BON VOYAGE
Cargo ships, notorious polluters of both the sea and sky, are aiming to get greener. The shipping industry in July agreed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, and one way to get there is to harness wind power: A cargo ship fitted with hard “sails” called WindWings, each 123 feet tall and made from the same material as wind turbines, embarked on its inaugural voyage from China to Brazil this summer.
Source: Engadget
$700K
Source: Interesting Engineering
PED XING
A study from King’s College London found that autonomous vehicles have a bias problem: Researchers report that self-driving car systems were 7.5 percent better at detecting light-skinned pedestrians than those with darker skin, and 20 percent better at detecting adults versus kids. While a spokesperson from AV firm Waymo said the study doesn’t represent all the tech used in its vehicles, researchers report that one of the AI’s problems detecting kids and people with darker skin comes from bias in the data used to train it.
Source: Gizmodo
30
Following a $19 million series A funding round that launched machine learning startup ElevenLabs out of beta, the company announced its text-to-speech tech now supports 30 languages. Its two main offerings are Speech Synthesis — which creates natural-sounding speech from text — and VoiceLab, a tool that allows users to clone their own voices or generate synthetic ones for use with Speech Synthesis. ElevenLab’s CEO and co-founder Mati Staniszewski said the company “was started with the dream of making all content universally accessible in any language and in any voice.”
Source: Venture Beat
This story appears in the October/November issue of Government Technology magazine. Click here to view the full digital edition online.
