As some of you may have noticed, we recently moved from beautiful but soggy Edinburgh to an equally soggy (and beautiful) Vancouver, Canada. The move monopolised our lives a bit longer than hoped, but come 2016, we’re officially back to work. We’re now quite often in Seattle and San Francisco (including the Mountain View area) and always happy to meet for coffee, a chat or to discuss potential projects. Do drop us a line!

A few upcoming conference announcements!

01: It appears that Moore’s Law may finally be over. 

Should be quite interesting to see what next month’s road map includes. (See here for a nice collection of charts showing the progression of Moore’s Law courtesy of the Economist).

02: On the matter of self-driving cars, the U.S. NTSA ruled this week that it “…will interpret ‘driver’ in the context of Google’s described motor vehicle design as referring to the (self-driving system), and not to any of the vehicle occupants.” This is a big deal. Regulators have so far separated autonomous vehicles depending on one of four levels of automation (from function-specific through to full self-driving [PDF]). This framework has in turn informed discussions around liability and behaviour of each class of vehicle. 

While the ruling doesn’t appear to adjust these classes, it does put the onus on Google to build a car that drives itself, but can pass a certification intended for human-driven vehicles. A certification process that often cites human anatomy (hand on wheel, foot on pedal etc.) so will still likely require modification regardless. You can find the full letter here.

03: And now for a bit of mundane theatre: A short conversation between two AIs tasked with setting a coffee date on behalf of two humans. The comments below are equally interesting. Apparently humans (trained Executive Assistants no less!) “intervene when the AI’s confidence level falls below a certain threshold”. (Can’t decide if I feel terribly bad for the humans or if this will free their time to organise more fun stuff…or at the very least, stuff that requires limbs).

04: Algo.Rhythm is a set of drum robots with programmable behavior. Each drum robot records pattern of beats when knocked on, and replays the rhythm by hitting its neighbour robot with a pre-programmed twist.

The Past: NASA Jet Propulsion Library has released a series of beautiful (old…or made to look that way?) mock-space-travel posters. High resolution copies are available to print!

The Future: In time for Valentine’s Day, Prntr is a far-future technology (and disturbingly plausible speculative design project) that was envisioned by a team of students from MIT and RISD. 

Our best wishes for a productive week. 

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