technology:3-d

‘It’s an Act of Murder’: How Europe Outsources Suffering as Migrants Drown

This short film, produced by The Times’s Opinion Video team and the research groups #Forensic_Architecture and #Forensic_Oceanography, reconstructs a tragedy at sea that left at least 20 migrants dead. Combining footage from more than 10 cameras, 3-D modeling and interviews with rescuers and survivors, the documentary shows Europe’s role in the migrant crisis at sea.

On Nov. 6, 2017, at least 20 people trying to reach Europe from Libya drowned in the Mediterranean, foundering next to a sinking raft.

Not far from the raft was a ship belonging to Sea-Watch, a German humanitarian organization. That ship had enough space on it for everyone who had been aboard the raft. It could have brought them all to the safety of Europe, where they might have had a chance at being granted asylum.

Instead, 20 people drowned and 47 more were captured by the Libyan Coast Guard, which brought the migrants back to Libya, where they suffered abuse — including rape and torture.

This confrontation at sea was not a simplistic case of Europe versus Africa, with human rights and rescue on one side and chaos and danger on the other. Rather it’s a case of Europe versus Europe: of volunteers struggling to save lives being undercut by European Union policies that outsource border control responsibilities to the Libyan Coast Guard — with the aim of stemming arrivals on European shores.

While funding, equipping and directing the Libyan Coast Guard, European governments have stymied the activities of nongovernmental organizations like Sea-Watch, criminalizing them or impounding their ships, or turning away from ports ships carrying survivors.

More than 14,000 people have died or gone missing while trying to cross the central Mediterranean since 2014. But unlike most of those deaths and drownings, the incident on Nov. 6, 2017, was extensively documented.

Sea-Watch’s ship and rescue rafts were outfitted with nine cameras, documenting the entire scene in video and audio. The Libyans, too, filmed parts of the incident on their mobile phones.

The research groups Forensic Architecture and Forensic Oceanography of Goldsmiths, University of London, of which three of us — Mr. Heller, Mr. Pezzani and Mr. Weizman — are a part, combined these video sources with radio recordings, vessel tracking data, witness testimonies and newly obtained official sources to produce a minute-by-minute reconstruction of the facts. Opinion Video at The New York Times built on this work to create the above short documentary, gathering further testimonials by some of the survivors and rescuers who were there.

This investigation makes a few things clear: European governments are avoiding their legal and moral responsibilities to protect the human rights of people fleeing violence and economic desperation. More worrying, the Libyan Coast Guard partners that Europe is collaborating with are ready to blatantly violate those rights if it allows them to prevent migrants from crossing the sea.

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Stopping Migrants, Whatever the Cost

To understand the cynicism of Europe’s policies in the Mediterranean, one must understand the legal context. According to a 2012 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, migrants rescued by European civilian or military vessels must be taken to a safe port. Because of the chaotic political situation in Libya and well-documented human rights abuses in detention camps there, that means a European port, often in Italy or Malta.

But when the Libyan Coast Guard intercepts migrants, even outside Libyan territorial waters, as it did on Nov. 6, the Libyans take them back to detention camps in Libya, which is not subject to European Court of Human Rights jurisdiction.

For Italy — and Europe — this is an ideal situation. Europe is able to stop people from reaching its shores while washing its hands of any responsibility for their safety.

This policy can be traced back to February 2017, when Italy and the United Nations-supported Libyan Government of National Accord signed a “memorandum of understanding” that provided a framework for collaboration on development, to fight against “illegal immigration,” human trafficking and the smuggling of contraband. This agreement defines clearly the aim, “to stem the illegal migrants’ flows,” and committed Italy to provide “technical and technological support to the Libyan institutions in charge of the fight against illegal immigration.”

Libyan Coast Guard members have been trained by the European Union, and the Italian government donated or repaired several patrol boats and supported the establishment of a Libyan search-and-rescue zone. Libyan authorities have since attempted — in defiance of maritime law — to make that zone off-limits to nongovernmental organizations’ rescue vessels. Italian Navy ships, based in Tripoli, have coordinated Libyan Coast Guard efforts.

Before these arrangements, Libyan actors were able to intercept and return very few migrants leaving from Libyan shores. Now the Libyan Coast Guard is an efficient partner, having intercepted some 20,000 people in 2017 alone.

The Libyan Coast Guard is efficient when it comes to stopping migrants from reaching Europe. It’s not as good, however, at saving their lives, as the events of Nov. 6 show.

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A Deadly Policy in Action

That morning the migrant raft had encountered worsening conditions after leaving Tripoli, Libya, over night. Someone onboard used a satellite phone to call the Italian Coast Guard for help.

Because the Italians were required by law to alert nearby vessels of the sinking raft, they alerted Sea-Watch to its approximate location. But they also requested the intervention of their Libyan counterparts.

The Libyan Coast Guard vessel that was sent to intervene on that morning, the Ras Jadir, was one of several that had been repaired by Italy and handed back to the Libyans in May of 2017. Eight of the 13 crew members onboard had received training from the European Union anti-smuggling naval program known as Operation Sophia.

Even so, the Libyans brought the Ras Jadir next to the migrants’ raft, rather than deploying a smaller rescue vessel, as professional rescuers do. This offered no hope of rescuing those who had already fallen overboard and only caused more chaos, during which at least five people died.

These deaths were not merely a result of a lack of professionalism. Some of the migrants who had been brought aboard the Ras Jadir were so afraid of their fate at the hands of the Libyans that they jumped back into the water to try to reach the European rescuers. As can be seen in the footage, members of the Libyan Coast Guard beat the remaining migrants.

Sea-Watch’s crew was also attacked by the Libyan Coast Guard, who threatened them and threw hard objects at them to keep them away. This eruption of violence was the result of a clash between the goals of rescue and interception, with the migrants caught in the middle desperately struggling for their lives.

Apart from those who died during this chaos, more than 15 people had already drowned in the time spent waiting for any rescue vessel to appear.

There was, however, no shortage of potential rescuers in the area: A Portuguese surveillance plane had located the migrants’ raft after its distress call. An Italian Navy helicopter and a French frigate were nearby and eventually offered some support during the rescue.

It’s possible that this French ship, deployed as part of Operation Sophia, could have reached the sinking vessel earlier, in time to save more lives — despite our requests, this information has not been disclosed to us. But it remained at a distance throughout the incident and while offering some support, notably refrained from taking migrants onboard who would then have had to have been disembarked on European soil. It’s an example of a hands-off approach that seeks to make Libyan intervention not only possible but also inevitable.

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A Legal Challenge

On the basis of the forensic reconstruction, the Global Legal Action Network and the Association for Juridical Studies on Immigration, with the support of Yale Law School students, have filed a case against Italy at the European Court of Human Rights representing 17 survivors of this incident.

Those working on the suit, who include two of us — Mr. Mann and Ms. Moreno-Lax — argue that even though Italian or European personnel did not physically intercept the migrants and bring them back to Libya, Italy exercised effective control over the Libyan Coast Guard through mutual agreements, support and on-the-ground coordination. Italy has entrusted the Libyans with a task that Rome knows full well would be illegal if undertaken directly: preventing migrants from seeking protection in Europe by impeding their flight and sending them back to a country where extreme violence and exploitation await.

We hope this legal complaint will lead the European court to rule that countries cannot subcontract their legal and humanitarian obligations to dubious partners, and that if they do, they retain responsibility for the resulting violations. Such a precedent would force the entire European Union to make sure its cooperation with partners like Libya does not end up denying refugees the right to seek asylum.

This case is especially important right now. In Italy’s elections in March, the far-right Lega party, which campaigned on radical anti-immigrant rhetoric, took nearly 20 percent of the vote. The party is now part of the governing coalition, of which its leader, Matteo Salvini, is the interior minister.

His government has doubled down on animosity toward migrants. In June, Italy took the drastic step of turning away a humanitarian vessel from the country’s ports and has been systematically blocking rescued migrants from being disembarked since then, even when they had been assisted by the Italian Coast Guard.

The Italian crackdown helps explain why seafarers off the Libyan coast have refrained from assisting migrants in distress, leaving them to drift for days. Under the new Italian government, a new batch of patrol boats has been handed over to the Libyan Coast Guard, and the rate of migrants being intercepted and brought back to Libya has increased. All this has made the crossing even more dangerous than before.

Italy has been seeking to enact a practice that blatantly violates the spirit of the Geneva Convention on refugees, which enshrines the right to seek asylum and prohibits sending people back to countries in which their lives are at risk. A judgment by the European Court sanctioning Italy for this practice would help prevent the outsourcing of border control and human rights violations that may prevent the world’s most disempowered populations from seeking protection and dignity.

The European Court of Human Rights cannot stand alone as a guardian of fundamental rights. Yet an insistence on its part to uphold the law would both reflect and bolster the movements seeking solidarity with migrants across Europe.

▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/26/opinion/europe-migrant-crisis-mediterranean-libya.html
#reconstruction #naufrage #Méditerranée #Charles_Heller #Lorenzo_Pezzani #asile #migrations #réfugiés #mourir_en_mer #ONG #sauvetage #Sea-Watch #gardes-côtes_libyens #Libye #pull-back #refoulement #externalisation #vidéo #responsabilité #Ras_Jadir #Operation_Sophia #CEDH #cour_européenne_des_droits_de_l'homme #justice #droits_humains #droit_à_la_vie

ping @reka

In the Age of A.I., Is Seeing Still Believing ? | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/in-the-age-of-ai-is-seeing-still-believing

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In a media environment saturated with fake news, such technology has disturbing implications. Last fall, an anonymous Redditor with the username Deepfakes released a software tool kit that allows anyone to make synthetic videos in which a neural network substitutes one person’s face for another’s, while keeping their expressions consistent. Along with the kit, the user posted pornographic videos, now known as “deepfakes,” that appear to feature various Hollywood actresses. (The software is complex but comprehensible: “Let’s say for example we’re perving on some innocent girl named Jessica,” one tutorial reads. “The folders you create would be: ‘jessica; jessica_faces; porn; porn_faces; model; output.’ ”) Around the same time, “Synthesizing Obama,” a paper published by a research group at the University of Washington, showed that a neural network could create believable videos in which the former President appeared to be saying words that were really spoken by someone else. In a video voiced by Jordan Peele, Obama seems to say that “President Trump is a total and complete dipshit,” and warns that “how we move forward in the age of information” will determine “whether we become some kind of fucked-up dystopia.”

“People have been doing synthesis for a long time, with different tools,” he said. He rattled off various milestones in the history of image manipulation: the transposition, in a famous photograph from the eighteen-sixties, of Abraham Lincoln’s head onto the body of the slavery advocate John C. Calhoun; the mass alteration of photographs in Stalin’s Russia, designed to purge his enemies from the history books; the convenient realignment of the pyramids on the cover of National Geographic, in 1982; the composite photograph of John Kerry and Jane Fonda standing together at an anti-Vietnam demonstration, which incensed many voters after the Times credulously reprinted it, in 2004, above a story about Kerry’s antiwar activities.

“In the past, anybody could buy Photoshop. But to really use it well you had to be highly skilled,” Farid said. “Now the technology is democratizing.” It used to be safe to assume that ordinary people were incapable of complex image manipulations. Farid recalled a case—a bitter divorce—in which a wife had presented the court with a video of her husband at a café table, his hand reaching out to caress another woman’s. The husband insisted it was fake. “I noticed that there was a reflection of his hand in the surface of the table,” Farid said, “and getting the geometry exactly right would’ve been really hard.” Now convincing synthetic images and videos were becoming easier to make.

The acceleration of home computing has converged with another trend: the mass uploading of photographs and videos to the Web. Later, when I sat down with Efros in his office, he explained that, even in the early two-thousands, computer graphics had been “data-starved”: although 3-D modellers were capable of creating photorealistic scenes, their cities, interiors, and mountainscapes felt empty and lifeless. True realism, Efros said, requires “data, data, data” about “the gunk, the dirt, the complexity of the world,” which is best gathered by accident, through the recording of ordinary life.

Today, researchers have access to systems like ImageNet, a site run by computer scientists at Stanford and Princeton which brings together fourteen million photographs of ordinary places and objects, most of them casual snapshots posted to Flickr, eBay, and other Web sites. Initially, these images were sorted into categories (carrousels, subwoofers, paper clips, parking meters, chests of drawers) by tens of thousands of workers hired through Amazon Mechanical Turk. Then, in 2012, researchers at the University of Toronto succeeded in building neural networks capable of categorizing ImageNet’s images automatically; their dramatic success helped set off today’s neural-networking boom. In recent years, YouTube has become an unofficial ImageNet for video. Efros’s lab has overcome the site’s “platform bias”—its preference for cats and pop stars—by developing a neural network that mines, from “life style” videos such as “My Spring Morning Routine” and “My Rustic, Cozy Living Room,” clips of people opening packages, peering into fridges, drying off with towels, brushing their teeth. This vast archive of the uninteresting has made a new level of synthetic realism possible.

In 2016, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched a program in Media Forensics, or MediFor, focussed on the threat that synthetic media poses to national security. Matt Turek, the program’s manager, ticked off possible manipulations when we spoke: “Objects that are cut and pasted into images. The removal of objects from a scene. Faces that might be swapped. Audio that is inconsistent with the video. Images that appear to be taken at a certain time and place but weren’t.” He went on, “What I think we’ll see, in a couple of years, is the synthesis of events that didn’t happen. Multiple images and videos taken from different perspectives will be constructed in such a way that they look like they come from different cameras. It could be something nation-state driven, trying to sway political or military action. It could come from a small, low-resource group. Potentially, it could come from an individual.”

As with today’s text-based fake news, the problem is double-edged. Having been deceived by a fake video, one begins to wonder whether many real videos are fake. Eventually, skepticism becomes a strategy in itself. In 2016, when the “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced, Donald Trump acknowledged its accuracy while dismissing his statements as “locker-room talk.” Now Trump suggests to associates that “we don’t think that was my voice.”

“The larger danger is plausible deniability,” Farid told me. It’s here that the comparison with counterfeiting breaks down. No cashier opens up the register hoping to find counterfeit bills. In politics, however, it’s often in our interest not to believe what we are seeing.

As alarming as synthetic media may be, it may be more alarming that we arrived at our current crises of misinformation—Russian election hacking; genocidal propaganda in Myanmar; instant-message-driven mob violence in India—without it. Social media was enough to do the job, by turning ordinary people into media manipulators who will say (or share) anything to win an argument. The main effect of synthetic media may be to close off an escape route from the social-media bubble. In 2014, video of the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner helped start the Black Lives Matter movement; footage of the football player Ray Rice assaulting his fiancée catalyzed a reckoning with domestic violence in the National Football League. It seemed as though video evidence, by turning us all into eyewitnesses, might provide a path out of polarization and toward reality. With the advent of synthetic media, all that changes. Body cameras may still capture what really happened, but the aesthetic of the body camera—its claim to authenticity—is also a vector for misinformation. “Eyewitness video” becomes an oxymoron. The path toward reality begins to wash away.

#Fake_news #Image #Synthèse

Preserving snapshots of Cambridge’s anti-women protests
▻https://www.varsity.co.uk/features/15985

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When the question was first posited in 1897 of whether women attending Girton and Newnham should be granted Cambridge degrees equal in value to those awarded to men, male undergraduates protested by burning effigies of female scholars and throwing fireworks into the windows of women’s colleges.

Now, a series of items collected during the Cambridge street protests opposing admission of women to the University – rockets, confetti, and eggshells from the near-riots – are to be photographed and archived for public record.

Archivist Sian Collins, of the University Library Department of Archives and Modern Manuscripts, said that the materials offer insight into an “extraordinary time”. She told the BBC, “it’s not an eyewitness description or a newspaper report – these were actual items used to victimise people, things that don’t normally survive”.

An entry description of the artifacts detailed how they serve as a “tangible and unusual reminder of the depth of outrage felt by male students in Cambridge” at the prospect of “granting equality to female students”.

When the Senate House vote was first held in 1897 on whether to accept women as full members of the University, female students suffered a defeat of 661 votes in favour and 1,707 votes opposed – a decision which would not be overturned until 1948. In celebration of the 1897 decision, male protesters maimed and decapitated an effigy of a female Cambridge student before pushing the remains through the gates of Newnham College.

A second Senate House vote on whether to grant female students full membership to the University was held in 1921. The repeated defeat of the motion inspired a crowd of male undergraduates to use a coal trolley as a battering ram, smashing and partially destroying Newnham College’s Clough Memorial Gates.

Cambridge University’s history with its female students has been fraught with institutional apathy, and its progression toward equality slow: as men violently opposed the push for equal University status, several women made landmark academic achievements to little acclaim – their Tripos marks not considered comparable to male students who had taken identical exams.

Cambridge was the last university in the UK to grant its female students equal rights, despite having allowed women to attend certain lectures from the 1870s, and to take Cambridge exams from 1881.

The last Cambridge college to fully integrate women did so even later, in 1988, when Magdalene accepted its first cohort of women. In protest of the decision at the time, Magdalene men wore black armbands and flew the college’s flag at half-mast, ‘mourning’ the end to an exclusively male College.

The artifacts from the 1897 protests, currently stored at Cambridge University Library, are to be digitised by a process which may involve the use of 3-D imagery. Cambridge Digital Library announced that it would digitise the items after its entry received a plurality of votes in the Library’s ‘digitisation competition’, where certain objects were voted on whether to be made publicly available online. A Portolan chart of the Aegean Sea, the paintings and drawings of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, and the ‘Golden Book’ of the Cambridge University Music Club, are also set to be made digitally available to the public.

When the 1897 artifacts were suggested for digitisation by the Cambridge Digital Library, an entry description wrote, “these fragile items bring home how physically threatening it must have felt for these women, who simply wanted their hard work and exam success acknowledged equally.” In providing public access to the symbols of the anti-women riots, the Library offers a glimpse into a period of Cambridge’s history malaised by its archaism, where its community was not only lagging behind the curve, but actively – and violently – fighting against it.

#sexisme #masculinisme #discrimination #élites #mémoire #archives

Interview with #Forensic_Architecture Founder #Eyal_Weizman | 2018-05-01 | Architectural Record
▻https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/13367-interview-with-forensic-architecture-founder-eyal-weizman

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Born in Israel and educated at the Architectural Association (AA), Eyal Weizman could be considered more a detective than an architect. In 2011, Weizman established Forensic Architecture, an agency based at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. He directs the center. The group, whose funders include the European Research Council, combs through data such as smartphone footage, satellite imagery, maps, and phone logs to create three-dimensional spatial maps of conflict sites, using architectural rendering software and other analytic tools. Significant projects have included full-scale replicas of key elements of Auschwitz gas chambers and incinerators for an exhibit at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, and an investigation into the U.S. bombing of a Syrian mosque last year. The firm, which was just shortlisted for the Turner Prize, is currently scrutinizing the deadly blaze at London’s Grenfell Tower in June 2017, mining publicly available footage to create a 3-D model that will serve as an open resource for people to better understand the events that led to the fire. Weizman spoke to RECORD from the group’s office at Goldsmiths.

What the hell is a climate model—and why does it matter? - MIT Technology Review
►https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610225/what-the-hell-is-a-climate-modeland-why-does-it-matter

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Climate models are sophisticated computer simulations that approximate how the planet responds to various forces, like surges in carbon dioxide. They break down the oceans, surface, and atmosphere into 3-D boxes and calculate how shifting conditions track across time and space.

Basic gains in computing power have driven many of the improvements. Those boxes were about 500 square kilometers in 1990. For some of today’s highest-resolution models, including the Department of Energy’s E3SM, Japan’s MRI, and China’s FGOALS, they are under 25 square kilometers. The resolution gets higher still for specific applications, such as modeling hurricanes.

In addition, the earliest climate models in the 1960s were focused on the atmosphere, but now they take into account land surfaces, sea ice, aerosols, the carbon cycle, vegetation, and atmospheric chemistry. More recently, models have started to incorporate the ways that human behavior shifts in response to climate change, including migration and deforestation.

#modélisation #climat

Before Self-Driving Cars Become Real, They Face These Challenges | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/self-driving-cars-challenges

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OH, THE UNTAINTED optimism of 2014. In the spring of that year, the good Swedes at Volvo introduced Drive Me, a program to get regular Josefs, Frejas, Joeys, and Fayes into autonomous vehicles. By 2017, Volvo executives promised, the company would distribute 100 self-driving SUVs to families in Gothenburg, Sweden. The cars would be able to ferry their passengers through at least 30 miles of local roads, in everyday driving conditions—all on their own. “The technology, which will be called Autopilot, enables the driver to hand over the driving to the vehicle, which takes care of all driving functions,” said Erik Coelingh, a technical lead at Volvo.

Now, in the waning weeks of 2017, Volvo has pushed back its plans. By four years. Automotive News reports the company now plans to put 100 people in self-driving cars by 2021, and “self-driving” might be a stretch. The guinea pigs will start off testing the sort of semi-autonomous features available to anyone willing to pony up for a new Volvo (or Tesla, Cadillac, Nissan, or Mercedes).

“On the journey, some of the questions that we thought were really difficult to answer have been answered much faster than we expected,” Marcus Rothoff, the carmaker’s autonomous driving program director, told the publication. “And in some areas, we are finding that there were more issues to dig into and solve than we expected.” Namely, price. Rothoff said the company was loath to nail down the cost of its sensor set before it knew how it would work, so Volvo couldn’t quite determine what people would pay for the privilege in riding in or owning one. CEO Hakan Samuelsson has said self-driving functionality could add about $10,000 to the sticker price.

Volvo’s retreat is just the latest example of a company cooling on optimistic self-driving car predictions. In 2012, Google CEO Sergey Brin said even normies would have access to autonomous vehicles in fewer than five years—nope. Those who shelled out an extra $3,000 for Tesla’s Enhanced Autopilot are no doubt disappointed by its non-appearance, nearly six months after its due date. New Ford CEO Jim Hackett recently moderated expectations for the automaker’s self-driving service, which his predecessor said in 2016 would be deployed at scale by 2021. “We are going to be in the market with products in that time frame,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “But the nature of the romanticism by everybody in the media about how this robot works is overextended right now.”

The scale-backs haven’t dampened the enthusiasm for money-throwing. Venture capital firm CB Insights estimates self-driving car startups—ones building autonomous driving software, driver safety tools, and vehicle-to-vehicle communications, and stockpiling and crunching data while doing it—have sucked in more than $3 billion in funding this year.

To track the evolution of any major technology, research firm Gartner’s “hype cycle” methodology is a handy guide. You start with an “innovation trigger,” the breakthrough, and soon hit the “peak of inflated expectations,” when the money flows and headlines blare.

And then there’s the trough of disillusionment, when things start failing, falling short of expectations, and hoovering up less money than before. This is where the practical challenges and hard realities separate the vaporware from the world-changers. Self-driving, it seems, is entering the trough. Welcome to the hard part.

Technical Difficulties
“Autonomous technology is where computing was in the 60s, meaning that the technology is nascent, it’s not modular, and it is yet to be determined how the different parts will fit together,” says Shahin Farshchi, a partner at the venture capital firm Lux Capital, who once built hybrid electric vehicles for General Motors, and has invested in self-driving startup Zoox, as well as sensor-builder Aeva.)

Turns out building a self-driving car takes more than strapping sensors and software onto a set of wheels. In an almost startlingly frank Medium post, Bryan Salesky, who heads up Ford-backed autonomous vehicle outfit Argo AI, laid out the hurdles facing his team.

First, he says, came the sensor snags. Self-driving cars need at least three kinds to function—lidar, which can see clearly in 3-D; cameras, for color and detail; and radar, with can detect objects and their velocities at long distances. Lidar, in particular, doesn’t come cheap: A setup for one car can cost $75,000. Then the vehicles need to take the info from those pricey sensors and fuse it together, extracting what they need to operate in the world and discarding what they doesn’t.

“Developing a system that can be manufactured and deployed at scale with cost-effective, maintainable hardware is… challenging,” Salesky writes. (Argo AI bought a lidar company called Princeton Lightwave in October.)

Salesky cites other problems, minor technological quandaries that could prove disastrous once these cars are actually moving through 3-D space. Vehicles need to be able to see, interpret, and predict the behavior of human drivers, human cyclists, and human pedestrians—perhaps even communicate with them. The cars must understand when they’re in another vehicle’s blind spot and drive extra carefully. They have to know (and see, and hear) when a zooming ambulance needs more room.

“Those who think fully self-driving vehicles will be ubiquitous on city streets months from now or even in a few years are not well connected to the state of the art or committed to the safe deployment of the technology,” Salesky writes.

He’s not the only killjoy. “Technology developers are coming to appreciate that the last 1 percent is harder than the first 99 percent,” says Karl Iagnemma, CEO of Nutonomy, a Boston-based self-driving car company acquired by automotive supplier Delphi this fall. “Compared to last 1 percent, the first 99 percent is a walk in the park.”

The smart companies, Iagnemma says, are coming up with comprehensive ways to deal with tricky edge cases, not patching them over with the software equivalent of tape and chewing gum. But that takes time.

Money Worries
Intel estimates self-driving cars could add $7 trillion to the economy by 2050, $2 trillion in the US alone—and that’s not counting the impact the tech could have on trucking or other fields. So it’s curious that no one seems quite sure how to make money off this stuff yet. “The emphasis has shifted as much to the product and the business model as pure technology development,” says Iagnemma.

Those building the things have long insisted you’ll first interact with a self-driving car through a taxi-like service. The tech is too expensive, and will at first be too dependent on weather conditions, topography, and high-quality mapping, to sell straight to consumers. But they haven’t sorted out the user experience part of this equation. Waymo is set to launch a limited, actually driver-free service in Phoenix, Arizona, next year, and says it has come up with a way for passengers to communicate they want to pull over. But the company didn’t let reporters test the functionality during a test drive at its test facility this fall, so you’ll have to take its word for it.

Other questions loom: How do you find your vehicle? Ensure that you’re in the right one? Tell it that you’re having an emergency, or that you’ve had a little accident inside and need a cleanup ASAP? Bigger picture: How does a company even start to recoup its huge research and development budget? How much does it charge per ride? What happens when there’s a crash? Who’s liable, and how much do they have to pay in insurance?

One path forward, money-wise, seems to be shaking hands with enemies. Companies including Waymo, GM, Lyft, Uber, and Intel, and even seemingly extinction-bound players like the car rental firm Avis, have formed partnerships with potential rivals, sharing data and services in the quest to build a real autonomous vehicle, and the infrastructure that will support it.

Still, if you ask an autonomous car developer whether it should be going at it alone—trying to build out sensors, mapping, perception, testing capabilities, plus the car itself—expect a shrug. While a few big carmakers like General Motors clearly seem to think vertical integration is the path to a win (it bought the self-driving outfit Cruise Automation last year, and lidar company Strobe in October), startups providing à la carte services continue to believe they are part of the future. “There are plenty of people quietly making money supplying to automakers,” says Forrest Iandola, the CEO of the perception company DeepScale, citing the success of more traditional automotive suppliers like Bridgestone.

Other companies seize upon niche markets in the self-driving space, betting specific demographics will help them make cash. The self-driving shuttle company Voyage has targeted retirement communities. Optimus Ride, an MIT spinoff, recently announced a pilot project in a new developed community just outside of Boston, and says it’s focused on building software with riders with disabilities in mind.

“We think that kind off approach, providing mobility to those who are not able-bodied, is actually going to create a product that’s much more robust in the end,” says CEO Ryan Chin. Those companies are raising money. (Optimus Ride just came off an $18 million Series A funding round, bringing its cash pull to $23.25 million.) But are theirs viable strategies to survive in the increasingly crowded self-driving space?

The Climb
OK, so you won’t get a fully autonomous car in your driveway anytime soon. Here’s what you can expect, in the next decade or so: Self-driving cars probably won’t operate where you live, unless you’re the denizen of a very particular neighborhood in a big city like San Francisco, New York, or Phoenix. These cars will stick to specific, meticulously mapped areas. If, by luck, you stumble on an autonomous taxi, it will probably force you to meet it somewhere it can safely and legally pull over, instead of working to track you down and assuming hazard lights grant it immunity wherever it stops. You might share that ride with another person or three, à la UberPool.

The cars will be impressive, but not infallible. They won’t know how to deal with all road situations and weather conditions. And you might get some human help. Nissan, for example, is among the companies working on a stopgap called teleoperations, using remote human operators to guide AVs when they get stuck or stumped.

And if you’re not lucky enough to catch a ride, you may well forget about self-driving cars for a few years. You might joke with your friends about how silly you were to believe the hype. But the work will go on quietly, in the background. The news will quiet down as developers dedicate themselves to precise problems, tackling the demons in the details.

The good news is that there seems to be enough momentum to carry this new industry out of the trough and onto what Gartner calls the plateau of productivity. Not everyone who started the journey will make the climb. But those who do, battered and a bit bloody, may just find the cash up there is green, the robots good, and the view stupendous.

#Uber #disruption

Experience the Best Dinosaur Fossil of Its Kind in 3-D
▻http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/06/nodosaur-3d-interactive-dinosaur-fossil

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/magazine/rights-exempt/2017/06/Nodosaur/nodo-og.ngsversion.1494875583665.adapt.1900.1.jpg

le making-off plein de #three.js et de #webgl
▻https://source.opennews.org/articles/resurrecting-dragon

#dinosaure #fossile #3D

Biopunk : Subverting Biopolitics – The New Inquiry
▻https://thenewinquiry.com/biopunk-subverting-biopolitics

https://thenewinquiry.com/app/uploads/2017/06/screenshot-guthack.jpg

My own work has also taken a political and critical approach to working with biotechnology. With Stranger Visions, in 2012, I created portraits of strangers from their abandoned DNA. I began by collecting genetic artifacts I found in public: hair, cigarette butts, chewed-up gum. I learned how to extract DNA, how to sequence it, and how to analyze it to generate a portrait of what someone might look like based on an interpretation of their DNA, utilizing scientific research ranging from the established to the speculative. I 3-D printed the portraits life size, in full color, and exhibited these alongside documentation of the artifact, where and when it was collected, and what I analyzed.
Stranger Visions (installation view)

https://thenewinquiry.com/app/uploads/2017/06/hagborg-installation.jpg

The work was meant to call attention to the vulnerability of the body to new forms of surveillance and to predict the future direction of forensic DNA phenotyping—the profiling of a person’s outward characteristics from their DNA. At the time there were clear signals this research was happening, but it hadn’t been publicly discussed.

Two years later the prediction came true with the launch of Parabon Nanolabs DNA “Snapshot”, offering genomic mugshots to police around the country. The danger of offering stereotypes based primarily on sex and ancestry predictions is that a black box algorithm in the hands of the police can become a new form of racial profiling which appears to have the authority of real genetic evidence.

Most recently, I worked with Chelsea Manning. Subject to a strict policy of visitation and representation, Chelsea’s image had been suppressed since her sentencing and gender transition in 2013. She realized that DNA could give her a kind of visibility or presence that she had been stripped of for years. Chelsea didn’t want to appear too masculine in the portraits. I realized it was a perfect opportunity to highlight the reductionism of DNA phenotyping. Instead of producing one portrait to represent her, I generated two: one that was algorithmically gender “neutral” and one parameterized “female.” I presented the two portraits side by side to focus attention on the limitations of this technique even in regards to a genetic trait considered “legible.”

Just as the libertarian fraction of the cyberpunks fantasizes about the singularity putting the mind into software, biopunk-driven positivism fantasizes about DNA code being the instructions for life itself. “We have discovered the secret of life.” This was how Watson and Crick bragged about their discovery of the DNA double helix after poaching the work of their colleague Rosalind Franklin. Code is the ultimate dream.

#Génomique #biopunk #23andme #surveillance
So let’s imagine what happens as this runs its course. What will evolve from biohacking, taking into consideration what we have said so far?

How Japanese Floating Illusions Reverse-Engineer What We See - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/how-japanese-floating-illusions-reverse_engineer-what-we-see

http://static.nautil.us/12556_dcd3f83c96576c0fd437286a1ff6f1f0.jpg

The Arais do not merely dissect illusions, but can generate them, taking an image that looks boringly normal and making subtle changes, to color and contrast, to fool our brains.If you don’t know how something works, break it. Science is built on creative destruction: Much of what neuroscientists know of the brain, they know from what gets lost during brain injuries. Under happier circumstances, they glimpse the functioning of visual perception from how it breaks down in optical illusions. For instance, the 3-D Escher-like illusions created by Kokichi Sugihara of Meiji University exploit our brain’s tendency to see all angles as right angles.Some of the most dramatic illusions involve apparent motion—these appear to spin, shimmer, or shimmy even though they’re completely static, like Piet (...)

Tactile sensor gives robots new capabilities
▻https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170605150252.htm

Eight years ago, researchers unveiled a new sensor technology, called GelSight, that uses physical contact with an object to provide a remarkably detailed 3-D map of its surface. Now, by mounting GelSight sensors on the grippers of robotic arms, two teams have given robots greater sensitivity and dexterity.

Are You a Self-Interrupter ? - Issue 48 : Chaos
▻http://nautil.us/issue/48/chaos/are-you-a-self_interrupter

http://static.nautil.us/12405_38298f3cad250b58051bda2c11721e56.jpg

Our technology-rich world has proven to be both a blessing and a curse. While on the one hand we have access to information or people anywhere at any time, on the other hand we find our attention constantly drawn by the rich, multisensory, technological environments. It all started with the graphical user interface that took us from the flat, two-dimensional text-based environment that operated on a line-by-line basis similar to a typewriter, to a small picture depicting an operation or program. From there it was a short hop to a completely multisensory world appealing to all of our visual, auditory, and tactile or kinesthetic senses. We now see videos in high definition, often in simulated 3-D. We hear high-definition stereo sounds that feel as crisp as sounds in the real world. Our (...)

Device allows users to manipulate 3-D virtual objects more quickly
▻https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170501094331.htm

Researchers have developed a user-friendly, inexpensive controller for manipulating virtual objects in a computer program in three dimensions. The device allows users to manipulate objects more quickly — with less lag time — than existing technologies.

Operating smart devices from the space on and above the back of your hand
▻https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170503110802.htm

Smartwatches such as the Apple Watch have been called a ’revolution on the wrist’, but the operation of these devices is complicated, because the screen is small. Researchers have therefore developed a novel input method that expands the input space to the back of the hand and the 3-D space above the back of the hand wearing the watch.

World’s thinnest hologram paves path to new 3-D world
▻https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170518083031.htm

Researchers pave way towards integration of 3-D holography into electronics like smart phones, computers and TVs, with development of nano-hologram 1,000 times thinner than a human hair.

3-D-Printed Skin Leads the Way Toward Artificial Organs
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603511/3-d-printed-skin-leads-the-way-toward-artificial-organs/?set=603514

Researchers claim that additive manufacturing can now produce functional skin, and the first internal organs may be ready within six years.

#biotechnologies

The Best New Maps, According to Cartographers

▻http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/11/best-new-maps-atlas-design

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/news/2016/11/16/atlas_design/03_atlas_design_maps.ngsversion.1479330009989.adapt.1190.1.jpg

Carte par Levy Westerveld actuellement en poste au Grid-Arendal en Norvège... Si ça vous dit quelque chose :)

Every person who died trying to reach Europe by crossing the water from Africa and the Middle East between 2005 and 2015 is represented by a single dot on this map. Levi Westerveld, a spatial analyst and cartographer at the Norwegian foundation GRID-Arendal, placed each dot, one by one, as close as he could to where each person died or went missing. “Assigning a unique dot to each victim helped to portray the unsettling number of recorded losses,” Westerveld wrote in the atlas.

Distances and locations aren’t exact on this map, but Westerveld’s intention was to portray the experience of the people who were fleeing conflicts in their home countries. They were often navigating the Mediterranean with just handheld compasses in un-seaworthy boats, hoping to see a thin line of coast on the horizon, represented on the map by a thin black line.

If you look closer, you’ll see thin blue lines of text waving away from a few of the dots. These are descriptions of who died, how they died, and the destination they hoped to reach. Westerveld writes: “And they leave us wondering: What about the stories behind all the other dots?”

Elmer says the editors all felt that the overall effect of the map is “a total emotional gut-punch.”

–---
The other maps are :

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/news/2016/11/16/atlas_design/04_atlas_design_maps.ngsversion.1479330016156.adapt.1190.1.jpg http://news.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/news/2016/11/16/atlas_design/05_atlas_design_maps.ngsversion.1479330022674.adapt.1190.1.jpg http://news.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/news/2016/11/16/atlas_design/01_atlas_design_maps.ngsversion.1479330037514.jpg

The Best New Maps, According to Cartographers

By Betsy Mason

PUBLISHED November 16, 2016

From charts of UFO sightings in the United States to surveys of bear population density in Finland to a 3-D visualization of where London’s airport employees live, a new collection of maps shows off the skill and creativity of today’s cartographers.

The third volume of the Atlas of Design contains 32 maps, each representative of a different style of design and craft. The one thing the maps have in common is that they tend to “impress the viewer at first glance, and have enough rich details to reward the time spent looking closer,” says atlas co-editor Marty Elmer, a member of the North American Cartographic Information Society, which publishes the atlas.

As they sifted through nearly 250 submissions from more than 15 countries, a panel of NACIS members considered the maps’ creativity, scientific rigor, and artistic mastery. The result is a beautiful set of modern maps that will appeal to both professional mapmakers and casual map enthusiasts. “Whether the mapmaker is a journalist, student, GIS professional, lifetime cartographer, or independent artist, people of all sorts of backgrounds are making maps that are interesting, informative, and fun,” Elmer says.

#cartographie #concours #sémiologie #cartoexperiment

The Pentagon Wants to Buy That Bomb You’re Building in the Garage - Defense One (via @stephane)
▻http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/03/darpa-IED-bomb-tinkerers/126649

On Friday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or #DARPA, announced that they would award money to people who can turn consumer electronics, household chemicals, 3-D printed parts, cheap drones or other “commercially available technology” into the next improvised weapon [un programme en trois phases].

(…) “Proposers are free to reconfigure, repurpose, program, reprogram, modify, combine, or recombine commercially available technology in any way within the bounds of local, state, and federal laws and regulations. Use of components, products, and systems from non-military technical specialties (e.g., transportation, construction, maritime, and communications) is of particular interest”

#silicon_army

An NYC Architect Drafted 3-D Station Layout Maps of the Most Complex Subway Stations - CityLab
▻http://www.citylab.com/navigator/2015/09/a-nerds-eye-view-of-new-yorks-most-complex-subway-stations/405397

http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/2015/09/02TIMESSQUAREIMAGE/lead_large.jpg

n June, I spoke with designer David Gibson about ways to help pedestrians keep their bearings as they exit a subway station. One of his ideas was to put up a new kind of map inside the station:

Gibson suggests going back to basics: installing track and exit maps underground, so that riders get a feel for a station’s internal geography before they reach the surface. The maps would show where a station’s exits are and where they lead, “connecting the subterranean world with the world on the street.”

It turns out Gibson wasn’t the only one thinking along those lines. New York-based architect Candy Chan just launched Project Subway NYC to visualize some of Manhattan’s most complicated subway stations, blueprint style.

#cartographie #complexité_visuelle

Five Veteran Scientists Tell Us What Most Surprised Them - Issue 28: 2050
▻http://nautil.us/issue/28/2050/five-veteran-scientists-tell-us-what-most-surprised-them

http://static.nautil.us/7188_d073bb8d0c47f317dd39de9c9f004e9d.png

Turn back the clock to 1965. Science appeared to be marching forward at an unrelenting pace. Biochemists had cracked the genetic code (how DNA translates into proteins), inspiring Life magazine to envision “superbabies with improved minds and bodies.” In an article for the trade magazine Electronics, computer engineer Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors on an integrated chip would double every year while the cost stayed the same—the eponymous Moore’s Law. This, he wrote, would lead to “such wonders” as home computers, mobile phones, and automatic control systems for cars. Meanwhile, the New York World’s Fair provided further glimpses of what the future might hold: fusion power, moon colonies, underwater hotels, robot maids, flying cars, and 3-D TV. For young scientists at (...)

Lockpickers 3-D Print TSA Master Luggage Keys From Leaked Photos
▻http://www.wired.com/2015/09/lockpickers-3-d-print-tsa-luggage-keys-leaked-photos

The TSA is learning a basic lesson of physical security in the age of 3-D printing: If you have sensitive keys—say, a set of master keys that can open locks you’ve asked millions of Americans to use—don’t post pictures of them on the Internet.

#clés_physiques

A 3-D View of a Chart That Predicts The Economic Future : The Yield Curve - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/03/19/upshot/3d-yield-curve-economic-growth.html

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/zorq3rb6oaq0fa6/nyt-d3-bonds.png?dl=0

le NYT continue d’innover avec ses #visualisations graphiques interactives ; ça reste assez ardu, mais c’est le sujet qui veut ça

#3D #d3.js #three.js

How the Photocopier Changed the Way We Worked—and Played, by Clive Thompson | SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE | MARCH 2015
▻http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/duplication-nation-3D-printing-rise-180954332/?no-ist

http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/00/5a/005abb68-5d12-4d1b-8df4-6318f046d7b3/mar2015_b01_clive3dprinting.jpg__800x600_q85_crop.jpg

Decades before 3-D printers brought manufacturing closer to home, copiers transformed offices, politics and art

#innovation #progrès #histoire via @fil

Israeli Researchers Debut Software That Extracts 3-D Objects From Photos | Singularity Hub
▻http://singularityhub.com/2013/09/10/israeli-researchers-debut-software-that-extracts-3-d-objects-from-ph

▻http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oie1ZXWceqM

One of major barriers to entry is the difficulty of generating the 3-D computer models that serve as the instruction sheets for printers.

In a paper they will present at Siggraph Asia in December, Ariel Shamir, of the Interdisciplinary Center at Herzliya, and Daniel Cohen-Or and Tao Chen of Tel Aviv University hope to knock that barrier down with software they’ve developed that allows the user to extract the beginnings of a 3-D model of an object from a single photograph.

“The key idea is that you could create 3D objects based only on single images,” Shamir told Singularity Hub. “We wanted a model that would be simple for almost anyone to use.”

#recherche #3D #scanner #photographie #modélisation

Governments Worry about Plastic Weapons Made with 3-D Printers - SPIEGEL ONLINE
▻http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/governments-worry-about-plastic-weapons-made-with-3-d-printers-a-904131.html

He says that his weapon was downloaded from the Internet more than 100,000 times within two weeks, so that copies of the files are now on computers in countries like the United States, Russia, Egypt, Spain and Germany.

Exactly how many?

“I have no idea,” says Wilson. “It isn’t possible to determine that anymore.”

#3D #imprimante_3D #arme via @opironet

Je me culture avec l’interwebz : pourquoi James Cameron porte-t-il un t-shirt « Papyrus 4 Ever » sur le tournage d’Avatar ?
▻http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665318/the-8-worst-fonts-in-the-world

http://thecreativesideshow.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/jc_shirt.jpg

Avatar cost more to make than any other film in history but it did its best to recoup whatever it spent on 3-D special effects and computer-generated blue people by using the cheapest and least original font it could find: Papyrus, a font available free on every Mac and PC. They did tweak it a little for the posters, but they used the standard version for credits and the subtitling for the Na’vi conversations. (On the website iheartpapyrus.com you’ll see an amusing Photoshop of James Cameron briefing star Sam Worthington in a T-shirt proudly asserting “Papyrus 4 Ever!”)

#typographie #merci_arno