A social media user filmed what appeared to be drones flying over the Fairfield train station. Several drones were allegedly spotted in the skies above a Connecticut suburb on Thursday night, adding to recent drone sightings that have perplexed locals and raised questions about possible national security and public safety concerns. A social media user on X posted videos of possible drones in Fairfield, 55 miles northeast of New York City. Drones hovering over New Jersey and near Staten Island, New York in recent weeks have raised concerns amid a lack of clarity over their origin. A social media user said she filmed several drones hovering over Fairfield, Connecticut on Thursday night.

I'm in the middle seat of a Chrysler Pacifica minivan, heading north on Dobson Road in Chandler, Arizona, when I notice we may have taken a wrong turn. Under normal circumstances, I would just lean forward and ask the driver for an explanation. There is, after all, no driver to ask. Last October, Alphabet's self-driving subsidiary Waymo emailed its customers in the suburbs of Phoenix to let them know that "completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way." For several years, Waymo has offered its autonomous taxi service to a small group of people, but the rides typically included a safety driver behind the steering wheel. Now, Waymo is saying more of those rides will take place sans safety driver, a sign that the company is growing confident in the accuracy of its technology.

Hardly a week goes by without fresh signposts that our self-driving future is just around the corner. It will likely take decades to come to fruition. And many of the companies that built their paper fortunes on the idea we'd get there soon are already adjusting their strategies to fit this reality. Uber, for example, recently closed its self-driving truck project, and suspended road testing self-driving cars after one of its vehicles killed a pedestrian. Uber's chief executive even announced he would be open to partnering with its biggest competitor in self-driving tech, Alphabet Inc. subsidiary Waymo.

Anthony Rowe, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, wants bikes to feed information to nearby cars to avoid collisions. His back is fitted with an array of precise instruments and a battery hidden in the water bottle. Anthony Rowe, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, wants bikes to feed information to nearby cars to avoid collisions. His back is fitted with an array of precise instruments and a battery hidden in the water bottle. Proponents of self-driving cars say they'll make the world safer, but autonomous vehicles need to predict what bicyclists are going to do.

The fact that Google's bubble-like self-driving car, unveiled this week, lacks a steering wheel might be seen as evidence the company's software is close to mastering the challenges of piloting a vehicle. But the car's design is just as much a consequence of what Google's existing fleet of automated Lexus SUVs revealed about human laziness. Google's engineers had been focused on perfecting how well those modified cars could handle freeway driving, and they imagined their technology hitting the market in a way that left humans sharing driving duties with their vehicle. "The idea was that the human drives onto the freeway, engages the system, [and] it takes them on the bulk of the trip--the boring part--and then they reëngage," said Nathaniel Fairfield, a technical lead on the project, speaking at the Embedded Vision Summit in Santa Clara, California, on Thursday. That approach had to be scrapped after tests showed that human drivers weren't trustworthy enough to be co-pilots to Google's software. When people began riding in one of the vehicles, they paid close attention to what the car was doing and to activity on the road around them, which meant the hand-off between person and machine was smooth.

In 700,000 miles of navigating Bay Area and other roads, Google's self-driving cars have encountered just about everything -- including an elderly woman in a motorized wheelchair flailing a broom at a duck she was chasing around the street. Apparently perplexed and taking no chances, the vehicle stopped and refused to go further. Through extensive testing covering nearly every street in Mountain View, the company's 20 or so autonomous vehicles have developed an abiding sense of caution. But Google researchers concede it will take more experience on the roads before the autos can learn to cope with every situation without becoming bewildered and shutting down, stranding passengers. When that happens now, researchers have to take the wheel and step on the gas.

When Steve Mahan was a kid in the 1960s, his mother would sometimes wake him in the early hours of the morning to watch the hours of television coverage preceding the launch of the Mercury space missions. "We would hear about all of the preparations, all of the technology, everything that led up to these moments," Mahan says. "And then we would count down'till you finally got to zero and ignition, and one of those rockets begins bellowing fire and smoke, and slowly begins to creep away from the grapples. Now 63 and having lost his sight, Mahan has become one of those capsule-bound explorers. In October 2015, he became the first member of the public to ride in Google's self-driving pod-like prototype, alone and on public roads.

A blind man has successfully traveled around Austin -- unaccompanied -- in a car without a steering wheel or floor pedals, Google announced Tuesday. After years of testing by Google engineers and employees, the company's new level of confidence in its fully autonomous technology was described as a milestone. "We've had almost driverless technology for a decade," said Google engineer Nathaniel Fairfield. "It's the hard parts of driving that really take the time and the effort to do right." Steve Mahan, who is legally blind, was the first non-Google employee to ride alone in the company's gumdrop-shaped autonomous car.

When experiencing or describing a new place people will often compare it against other places that they already know. However, this human attention to the simultaneous similarities and differences between places is not reflected in the design of user interfaces of current place search technologies. In this demo, we present Frankenplace, an application for doing similarity-based place search that allows users to interactively find new places based on mixtures of features drawn from different places. The features of places are derived from a combination of authoritative data sources and unstructured observation data from social media, and organized into an extensible set of layers. We demonstrate the Frankenplace interface, which lets a user build a profile of a target place by selecting the most relevant of the properties shared by known places.