Two Canadian universities chosen for new Autonomous Vehicle Competition

At WCX 17: SAE World Congress Experience, SAE International and General Motors announced that the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo are finalists among eight North American universities who will compete in the upcoming autonomous vehicle design competition, AutoDrive Challenge.

This new autonomous vehicle design competition will be a three-year challenge to develop and demonstrate a full autonomous driving passenger vehicle. The competition’s technical goal is to navigate an urban driving course in an automated driving mode as described by SAE Standard (J3016) level four definition by Year 3.

The other finalists are: Kettering University, Michigan State University, Michigan Tech, North Carolina A&T University, Texas A&M University and Virginia Tech.

Click to read more ...

Canada's only Certified LEGO Professional inspires kids to build a City Of Tomorrow

 

Our entry to the LEGO City of Tomorrow campaign. A safe haven and hotel for family pets with a chef that offers healthy meals using fresh and  locally sourced ingredients. 

By Sonya Davidson

The world's most cherished building toy company, LEGO, is inviting Canadian kids to ditch the instructions and build their vision for the City of Tomorrow. With Canada celebrating our 150th, this campaign is aimed to inspired kids to think about what will make Canada's future cities better, birghter, and even more fun.  (see below for details). 

We had a chance to chat with Robin Sather, Canada's only Certified LEGO Professional Builder, about all things LEGO and how he landed this cool job. 

Click to read more ...

Latest Pebble update decouples the smartwatches from online servers

With Fitbit’s acquisition of Pebble, one of the biggest concerns was whether Pebble watches would still work in the future, especially since its smartwatches software is mostly cloud-based. To help address that, Pebble released an update that’ll decouple the wearables’ dependence on cloud services. This means when Pebble’s servers shut down, users will still be able to side load apps and new firmware to the smartwatches. Of course this doesn’t address yet questions about how messaging, weather, and dictation features (which are all cloud-based) will work moving forward. But at the very least, the smartwatches can work even when Pebble gets fully absorbed into Fitbit.

Source: The Verge

This wireless mouse also works as a scanner

Now here’s a nifty combo: a mouse that doubles as a scanner. The Zcan Wireless Scanner Mouse looks just like any other wireless mouse out there. It ups the ante though with a built-in scanner that can read documents simply by swiping on them. The Zcan Wireless Scanner Mouse’s accompanying software can then digitize the text and even translate on the fly. It supports 199 OCR languages and can even scan tables, spreadsheets, and offers direct editing of each individual cell in Microsoft Excel. It comes with an A4 Scan Pad to help you scan things like receipts, photos, business cards, and other scraps of paper. A pretty handy gadget that goes for US$148.90 on Amazon.

Source: BGR