Stanford is showing off Shelley, their self-driving Audi TTS which can zip around the track at up to 120 MPH. This means that the car can complete the twisty three-mile course in just under 2 and 1/2 minutes.

Thunderhill track consists of 15 turns – high speed turns, sharp turns after straightaways, and even a blind turn at the top of a hill. “Each one of these really represents a separate challenge for the car, and test a different part of out algorithm,” says engineer Chris Gerdes.

They’re studying the difference between Shelley and a human driver. Apparently, human drivers can still tackle the course a little bit faster (just a few seconds).

“We need to know what the best drivers do that makes them so successful,” Gerdes says. “If we can pair that with the vehicle dynamics data, we can better use the car’s capabilities.”

It’s not just about impressive speed. And it’s also not just about building a system that will chauffeur people around after a night of too many martinis. It’s also about finding out the limits of drive-assist technology, which will continue to show up more and more in cars of the future.

“The experience and data gathered by running Shelley around the track could one day lead to fully autonomous cars that safely drive you and your loved ones from Point A to Point B on public roads. In the nearer term, the technology could show up as a sort of onboard co-pilot that helps the driver steer out of a dangerous situation,” says Bjorn Carey of Standford News Service. “And while Gerdes and crew clearly enjoy racing Shelley, the truth is that pushing the car to its limits on the racetrack – its brake pads melted on its last Thunderhill run – is the best way to learn what type of stress a car is under in a crisis, and what it takes to get the car straightened out.”

Check out Gerdes explaining the test run below:

Google just announced that their fleet of driverless cars had topped 300,000 miles without incident. They said that some additional testing needs to be done, for instance training in inclement weather. But soon, they say they’ll cut them lose and finally remove the team member failsafe from the equation.

States like Nevada and California are already taking steps to legalize and regulate self-driving cars. Google thinks that we’re inside a decade away from the technology being road ready, and automakers like Ford think we’re even closer than that.

[via Singularity Hub]

The site offers dozens of courses that run from 4-12 weeks in duration. The courses fall into the following categories: Humanities and Social Sciences; Computer Science; Mathematics and Statistics; Healthcare, Medicine, and Biology; Economics, Finance, and Business; and Society, Networks, and Information.

Each course has a YouTube video where the professor pitches a class to prospective students. It also gives a synopsis about the course, some background information about the instructor, a list of frequently asked questions, and sometimes they even post a syllabus.

I wish more colleges listed courses this way. It would be a great way to boost enrollment because students would be able to get a feel for the instructor and the material that would be covered.

In the following YouTube video, Michael Kearns, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, pitches his class titled, “Networked Life.”

According to the course profile, “Networked Life explores recent scientific efforts to explain social, economic and technological structures — and the way these structures interact — on many different scales, from the behavior of individuals or small groups to that of complex networks such as the Internet and the global economy.”

You can join his class by signing up here.

Several courses are starting on April 23 so you should register ASAP.

Completing a course on Coursera will not stand in the place of a course taken at an accredited institution and does not convey academic credit but there are occasions where instructors will grant students a letter of completion.

Students must be 18 years old to participate (with a few exceptions).

Wopat, who excelled in sports and was one of the nation’s best volleyball players during her high school years, was hospitalized on March 17th for what officials would only call “a medical emergency“. She died in the intensive care unit of Stanford Hospital on Sunday. The cause of her death has not been disclosed. The official statement read:

“On behalf of all of us at USA Volleyball, we are terribly saddened by the tragic and sudden passing of Samantha Wopat. Sam played on the 2009 U.S. Girls’ Youth National Volleyball Team at the FIVB World Championship and the 2010 U.S. Women’s Junior National Team at the NORCECA Continental Championship. Samantha was a bright and vibrant participant in the USA Volleyball Indoor High Performance Program with a seemingly unlimited and bright future. We cannot begin to imagine the sense of loss to the family, and we offer our thoughts and prayers to them and our most sincere condolences.” – Doug Beal, Chief Executive Officer of USA Volleyball

The young athlete was a three-time junior Olympic competitor and joined Stanford’s volleyball team in 2010 with her twin sister, Carly.

As with the death of any young person, the news of the loss has touched many who didn’t even know her. Twitter reacted immediately.

The professor believes in reaching the people who truly have an aptitude for his material rather than just those who have the financial means. His goal is to reach students all over the World. Also, the professor would like to cover a wider range of topics than he could offer at Stanford.

Udacity:

We believe university-level education can be both high quality and low cost. Using the economics of the Internet, we’ve connected some of the greatest teachers to hundreds of thousands of students in almost every country on Earth.

Starting on February 20th Udacity will begin online learning offering two classes:

CS 101: BUILDING A SEARCH ENGINE
Learn programming in seven weeks. We’ll teach you enough about computer science that you can build a web search engine like Google or Yahoo!

CS 373: PROGRAMMING A ROBOTIC CAR
In seven weeks you’ll learn how to program all the major systems of a robotic car, by the leader of Google and Stanford’s autonomous driving teams.

Below is the video of his commencement speech:

Here is the full text from the speech, for those who might like to read through it:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

Thank you all very much.

This move makes sense for a number of reasons.  A post on the Official Google Blog explained, "Most important was Stanford’s openness to us experimenting with new fiber technologies on its streets."

Also, "The layout of the residential neighborhoods and small number of homes make it a good fit for a beta deployment."  And location was a key consideration, since the short distance between the subdivision and Google’s headquarters means engineers can check things and interview users whenever they like.

Finally, we must point out that Stanford faculty and staff are perhaps more likely than the average individual to use their fancy Internet connections to make scientific breakthroughs rather than view porn or pirate movies.

Google’s announcement doesn’t mean that all the ordinary communities vying for ultra high-speed broadband networks are out of the running, though, as the Stanford network is a separate matter.  So look for more statements about Internet speeds of 1 gigabit per second in the future.

Work on the Stanford network, meanwhile, is supposed to begin early next year.

M. Ryan Calo, a residential fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, has helped design WhatApp.org with the goal of reducing the risk of computer hacking, identity theft, spam and phishing.

The reviews are being written by lawyers, computer scientists, and privacy and security experts from Stanford and other institutions.

"People are going online to opine about the security and privacy of apps all the time," Calo said. "But none of that discussion is centralized. What we’re trying to say is that if you’re doing it already, come and do it here."

The site also reviews browsers like Firefox and Safari, social networks including Twitter and Facebook and mobile platforms such as Apple’s iPhone, Windows Mobile and Google’s Android.

Users will be able to register as "expert reviewers" and create public profiles that list their qualifications. Calo and his team will verify that new reviewers are who they claim to be, but will leave it to the WhatApp? members to decide for themselves.

"The idea is not to be exclusive and create a club," Calo said. "If you know something or have an opinion about how good or bad an app’s privacy is, feel free to weigh in."

Reviewers will be asked to rate an app based on a number of questions after reading an application’s privacy and security policy.

The reviews come in the form of written comments and badges that award applications up to five green bars for privacy, security and openness. Wikis accompany the reviews to summarize what the app does, and the site immediately offers a list of links to news stories about an app’s privacy and security issues.

"The entire point is to drive the application market toward better privacy and security practices by rewarding those who do a good job and penalizing those who don’t," Calo said.

"Privacy is about having control over information that pertains to you. I think we’re rapidly losing that control, and this is a way to monitor what’s being done with information being collected."
 

Stanford and Google first sealed a book-related deal in late 2004.  In fact, Stanford was one of five organizations that, on December 14th of 2004, joined what was then known as an expansion of the Google Print program.

Now, a post on the Google Public Policy Blog has stated, "Stanford University . . . has expanded our original partnership to take advantage of our settlement agreement to make millions of works from its library collection accessible to readers, researchers, and book lovers across the United States."

The post continued, "That means that if the settlement agreement is approved by the court, anyone in the US will be able to find, preview and buy online access to books from Stanford’s library."

So obviously, this could be a significant agreement.  We’ll just need to find out how the settlement agreement fares before we can be sure that the terms will stick.

Related Articles:

> Google Bows To Chinese Authors On Book Scanning

> Three More Groups Rally Against Google Books Settlement

> Google Books Suffers Defeat In French Court

Okay, maybe not Congress just yet. But fresh on the heels of Harvard Law taking it to the RIAA over the recording industry’s litigation scare tactics against the nation’s universities and assumed pirate students. When the best profs at Harvard Law come after you, you know you’re in big, big trouble.

The AP is facing similar intimidating opposition from the other coast, this time from Stanford Law and San Francisco-based Durie Tangri Lemley Roberts & Kent, who just filed a lawsuit against the Associated Press. The suit seeks a declaration from the court that Shepard Fairey’s artistic transformation of an AP photograph of Barack Obama is fair use. The suit also seeks an injunction against the AP from further action against Fairey or anyone else using or displaying his work—perhaps like the Smithsonian, at the moment.

“There should be no doubt about the legality of Fairey’s work,” said Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project and lecturer in law at Stanford Law School, who is leading Fairey’s legal team. “He used the photograph for a purpose entirely different than the original, and transformed it dramatically.

“The original photograph is a literal depiction of Obama, whereas Fairey’s poster creates powerful new meaning and conveys a radically different message that has no analogue in the original photograph. Nor has Fairey done any harm to the value of the original photograph. Quite the opposite; Fairey has made the photograph immeasurably more valuable.”

Stanford and company become strong allies to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the nonprofit legal organization that went fishing for YouTube plaintiffs last week to join the DMCA abuse fight against Warner Music Group.

Why are law schools and nonprofit organizations having to step in? Because these are areas where Google’s high-priced lawyers apparently fear to tread. Despite the inherent benefit each fair use precedent would offer Google’s business model (and scores of others on the net), the cost of litigating against major media companies is higher than cutting a licensing deal.

And that’s exactly what media lawyers are counting on.

In case you missed it. Though the RIAA, MPAA, AP, etc., didn’t really need any help going after alleged copyright infringement, you Congress (including then Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden) made it a lot easier for them just before the election in a unanimous Senate vote.