Nissan's Cars Will Read Your Mind

The Japanese automaker is teaming up with Swiss researchers to build a car that will predict its driver's intentions.

DAVID ZAX 

In the future--don't ask how distant--your car may be able to read your mind.

Nissan announced that it would be collaborating with the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland (EPFL) on a car that would be able to make an educated guess about what a driver's intentions are. The idea isn't quite to have a car be steered by the driver's mind alone--as in this German concept proposing that a car brake for you, based on brain signals. Rather, the car would read the driver's mind and prepare itself for a manually executed maneuver. Think about turning to the right, for instance, and the car will adopt the appropriate speed and road position.

How could a car know what you're thinking? For one thing, it would use brain-computer interface (BCI) technology developed at EPFL. The Swiss researchers, led by Professor José del R. Millán, are acknowledged leaders in this space, having created an interface that enables the steering of a wheelchair by thought alone, for instance.

But the car would read more than the driver's mind. The car's sensors could scan around the car itself, effectively cross-checking what the driver is thinking with what's actually out there. You maywant to turn left--but if there's a Mack truck in your blind spot, your car will know better. By combining brain and environmental data, the car (and driver) makes smarter choices. "The idea is to blend driver and vehicle intelligence together in such a way that eliminates conflicts between them, leading to a safer motoring environment," José del R. Millán recently said.

EPFL isn't the first academic institution to dabble in hands-free driving. A German university-- Freie Universität Berlin--got there first.

But to the best of my knowledge, this is the first time a major car manufacturer has joined the effort, bringing the research into the realm of commercial, mass-market reality. The EPFL collaboration is part of a six-year plan Nissan calls "Power 88"; other technology projects include smart cruise control, distance control assist, and moving object detection--basically, more and more ways of automating the driving experience.

All of which raises the question: won't mind-reading cars be obsolete in an era of driverless cars?

Carmakers Unveil New Types of Hybrids

ENERGY

Carmakers Unveil New Types of Hybrids

Alternative approaches replace the battery with compressed air or a flywheel.

• BY STUART NATHAN

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Hybrid cars normally combine conventional engines with battery-powered electric motors. But many carmakers are developing alternative types of hybrids—some of which were on display this month at the Frankfurt Motor Show in Germany.

Hybrid systems recover kinetic energy—from the engine or from the vehicle itself—and use it to boost the efficiency of the engine. A typical hybrid car does this by charging up a battery.

Scuderi, based in West Springfield, Massachusetts, has altered the way the internal combustion engine operates to convert kinetic energy into the potential energy of high-pressure air. It splits the four parts of the internal combustion cycle across two cylinders synchronized on the same crankshaft. One cylinder handles the air intake and compression part of the cycle, pumping compressed air via a crossover passage into the second cylinder. The crossover contains the fuel-injection system, and combustion and exhaust are handled in the second cylinder.

When the vehicle does not need power—when traveling downhill, braking, or decelerating—the second cylinder is disabled and the first cylinder's air is diverted into a high-pressure air-storage tank. This air can be used to help run the engine, boosting its efficiency.

Recently, Scuderi has combined this system with a "Miller-cycle" turbocharger, which picks up energy off the exhaust and uses it to compress air into the intake cylinder. This allows the compression side to be shrunk down and reduces the amount of work done through the crankshaft. "The engine is producing much higher output at higher efficiency, we're producing less emissions, and our torque level is very high," said Scuderi group president Sal Scuderi at the Frankfurt show. "Our gasoline engine will rival the torque of any diesel engine on the market, but it does that while maintaining low pressure inside the cylinders, which reduces wear and tear."

Scuderi has now released results of a computer simulation of its engine against a European economy-class engine of comparable power. The air hybrid achieved a fuel economy figure of 65 miles per gallon, compared with 52 miles per gallon for the conventional engine. It also emitted 85 grams per kilometer of carbon dioxide, compared with 104 grams per kilometer for the conventional engine.

Across the Atlantic, a team that formerly worked for the Renault Formula 1 team has adapted its motorsport-developed flywheel system for use with conventional vehicles. The team has formed a company, Flybrid Systems, to commercialize the technology, and has teamed up with Jaguar Land Rover to trial the Flybrid technology that was originally developed as the kinetic energy recovery system (KERS) used in Formula 1 racing to provide a boost during racing. But while most KERS systems work by using a flywheel to charge an onboard battery or supercapacitor, Flybrid uses a gearbox system to transfer kinetic energy directly to and from the wheels.

Flybrid cars transfer energy via either a continuously variable transmission or a less complex three-gear system, which allows 15 different gear ratios on a standard five-gear model. "There are always efficiency losses when you convert energy," explains Flybrid's technical director, Doug Cross. "This system eliminates those losses, making it far more efficient."

The flywheel weighs five kilograms and is made from carbon fiber wrapped around a steel core. Because it is so light, it has to spin fast—at 60,000 rpm—which means that its rim is traveling at supersonic speeds. As a result, it has to operate in a vacuum, and Flybrid has developed special seals so that the wheel can be fully enclosed inside a safety container in case of a crash. At top speed, the flywheel can store 540 kilojoules of energy, which is sufficient to accelerate an average-sized automobile from a standing start to 48 kilometers per hour.

"One way you can use this technology is to boost the car during a cruise," Cross said. "We have a system installed on a Jaguar saloon, and that has shown that during a cruise, you can actually switch the engine off for 65 percent of the journey. With a V6 diesel engine, it cuts fuel use by 26 percent, but gives you the power of a V8 petrol engine."

Let's Talk, iPhone

COMPUTING

Let's Talk, iPhone

Could Apple be about to give iPhone users an AI personal assistant? And if so, will people like it?

• BY TOM SIMONITE

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Apple has popularized some revolutions in how we use personal computers in its time: the graphical interface, the mouse, and the touch screen, for example. Next Tuesday could see the company add to that list of milestones in man-machine interaction by letting users control a computer by having a conversation with it.

Apple's new boss, Tim Cook, will take the stage at the company's California headquarters to announce the latest updates to the company's products. Apple's invite to the event says only "Let's Talk iPhone," but the Internet rumor mill has decided that Cook will announce two things: a fifth model of the iPhone; and a voice-activated "Assistant" for iPhone and iPad devices, based on an impressive app called Siri that was bought by Apple last year (see here for one of the more plausible predictions).

We may well get neither of these, but of the two, the second is the most interesting. I may regret saying this, but there are few significant hardware upgrades that Apple could add to the iPhone 5. Some things will get incrementally better; more resolution (camera), faster (processor), or bigger (screen), but there's not a lot left to throw in that makes sense.

On the other hand, making it simple to set up calendar invites or find a nearby movie just by conversing with your iPhone or iPad would break new ground. It's also the kind of achievable revolution that Apple is known for.

The formula is simple: take a bunch of neat technology that has never lived up to its promise, rethink what it's for, do some secretive hard work, and then release a natural, retrospectively obvious experience that redefines what computers can do.

The iPad and iPhone interfaces are good examples of this. Touch screens, mobile browsers, and tablets existed already, but Apple rolled them together and altered the trajectory of personal computing.

The shabby history of speech recognition, voice control, and virtual assistants (remember Clippy?) is perfect feedstock for this approach. All have been around for decades and have the potential to be so much better than poking buttons or a screen. Never has anyone come close to realizing that potential.

When Siri debuted in 2009, it looked to be the best hope yet of changing that. It was the spawn of a DARPA-funded AI project and some smart thinking on integrating various tools such as maps, restaurant reviews, and movie ticket bookings, and we made it one of our 10 technologies to watch in 2009. A user could have back-and-forth conversations that begin with complex statements like, "I'd like a romantic place for Italian food near my office."

Siri contained several smart technical ideas, but crucially, it condensed them into an easy-to-understand, working conversational interface that was actually useful. Apple could take this a significant step further by making the technology more robust and integrating it with the iPad and iPhone operating system. If they do that, the humble app Siri would be promoted to the role of Assistant, a personal aide that you talk to in normal language and helps with most things you use your phone or tablet for. In essence, it would be your phone's personality.

As will be pointed out in many a discussion thread if this does come to pass, Google was (sort of) there first. The company's Android operating system has a "voice actions" feature that allows users to press and hold a button and request directions to a local business, or dictate a text message. Yet it lacks the power to take actions beyond your phone, such as booking a restaurant. More importantly, it doesn't have a smart conversational interface.

Voice actions on Android feel like a techy side feature, not a new way of interacting with computers. Assistant could and should be a much more cohesive package. If it does arrive on Tuesday, it will likely condense a boatload of technology into one simple thing: a computer interface you converse with. If done well, that could see Apple once again shift what it means to use a computer.

Apple doesn't perform such tricks for free, and is notoriously controlling, though. Should Assistant appear, it will only be available on Apple devices, to drive sales. Any external services it connects with will be carefully approved. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Apple gets a cut of anything sold through Assistant, whether movie tickets or restaurant booking. Still, like the iPhone and Apple's other disruptive ideas, it won't be long before competitors launch mimics.

Questions remain in my mind, though, about the limits Apple will have placed on Assistant to have it live up to the company's own high standards. Creating a voice-based interface is easy, but creating one that, in Steve Jobs's words, "just works" is not.

The fact is that voice recognition has to cheat to be really accurate without extensive pretraining to your voice. It needs some precognition of what you are going to say. Google's voice search mobile app, for example, is incredibly accurate because it draws on piles of data about phrases people search for. Apple Assistant should be fine when taking orders related to things it knows you might talk about, like your calendar, contacts or music playlists. Transcribing speech, such as an e-mail message, when you could say literally anything is another matter, though, and it will be interesting to see if Apple makes it part of its system. I've found Google's voice actions to be infuriating to use for composing messages, and I can't imagine Apple launching a product with such potential to annoy users.

Striking the balance between power and reliability could be the toughest design decision involved in building something like Assistant. It's the type of judgement call that Steve Jobs excelled at, for example, when he put the iPad on hold and launched a smaller version in the form of a phone first. Come Tuesday, we may get a glimpse at how well Jobs's successor negotiates the same trade-off between what could be launched and what meets Apple's unique brand of experience-centric perfectionism.