Founded by experts in robotics, Embark claims to be the longest-running self-driving truck program in the U.S., launched in 2016, when self-driving technology wasn’t so popular in the trucking industry. The company’s strategy was to focus exclusively on autonomous software and associated services, which would be universally compatible with most trucks.

So far, the company’s product range includes the Embark Driver, an advanced automated driving software that was specifically developed for trucks, the Embark Universal Interface that is used to integrate autonomous technology onto trucks, a fleet monitoring and remote-assist system.

The startup recently announced that it will start using the Nvidia Drive autonomous vehicle compute platform to power EUI and its Driver software. According to Ajith Dasari, Head of Hardware Platform at Embark, the high performance and safety standards that are required by the autonomous software and interface, can only be met with the help of “an enormous amount of computing power in our trucks”.

Known as the first scalable AI platform that combines hardware and software for the production of automated vehicles (including deep learning, surround vision and advanced sensors), Nvidia Drive was a natural choice.

The flexible EUI was specifically designed to allow carriers to select their preferred OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) when installing the self-driving software. At the moment, the EUI is compatible with four major OEMs – Freightliner, Navistar International, PACCAR, and Volvo – which bring most of the Class-8 trucks on U.S. roads today.

The partnership with Nvidia represents another significant step for Embark. A couple of months ago, the startup announced that it became a publicly listed company, after signing a definitive business combination agreement with Northern Genesis Acquisition Corp. II. Also, its Board of Directors was joined by former Secretary of Transportation, Elaine Chao.

DeepMap’s technology will bolster the mapping and localization capabilities of NVIDIA DRIVE after the acquisition is expected to close in the third calendar quarter of 2021. According to Ali Kani, vice president and general manager of Automotive at NVIDIA:

“The acquisition is an endorsement of DeepMap’s unique vision, technology and people. DeepMap is expected to extend our mapping products, help us scale worldwide map operations and expand our full self-driving expertise.”

The latest release of Visual Studio Code 1.57 includes updates such as Workspace Trust, a new getting started experience, remote repositories and much more.

Workspace Trust lets users decide whether their project folders should allow or restrict automatic code execution and enables safe code browsing. What is more, the new Edge browser debugging feature integrates the Microsoft Edge Developer tools directly into VS Code.

• The new FIDO Developer Challenge invites teams to use the public FIDO2 WebAuthn API to showcase unique FIDO authentication ideas.

The FIDO Alliance stated that the projects should apply FIDO authentication protocols to address technical or social challenges within Fintech, eCommerce, IoT, retail, blockchain, gaming and education. The deadline for entry is July 2nd.

• The new Powered by Snowflake program is specifically designed to accelerate the ability of companies and application developers to deliver differentiated applications through all stages of the application in Snowflake’s Data Cloud.

The program will allow users to build better applications with faster engineering velocity by leveraging Snowflake design resources and will also drive awareness and adoption by co-marketing with Snowflake.

Those who participate in the program will also be able to optimize performance by working with support engineers who specialize in app development.

• The new version of TMS WEB Core includes package support to easily create custom components, Workspaces that allow users to manage multiple projects in one folder, and support for the use of the entire FNC component suite.

Using TMS WEB Core, modern client-side web applications can be created exclusively with the Object Pascal programming language without the need for HTML, CSS or JavaScript.

All new components and improvements are now available to Visual Studio Code users.