNs) without modifying their original architecture or training procedures. Despite its effectiveness and convenience, the reliability of PTQ methods in the presence of some extrem cases such as distribution shift and data noise remains largely unexplored. This paper first investigates this problem on various commonly-used PTQ methods. We aim to answer several research questions related to the influence of calibration set distribution variations, calibration paradigm selection, and data augmentation or sampling strategies on PTQ reliability. A systematic evaluation process is conducted across a wide range of tasks and commonly-used PTQ paradigms. The results show that most existing PTQ methods are not reliable enough in term of the worst-case group performance, highlighting the need for more robust methods. Our findings provide insights for developing PTQ methods that can effectively handle distribution shift scenarios and enable the deployment of quantized DNNs in real-world applications.

Waymo today started giving robotaxi rides, with an autonomous specialist in the driver's seat, to and from the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport today. Members of the company's Trusted Tester Program can now hail one of its all-electric Jaguar I-PACE equipped with a fifth-generation Waymo Driver 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for rides between downtown Phoenix and Phoenix Sky Harbor. The company is working with Phoenix Sky Harbor to offer pickups and dropoffs from the 44th Street Sky Train station. While the rides will have autonomous specialists in them for now, Waymo plans to take them out of the robotaxis and provide rider-only rides in the coming weeks. The company is also working with local leaders and community groups to ensure its meeting their needs.

New Delhi: The Madhya Pradesh government will start a course in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for students from class 8, which will be the first such initiative in the country, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said on Sunday. The government will also launch a veterinary telemedicine facility so that livestock keepers can get advice on the phone regarding diseases of cows and other animals. A similar facility will be launched for farmers so that they can consult experts over the phone regarding agriculture-related problems and diseases of crops, the chief minister told a press conference at Pachmarhi, the lone hill station in MP, located 210 km away from Bhopal. The two-day brainstorming session of the Madhya Pradesh cabinet held at Pachmarhi ended on Sunday. The state cabinet also took several other decisions including setting up Sanjivani clinics in urban areas and regarding transportation policy for rural areas.

In the new era of technology Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the next big thing. Keeping this in mind, at least 53 schools in Madhya Pradesh will teach students of classes 8 and 9 Artificial Intelligence (AI) from this academic session (2021-22). The Madhya Pradesh State Board of Open School Education is set to launch the study of emerging technology artificial intelligence (AI) as separate subjects in the school curriculum. For this, global tech giant Microsoft has been hired to teach the students and also train state teachers to enhance their understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Around 1,500 teachers and over 40,000 students will be benefitted from this project.

Waymo Via, Waymo's autonomous truck unit, announced on Wednesday the construction of a hub for its fleet of autonomous trucks in Dallas, and a partnership with trucking company Ryder. The double announcement came as Waymo prepares to grow its delivery operations across Texas, California and Arizona. After raising $2.5 billion from outside investors in June, the Alphabet-owned company said today that its new primary operations center will be in a nine-acre site in South Dallas, and the company will move into it in the first half of 2022. Th self-driving truck company has started testing on the fifth generation of its Driver on the Class 8 trucks fleet as it continues freight hauling for JB Hunt. The hub will accommodate hundreds of trucks and personnel.

When we enforce differential privacy in machine learning, the utility-privacy trade-off is different w.r.t. each group. Gradient clipping and random noise addition disproportionately affect underrepresented and complex classes and subgroups, which results in inequality in utility loss. In this work, we analyze the inequality in utility loss by differential privacy and propose a modified differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DPSGD), called DPSGD-F, to remove the potential disparate impact of differential privacy on the protected group. DPSGD-F adjusts the contribution of samples in a group depending on the group clipping bias such that differential privacy has no disparate impact on group utility. Our experimental evaluation shows how group sample size and group clipping bias affect the impact of differential privacy in DPSGD, and how adaptive clipping for each group helps to mitigate the disparate impact caused by differential privacy in DPSGD-F.

Young students can shape up their career orientation only when they are not loaded with content-based curriculum, CBSE's Skill Education Director Biswajit Saha said on Tuesday. The flexibility in the system should be adopted by the school curriculum and the focus needs to be on activity-based skill formation of students, he said at an education summit organised by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India. As part of new-age skill education, CBSE has planned to offer Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an optional sixth subject for class 11 students from academic session 2109-20 onwards. Further, an AI-inspired module of 12 hours will be introduced for class 8 students by CBSE. Apart from artificial intelligence, subjects such as yoga, early childhood education will also be introduced as electives.

Young students can shape up their career orientation only when they are not loaded with content-based curriculum, CBSE's Skill Education Director Biswajit Saha said on Tuesday. The flexibility in the system should be adopted by the school curriculum and the focus needs to be on activity-based skill formation of students, he said at an education summit organised by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India. As part of new-age skill education, CBSE has planned to offer Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an optional sixth subject for class 11 students from academic session 2109-20 onwards. Further, an AI-inspired module of 12 hours will be introduced for class 8 students by CBSE. Apart from artificial intelligence, subjects such as yoga, early childhood education will also be introduced as electives.

IT firm Hexagon to introduce the nuts and bolts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to school students from Class 8. The AI Community Centre, which will offer free courses, to come up in Hyderabad early next year. Stockholm (Sweden)-based Hexagon, a sensor, software and autonomous solutions, has tied up the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) to establish the AI Community Centre. "The school is open to all. It will run introductory courses in AI for students from Class 8 to senior level, which include engineering students," Navaneet Mishra, vice-president and Country Manager of Hexagon Capability Center India (HCCI), said.