An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Researchers at Israel's Ben Gurion University of the Negev have spent the last two years experimenting with "phantom" images to trick semi-autonomous driving systems. They previously revealed that they could use split-second light projections on roads to successfully trick Tesla's driver-assistance systems into automatically stopping without warning when its camera sees spoofed images of road signs or pedestrians. In new research, they've found they can pull off the same trick with just a few frames of a road sign injected on a billboard's video. And they warn that if hackers hijacked an internet-connected billboard to carry out the trick, it could be used to cause traffic jams or even road accidents while leaving little evidence behind.

In this latest set of experiments, the researchers injected frames of a phantom stop sign on digital billboards, simulating what they describe as a scenario in which someone hacked into a roadside billboard to alter its video. They also upgraded to Tesla's most recent version of Autopilot known as HW3. They found that they could again trick a Tesla or cause the same Mobileye device to give the driver mistaken alerts with just a few frames of altered video. The researchers found that an image that appeared for 0.42 seconds would reliably trick the Tesla, while one that appeared for just an eighth of a second would fool the Mobileye device. They also experimented with finding spots in a video frame that would attract the least notice from a human eye, going so far as to develop their own algorithm for identifying key blocks of pixels in an image so that a half-second phantom road sign could be slipped into the "uninteresting" portions. And while they tested their technique on a TV-sized billboard screen on a small road, they say it could easily be adapted to a digital highway billboard, where it could cause much more widespread mayhem. "Autopilot is a driver assistance feature that is intended for use only with a fully attentive driver who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any time," reads Tesla's response. The Ben Gurion researchers counter that Autopilot is used very differently in practice. "As we know, people use this feature as an autopilot and do not keep 100 percent attention on the road while using it," writes Mirsky in an email. "Therefore, we must try to mitigate this threat to keep people safe, regardless of [Tesla's] warnings."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The railroad tracks cut through Weyling White's boyhood backyard like an invisible fence. He would play there on sweltering afternoons, stacking rocks along the rails under the watch of his grandfather, who established a firm rule: Weyling wasn't to cross the right of way into the white part of town. The other side had nicer homes and parks, all the medical offices, and the town's only hospital. As a consequence, White said, his family mostly got by without regular care, relying on home remedies and the healing hands of the Baptist church. "There were no health care resources whatsoever," said White, 34. "You would see tons of worse health outcomes for people on those streets." The hard lines of segregation have faded in Ahoskie, a town of 5,000 people in the northeastern corner of the state. But in health care, a new force is redrawing those barriers: algorithms that blindly soak up and perpetuate historical imbalances in access to medical resources. A STAT investigation found that a common method of using analytics software to target medical services to patients who need them most is infusing racial bias into decision-making about who should receive stepped-up care. While a study published last year documented bias in the use of an algorithm in one health system, STAT found the problems arise from multiple algorithms used in hospitals across the country.

The bias is not intentional, but it reinforces deeply rooted inequities in the American health care system, effectively walling off low-income Black and Hispanic patients from services that less sick white patients routinely receive. These algorithms are running in the background of most Americans' interaction with the health care system. They sift data on patients' medical problems, prior health costs, medication use, lab results, and other information to predict how much their care will cost in the future and inform decisions such as whether they should get extra doctor visits or other support to manage their illnesses at home. The trouble is, these data reflect long-standing racial disparities in access to care, insurance coverage, and use of services, leading the algorithms to systematically overlook the needs of people of color in ways that insurers and providers may fail to recognize.

NASA has announced more than a third of a billion dollars worth of "Tipping Point" contracts awarded to over a dozen companies pursuing potentially transformative space technologies. The projects range from in-space testing of cryogenic tech to a 4G LTE network for the Moon. From a report: The space agency is almost always accepting applications for at least one of its many grant and contract programs, and Tipping Point is directly aimed at commercial space capabilities that need a bit of a boost. According to the program description, "a technology is considered at a tipping point if an investment in a demonstration will significantly mature the technology, increase the likelihood of infusion into a commercial space application, and bring the technology to market for both government and commercial applications."

Almost 40 million people around the world have contracted Covid-19 and more than a million have died from the virus. The devastation has rippled even further, thanks to a global recession and rising political unrest. And as all of this unfolds, new research indicates that the governments around the world have exploited the pandemic to expand their domestic surveillance capabilities and curtail internet freedom and speech. From a report: The human and digital rights watchdog Freedom House today published its annual "Freedom on the Net" report, which tracks the ebb and flow of censorship laws, net neutrality protections, internet shutdowns, and more around the world. This year's report, which covers the period from June 2019 through May 2020, encompasses not only the Covid-19 pandemic but the trade war between the US and China, which has resulted in a dramatic acceleration of the cyber sovereignty movement. Combined with numerous other geopolitical clashes that have impacted digital rights, Freedom House found that global internet freedom has been broadly curtailed in 2020. "Political leaders used the pandemic as a pretext to crack down on free expression and limit access to information," Freedom House director for democracy and technology Adrian Shahbaz told reporters ahead of the report's release. "We traced three commonly used tactics. First in at least 45 countries, activists, journalists, and other members of the public were arrested or charged with criminal offenses for online speech related to the pandemic. Second in at least 20 countries governments cited the pandemic emergency to impose vague or overly broad speech restrictions. Third, governments in at least 28 countries censored websites and social media posts to censor unfavorable health statistics, corruption allegations, and other Covid-19-related content."

The European Union has opened up the .eu internet registry for a new owner, offering a five-year contract to oversee its 3.6 million domain names from October 2022. From a report: The EC's Directorate General for Communication Networks, Content and Technologies announced the rebid last week and its director of future networks, Pearse O'Donohue, has been pushing the issue to the DNS industry -- including personally contacting registry operators to encourage them to apply. It is just the latest in a series of rebids for major internet address spaces in recent years -- several of which have been shrouded in claims of corruption, backroom deals and legal threats, including Colombia's .co, India's .in and Australia's .au domains. In the worst example, Colombia's technology minister was accused of cutting a secret deal with US corporation Afilias ahead of its retender: an accusation that gained credence when the Colombian government's own documents contained unexplained references to a different Afilias contract. The government's documents also showed it has used the wrong registration figures for its own internet space and had skewed the process to favor Afilias. Afilias ended up withdrawing from the bid and the contract was re-awarded to US-based Neustar.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: Whether or not you live in Massachusetts, you should be paying attention to a very important vote coming up in November's election. Not for president, or senator, or even city council -- no, Question 1 is a proposition that could dramatically strengthen or weaken the state's landmark right-to-repair law that previously forced automakers to make it easier for you to get your car fixed. Essentially, Massachusetts voters are deciding on whether or not to add "mechanical" vehicle telematics data -- realtime updates from a car's sundry sensors transmitted to an automaker's private servers -- to the list of things OEMs have to share with independent mechanics. Telematics data was purposefully excluded from the original 2013 law, but as cars have gotten more computerized over the last decade, that gap in coverage has grown more pronounced.

The full information about what is appearing on the ballot can be found here. Voting "Yes" to Question 1 would expand access to wirelessly transmitted mechanical data regarding vehicle maintenance and repair. But what makes this a big deal for those outside Massachusetts is that the amendment will require automakers who want to do business in the state to make that data accessible through a smartphone app for owners starting in 2022. Remember, it was the 2013 law's passage that forced automakers to adopt a nationwide right-to-repair standard. Could the same happen with open-access telematics data, which will only grow in importance as more cars add on driver-assist features? Pro-Question 1 organization Massachusetts Right to Repair argues the amendment would futureproof the law for consumers and independent repair shops beyond the state's borders. "Voting 'No' would make no change to governing access over wirelessly transmitted vehicle data, meaning automakers would be under no obligation to provide a standard that consumers could use to analyze diagnostic information other than what is currently provided through the vehicle's OBDII port," adds The Drive.

"[T]he Coalition for Safe and Secure Data has shelled out at least $25.8 million to oppose Question 1, reportedly receiving large seven-figure donations from General Motors, Toyota, Ford, Honda and Nissan. Go figure."

KDE's Plasma 5.20 is now available, bringing a bunch of refinements as well as some larger features. Some of the KDE Plasma 5.20 highlights include (via Phoronix): - Numerous fixes to the KWin window manager / compositor including a number of Wayland fixes. Among the Wayland work in Plasma 5.20 includes Klipper support and middle-click paste, mouse and touchpad support nearly on par to X11, window thumbnails in the task manager, crash fixes, and more.

- Improved notifications.

- Different redesigns and additions to the KDE System Settings from SMART monitoring to better looking interfaces.

- Redesigned on-screen displays.

- Various tack manager and system tray improvements. More information about KDE 5.20 is available here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Decades before Twitter threads, Reddit forums, or Facebook groups, there was Usenet: an early-internet, pre-Web discussion system where one could start and join conversations much like today's message boards. Launched in 1980, Usenet is the creation of two Duke University students who wanted to communicate between decentralized, local servers -- and it's still active today. On Usenet, people talk about everything, from nanotech science to soap operas, wine, and UFOs. Jozef Jarosciak, a systems architect based in Ontario, had his first encounter with Usenet in 2000, when he found a full-time job in Canada thanks to a job posting there.

This week, Jarosciak uploaded some of the oldest Usenet posts available to the internet. Around 2.1 million posts from between February 1981 and June 1991 from Henry Spencer's UTZOO NetNews Archive are archived at the Usenet Archive for anyone to browse. This latest archive-dump is part of an even larger project by Jarosciak. He launched the Usenet Archive site last month, as a way to host groups in a way that'd be independent of Google Groups, which also holds archives of newsgroups like Usenet. It's currently archiving 317 million posts in 10,000 unique Usenet newsgroups, according to the site -- and Jarosciak estimates it'll eventually hold close to 1 billion posts.

If you're one of the Google Drive users who is taking advantage of unlimited storage for $12 per month on G Suite, beware. Workspace is replacing G Suite and offers more features for those who do, but you might not want to switch: unlimited storage on Workspace will cost you at least $20 a month. Jaron Schneider reports via PetaPixel: Currently G Suite business subscribers (which do not need to be actual businesses, but any individuals looking for greater storage capacity) can access unlimited storage on Drive for just $12 a month. For photographers with considerable backlogs of photos, this was a relatively inexpensive cloud storage backup solution. Google states in its plans that groups using this particular plan with four or fewer members are supposed to be only eligible for 1 TB of storage each, but in testing by Android Police and others have shown that Google has never enforced that limit.

Unfortunately, this appears to be changing with the transition to Workplace. According to the company's list of plans, which you can view here, there is a limit of 2 TB for individual Business Standard users and 5 TB per person on its new Business Plus plan. To get more, you will have to go to the Enterprise level which Google says requires you to work directly with a Google sales representative (this appears to actually be the case), but Google does promise they can offer as much storage "as you need" in this category. That doesn't explicitly say unlimited, but should realistically operate as such for now. Pricing in that Enterprise level will cost you $20 per month ($30 per month on Enterprise Plus), nearly double the previous price for the same amount of storage. For now, G Suite customers will be able to stick with their current plans if they do not switch to Workplace, but Google is intending to transition all users over to the new system eventually.

ttyler writes: As MacRumors reports, Apple's new HomePod Mini supports Thread networking technology. "Thread is a low-power IP-based networking technology for connecting Internet of Things (IoT) devices, offering a secure, mesh-based system that makes it easy to build an ecosystem of devices," reports MacRumors. "While Thread is essentially agnostic to the application layers that run on top of it, it can support multiple layers and may play a role in Project Connected Home over IP, the alliance of Apple, Amazon, Google, and other companies that is seeking to make it simpler to build devices compatible with multiple ecosystems such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant." In a footprint on the specs page, Apple says that HomePod mini's Thread support is limited to HomeKit devices, "so the technology can't yet be leveraged cross-platform and it remains to be seen how Apple will embrace Thread going forward," adds MacRumors.

Facebook will ban anti-vaccine ads in an effort to combat misinformation and support public health experts, the social media platform announced in a statement on Tuesday. Axios reports: The company now says it doesn't want these ads on its platform, but the policy does not apply to influencers who experts say drive a significant amount of organic misinformation about vaccines.

"Our goal is to help messages about the safety and efficacy of vaccines reach a broad group of people, while prohibiting ads with misinformation that could harm public health efforts," the social media platform said. "We already don't allow ads with vaccine hoaxes that have been publicly identified by leading global health organizations." "Now, if an ad explicitly discourages someone from getting a vaccine, we'll reject it. Enforcement will begin over the next few days." "Ads that advocate for or against legislation or government policies around vaccines -- including a COVID-19 vaccine -- are still allowed."

A network of scientists is chasing the pandemic's holy grail: an antibody that protects against not just the virus, but also related pathogens that may threaten humans. From a report: Dozens of companies and academic groups are racing to develop antibody therapies. Already Regeneron and the drug company Eli Lilly have requested emergency use authorizations for their products from the Food and Drug Administration. These drug companies have the long experience and deep pockets needed to win the race for a powerful antibody treatment. But some scientists are betting on a dark horse: Prometheus, a ragtag group of scientists who are months behind in the competition -- and yet may ultimately deliver the most powerful antibody. Prometheus is a collaboration between academic labs, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and a New Hampshire-based antibody company called Adimab. The group's antibody is not expected to be in human trials until late December, but it may be worth the wait. Unlike the antibodies made by Regeneron and Eli Lilly, which fade in the body within weeks, Prometheus's antibody aims to be effective for up to six months. "A single dose goes a long way, meaning we can treat more people," said Kartik Chandran, a virologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the group's leader.

Improving batteries has always been hampered by slow experimentation and discovery processes. Machine learning is speeding it up by orders of magnitude. From a report: Inside a lab at Stanford University's Precourt Institute for Energy, there are a half dozen refrigerator-sized cabinets designed to kill batteries as fast as they can. Each holds around 100 lithium-ion cells secured in trays that can charge and discharge the batteries dozens of times per day. Ordinarily, the batteries that go into these electrochemical torture chambers would be found inside gadgets or electric vehicles, but when they're put in these hulking machines, they aren't powering anything at all. Instead, energy is dumped in and out of these cells as fast as possible to generate reams of performance data that will teach artificial intelligence how to build a better battery. In 2019, a team of researchers from Stanford, MIT, and the Toyota Research Institute used AI trained on data generated from these machines to predict the performance of lithium-ion batteries over the lifetime of the cells before their performance had started to slip. Ordinarily, AI would need data from after a battery had started to degrade in order to predict how it would perform in the future. It might take months to cycle the battery enough times to get that data. But the researchers' AI could predict lifetime performance after only hours of data collection, while the battery was still at its peak. "Prior to our work, nobody thought that was possible," says William Chueh, a materials scientist at Stanford and one of the lead authors of the 2019 paper.

And earlier this year, Chueh and his colleagues did it again. In a paper published in Nature in February, Chueh and his colleagues described an experiment in which an AI was able to discover the optimal method for 10-minute fast-charging a lithium-ion battery. Many experts think fast-charging batteries will be critical for electric vehicle adoption, but dumping enough energy to recharge a cell in the same amount of time it takes to fill up a tank of gas can quickly kill its performance. To get fast-charging batteries out of the lab and into the real world means finding the sweet spot between charge speed and battery lifetime. The problem is that there is effectively an infinite number of ways to deliver charge to a battery; Chueh compares it to searching for the best way to pour water into a bucket. Experimentally sifting through all those possibilities to find the best one is a slow and arduous task -- but that's where AI can help.

Google employees are not shy about speaking up. In the last few years, they have openly confronted the company about building a censored search engine in China, the handling of sexual harassment claims and its work with the Pentagon on artificial intelligence technology for weapons. But there is one subject that employees avoid at all costs: antitrust. The New York Times: They don't address it in emails. They don't bring it up in big company meetings. They are regularly reminded that Google doesn't "crush," "kill," "hurt" or "block" the competition. And if you hope to land an executive job at the internet company, do not bring up the A-word in the interview process. As the Justice Department, a coalition of state attorneys general and a congressional subcommittee have investigated Google for monopoly behavior over the last year, there has been little discussion internally about antitrust concerns. Now, as the department prepares to file a lawsuit against the company, the usual forums where Google employees debate anything and everything have been startlingly subdued about what may be an existential threat to it. That's because Google's leaders have made it clear that antitrust is not a topic to be trifled with.

Virginia's voter-registration website went offline Tuesday on the state's last day to register before the Nov. 3 election, in what officials attributed to an accidental cutting of a fiber-optic cable. From a report: The Virginia Information Technologies Agency said that the Verizon cable was inadvertently struck during work for a roadside utilities project and that several agencies were affected. The Virginia Department of Elections didn't immediately respond to a request asking if the deadline to register, originally set for the end of Tuesday, would be extended once service was restored. Voters can also register using a paper application. In recent weeks, voter-registration websites in Florida and Pennsylvania, both considered potentially decisive swing states for the presidential election, crashed due, officials said, to glitches. Florida extended the deadline to register to vote after its registration website malfunctioned. The state's secretary of state cited unprecedented traffic to the site as the cause.

Covid-19 has made food security a major issue. Now Singapore is investing heavily in high-tech farming as it tries to become more self-sufficient. From a report: From the outside, VertiVegies looked like a handful of grubby shipping containers put side by side and drilled together. A couple of meters in height, they were propped up on a patch of concrete in one of Singapore's nondescript suburbs. But once he was inside, Ankesh Shahra saw potential. Huge potential. Shahra, who wears his dark hair floppy and his expensive-looking shirts with their top button casually undone, had a lot of experience in the food industry. His grandfather had founded the Ruchi Group, a corporate powerhouse in India with offshoots in steel, real estate, and agriculture; his father had started Ruchi Soya, a $3 billion oilseed processor that had been Shahra's training ground. By the time Shahra was introduced to VertiVegies founder Veera Sekaran at a friend's party in 2017, he was hungry to make his own entrepreneurial mark. A previous attempt had involved sourcing organic food from around Asia: "an eye-opening experience, one with a lot of pressure," he says. It helped him spot a problem that needed solving.

"I'd seen how much dependency farmers have globally on weather," he says. "Yields were hugely erratic: there are so many inconsistencies and dependencies that it's a hugely difficult profession for the bulk of farmers. The perishable supply chain was so broken." And what Shahra saw when he stepped into Sekaran's repurposed shipping containers was a solution. Inside, mismatched plastic trays sat carefully stacked on industrial metal shelves, stretching all the way from the concrete floor to the corrugated-steel ceiling. In each tray were small green plants of different species and sizes, all with their roots bathed in the same watery solution, their leaves curling up toward the same pink glow of faintly humming LED bar lights above. With VertiVegies, Sekaran was farming vertically: growing vegetables indoors, with towers of crops stacked one on the other instead of in wide, sprawling fields, and in hydroponic solution instead of soil. He was growing food without exposure to weather or seasons, using techniques pioneered by others, in a country that was badly in need of a new way to meet its food needs.

Singapore is the third most densely populated country in the world, known for its tightly packed high-rises. But to cram all those gleaming towers and nearly 6 million people into a land mass half the size of Los Angeles, it has sacrificed many things, including food production. Farms make up no more than 1% of its total land (in the United States it's 40%), forcing the small city-state to shell out around $10 billion each year importing 90% of its food. Here was an example of technology that could change all that. Sekaran came from a world very different from Shahra's. The fifth of nine children, he had lost his father at five years old and grew up poor. So little money did the family have that Sekaran would show up to school in an oversized uniform, clutching his textbooks in a paper bag. But he climbed out of poverty, paying his own way through university and never losing his irrepressible passion for living things. By the time the pair met, Sekaran had qualified as a botanist and worked in the Seychelles, Pakistan, and Morocco before returning home. In almost every media interview or biography he is referred to, almost reverently, as a "plant whisperer."

People who are blind or who use a wheelchair or who have autism often are early adopters of technology to complete everyday tasks like communicating, reading, and traveling. Artificial intelligence powers many of these services such as voice and object recognition. In many cases, these products are trained on data from able-bodied or neurotypical people. This means that the algorithms may have a limited understanding of body types, communication styles, and facial expressions. Microsoft is working with researchers and advocacy groups to solve this data problem and build data sets that better reflect all types of users and real-world scenarios. From a report: Microsoft put the challenges in context in a post published on Oct. 12 on the company's AI Blog: "If a self-driving car's pedestrian detection algorithms haven't been shown examples of people who use wheelchairs or whose posture or gait is different due to advanced age, for example, they may not correctly identify those people as objects to avoid or estimate how much longer they need to safely cross a street, researchers noted. AI models used in hiring processes that try to read personalities or interpret sentiment from potential job candidates can misread cues and screen out qualified candidates with autism or who emote differently. Algorithms that read handwriting may not be able to cope with examples from people who have Parkinson's disease or tremors. Gesture recognition systems may be confused by people with amputated limbs or different body shapes."

A surge in worldwide demand by educators for low-cost laptops has created shipment delays and pitted desperate schools against one another. Districts with deep pockets often win out. From a report: A surge in worldwide demand by educators for low-cost laptops and Chromebooks -- up to 41 percent higher than last year -- has created monthslong shipment delays and pitted desperate schools against one another. Districts with deep pockets often win out, leaving poorer ones to give out printed assignments and wait until winter for new computers to arrive. That has frustrated students around the country, especially in rural areas and communities of color, which also often lack high-speed internet access and are most likely to be on the losing end of the digital divide. In 2018, 10 million students didn't have an adequate device at home, a study by education nonprofit Common Sense Media found. That gap, with much of the country still learning remotely, could now be crippling.

"The learning loss that's taken place since March when they left, when schools closed, it'll take years to catch up," Ms. Henry said. "This could impact an entire generation of our students." Sellers are facing stunning demand from schools in countries from Germany to El Salvador, said Michael Boreham, an education technology analyst at the British company Futuresource Consulting. Japan alone is expected to order seven million devices. Global computer shipments to schools were up 24 percent from 2019 in the second quarter, Mr. Boreham said, and were projected to hit that 41 percent jump in the third quarter, which just ended. Chromebooks, web-based devices that run on software from Google and are made by an array of companies, are in particular demand because they cost less than regular laptops. That has put huge pressure on a supply chain that cobbles laptop parts from all over the world, usually assembling them in Asian factories, Mr. Boreham said. While that supply chain has slowly geared up, the spike in demand is "so far over and above what has historically been the case," said Stephen Baker, a consumer electronics analyst at the NPD Group. "The fact that we've been able to do that and there's still more demand out there, it's something you can't plan for."

The Philippines began Monday registering millions of citizens for its national identification system, hoping to promote electronic payments and make it easier for low-income earners without bank accounts to access financial services. From a report: All Philippine citizens and resident foreigners are required to register such information as name, sex, date of birth, place of birth, blood type, address and nationality. Biometric data -- fingerprints, facial photos and iris scans -- also will be stored. The country's current system, in which different agencies issue their own numbers, has been criticized as inconvenient. The new system will grant each person a unique number that can be used across agencies. The government hopes to make financial services more accessible to low-income workers who lack bank accounts as well as facilitate delivery of government services. Officials from the Philippine statistics agency will visit homes to collect the personal information, completing the process before President Rodrigo Duterte's term ends in June 2022. The system is scheduled to begin operation in the second half of 2021 for services such as visa issuances. A survey found 73% public support for the new ID system, suggesting that little concern exists over the collection of personal information by the government. Karl Kendrick Chua, acting secretary of the National Economic and Development Authority, said the ID system will accelerate growth of the digital economy. He expressed hope that the national system will spark widespread use of electronic payments. Partnerships with the private sector also appear to be on the table.

Alphabet's X lab has officially announced its latest "moonshot": a computational agriculture project the company is calling Mineral. The Verge reports: The project is focused on sustainable food production and farming at large scales, with a focus on "developing and testing a range of software and hardware prototypes based on breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, simulation, sensors, robotics and more," according to project lead Elliott Grant. A blog post outlining the project's vision says Mineral, which now has an official name but may have launched in secret around 2017 according to Grant's LinkedIn page, will try and aim technology toward solving issues around sustainability. Those include feeding of Earth's growing population, and producing crops more efficiently by understanding growth cycles and weather patterns. The project will also hope to manage land and plant life as the effects of climate change complicate ecosystems.

"Just as the microscope led to a transformation in how diseases are detected and managed, we hope that better tools will enable the agriculture industry to transform how food is grown," explains Grant. "Over the last few years my team and I have been developing the tools of what we call computational agriculture, in which farmers, breeders, agronomists, and scientists will lean on new types of hardware, software, and sensors to collect and analyze information about the complexity of the plant world." One of the first of these tools is a new four-wheel rover-like prototype, what the Mineral team are calling a plant buggy, study crops, soil, and other environmental factors using a mix of cameras, sensors, and other onboard equipment. The team then uses the data collected and combines it with satellite imagery and weather data to create predictive models for how the plants will grow using machine learning and other AI training techniques. The Mineral team says it's already using the prototypes to study soybeans in Illinois and strawberries in California.

"Over the past few years, the plant buggy has trundled through strawberry fields in California and soybean fields in Illinois, gathering high quality images of each plant and counting and classifying every berry and every bean. To date, the team has analyzed a range of crops like melons, berries, lettuce, oilseeds, oats and barley -- from sprout to harvest," reads Mineral's website. Grant says the Mineral team will collaborate with plant breeders and growers, farmers, and other agricultural experts to come up with solutions that are practical and have real-world benefits.