Researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison overlapped on work with China's powerful police ministry developing vehicle technology capable of tracking cars and overtaking driving functions. Beijing has already begun deploying the systems across China. The technology, known as "vehicle-road-cloud" integration, links cars with roadside cameras and sensors and centralized cloud platforms, allowing authorities to monitor traffic in real time and, at its most advanced levels, send commands to connected vehicles. The implications of connected vehicles have alarmed US officials. In 2016, then-UW Vice Provost Jeffrey Russell traveled to 🇨🇳 Southeast University, where the schools signed agreements covering research, faculty exchanges, student training and plans to create a joint institute. The following year, Southeast University's president traveled to Madison to formally establish the Joint Research Institute. The institute focused on intelligent transportation, connected and autonomous vehicles and vehicle-road-cloud technology. UW-Madison's own College of Engineering wrote in 2019 that the institute had "launched in late 2017." Two years later, UW researchers appeared on technical work that also involved an institute of 🇨🇳 Ministry of Public Security. Five UW-Madison researchers were among 46 contributors to a Chinese industry report on vehicle-road cooperative automated driving. The UW-SEU joint institute was listed first among the report's drafting units, while the Traffic Management Research Institute of 🇨🇳 Ministry of Public Security was listed seventh. The extent of UW-Madison's institutional involvement in the joint institute is disputed. Related vehicle-road-cloud technology was, meanwhile, becoming part of China's national connected-vehicle push. In 2023, three major Chinese transportation and communications standards bodies published a framework for vehicle-road-cloud integration. Southeast University was among the drafters alongside the Road Traffic Safety Research Center of 🇨🇳 Ministry of Public Security. The following year, the MPS joined four other Chinese ministries in launching a vehicle-road-cloud pilot program across 20 cities and regional groupings. Under the government plan, participating cities are to install connected roadside equipment and sensing systems and build city-level cloud platforms capable of communicating with vehicles. The platforms can provide information to vehicles and assist with decision-making, planning and control, while safety-monitoring systems track participating vehicles in real time. Chinese authorities describe the program as an effort to improve traffic safety, advance autonomous driving and accelerate the country's connected-vehicle industry. But those same capabilities have raised security concerns in Washington, where officials have warned that connected-vehicle systems could be exploited to collect sensitive data or remotely manipulate vehicles. “The available evidence indicates that research conducted by scholars affiliated with the JRI contributed to the development of a civilian-framed dual-use technology in technical areas that also received US institutional and federal research support.” “When Beijing incorporated this technology into national standards, the state absorbed a system that has significant surveillance, military, and human rights dimensions.” foxnews.com/politics/how-ame…

Yann LeCun: we are not going to get human-level intelligence or AGI by just scaling LLMs. “There’s absolutely no way in hell.” “The idea that we’re gonna have a country of geniuses in a data center, that’s complete BS.” “It may feel like you have a PhD sitting next to you.” “But it’s not a PhD.” “It’s a system with gigantic memory and retrieval ability, not one that can invent solutions to new problems.”