In a groundbreaking move, crews have completed the installation of what is being hailed as the nation’s inaugural wireless-charging public roadway for electric vehicles beneath a street located just west of downtown Detroit.
The innovative system utilizes copper inductive charging coils, allowing vehicles equipped with corresponding receivers to charge their batteries seamlessly while driving, idling, or parking directly above these coils.
The Michigan Department of Transportation has earmarked a quarter-mile stretch along 14th Street for testing and refining this cutting-edge technology before making it accessible to the public within the next few years.
Demonstrations took place on Wednesday at the Michigan Central Innovation District, a focal point for advancing technologies and programs addressing mobility barriers. This district is also where Ford Motor Co. is actively restoring the historic Michigan Central train station to facilitate the development of self-driving vehicles.
The brainchild behind this technology is Electreon, an Israel-based developer specializing in wireless charging solutions for electric vehicles. With existing contracts for similar roadways in Israel, Sweden, Italy, and Germany, the pilot initiative in Michigan was originally announced by Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2021.
Stefan Tongur, Electreon’s Vice President of Business Development, emphasized the potential of wireless charging in revolutionizing electric vehicle adoption, mitigating issues such as limited range, grid constraints, and battery size and costs. Tongur stated, “This project paves the way for a zero-emission mobility future, where EVs are the norm, not the exception.”
As a vehicle with a receiver approaches the charging segments, the coils beneath the road generate electricity through a magnetic field, effectively charging the vehicle’s battery. Notably, the coils are designed to activate solely when a vehicle with a receiver passes over them.
Tongur reassured reporters that the wireless-charging roadway is safe for pedestrians, motorists, and animals alike.
The Michigan Department of Transportation and Electreon have committed to a five-year partnership to further develop the electric road system. The department is anticipated to seek bids for the reconstruction of a portion of the bustling Michigan Avenue, where inductive charging will also be implemented.
With the rising popularity of electric vehicles in the United States, the Biden administration has incorporated plans for half a million EV charging stations as a cornerstone of its infrastructure goals.
Officials believe that the installation of the wireless-charging roadway positions Michigan and Detroit at the forefront of electric vehicle technology. Michigan DOT Director Bradley C. Wieferich expressed the state’s commitment to staying ahead of the curve and leading in electric vehicle advancements.
Stefan Tongur mentioned that no decisions have been finalized regarding revenue models in Michigan, emphasizing the intelligence of the technology in recognizing verified and authentic users who can seamlessly access charging services.
(With input from agenices)
The Stable Diffusion artificial intelligence (AI) image generator has come under scrutiny from US scientists at the University of Washington (UW) for perpetuating harmful racial and gender stereotypes.
The researchers found that when prompted to generate images of individuals from specific regions, such as “a person from Oceania,” the generator failed to represent Indigenous peoples equitably.
Notably, it tended to sexualize images of women from certain Latin American countries (Colombia, Venezuela, Peru), as well as Mexico, India, and Egypt.
These findings, available on the pre-print server arXiv, are scheduled for presentation at the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing in Singapore from December 6-10.
Sourojit Ghosh, a UW doctoral student in the human-centred design and engineering department, emphasized the potential harm caused by systems like Stable Diffusion and highlighted the near-complete erasure of nonbinary and Indigenous identities.
“It’s important to recognise that systems like Stable Diffusion produce results that can cause harm,” said Ghosh.
“For instance, an Indigenous person looking at Stable Diffusion’s representation of people from Australia is not going to see their identity represented-that can be harmful and perpetuate stereotypes of the settler-colonial white people being more ‘Australian’ than Indigenous, darker-skinned people, whose land it originally was and continues to remain,” Ghosh said.
The researchers conducted a study by instructing Stable Diffusion to generate 50 images of a “front-facing photo of a person” and varying prompts to represent different continents and countries.
Computational analysis, along with manual confirmation, revealed that images of a “person” correlated most with men, individuals from Europe, and North America, while showing the least correspondence with nonbinary individuals and people from Africa and Asia.
Additionally, the generator was found to sexualize certain women of colour, particularly those from Latin American countries. The team used a Not Safe for Work (NSFW) Detector to assess sexualization, with women from Venezuela receiving higher “sexy” scores compared to women from Japan and the UK.
(With inputs from agencies)
