3:30 PM
The next segment of the Emerging Technologies Conference is titled "DARPA Grand Challenge and Beyond -- The winner of DARPA's famed $2 million autonomous vehicle competition discusses the race and the future of robotic vehicles."
Sebastian Thrun, Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University, and DARPA Grand Challenge Winner, was a presenter at the Singularity Summit that I covered earlier this year, so I hope he'll have something new to show us or tell us. It's a field that fascinates me, and that could be greatly accelerated by molecular manufacturing.
So far, his presentation seems to be the same one that I saw before. It's highly amusing, though, with a lot of video from the DARPA race. Sebastian's got a lot of talent, even charisma, as a presenter; I could see him becoming a media star like Carl Sagan someday.
As Thrun explains the combination of laser scanning, TV camera vision, and adaptive artificial intelligence that guided his team's robot car, it's clear that innovative new approaches are being developed through this DARPA challenge, and others like them. Next up is the DARPA Urban Challenge, scheduled for November 2007. Thrun is decsribing the new difficulties that robotic vehicles will encounter in an urban setting, as opposed to a desert environment.
He's wrapping up his talk with statistics about the costs of human-caused traffic accidents as well as the potential savings in traffic jam avoidance wth robot control. "Autonomous cars for everyone" is his goal. This truly sounds like a technology whose time has come.
In answering an audience question, Thrun said that the United States has lost its lead in robotics to Japan and Europe, and that, in fact, the only technology application areas in which the US still leads the world are outer space and military.
4:20 PM
The final speaker of the day is Marc Chapman of IBM who is presenting the results from a survey of CEOs and their insights on where business, technology, and innovation are headed. I'm going to skip reporting on this one: it seems to be standard Fortune magazine fare. In fact, a lot of the audience is starting to drift out. If you'd like to learn about this survey, you can Google for it. I think I'm going to join the exodus, and go spend some time with my niece. I'll see you tomorrow morning for Day Two.
Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog tretc
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