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Motional Open-Sources Dataset to Help Autonomous Vehicles Master Human-Like Reasoning

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World’s first reasoning-centric, long-tail scenario open dataset designed to teach autonomous vehicles (AVs) human-like reasoning and decision making
Motional launches nuReasoning Challenge at European Conference on Computer Vision for researchers and practitioners to advance next-generation driving foundation models
Dataset and Challenge developed in partnership with the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Mobility Lab and its Director, Professor Jiaqi Ma

BOSTON, Sept. 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Motional, a leader in autonomous driving technology, announces the release of nuReasoning, the world’s first reasoning-centric, long-tail scenario open dataset designed to teach autonomous vehicles (AVs) human-like reasoning and decision making. nuReasoning serves to advance the AV industry by training end-to-end autonomous systems with the common-sense intuition needed to navigate complex edge cases.

Today’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) is moving beyond simply recognizing what it sees toward understanding the physical world, reasoning about what could happen next, and deciding how to act. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models bring these capabilities together, but they need training data that teaches more than just the correct action, they also need to learn the logic behind that action. nuReasoning provides this missing supervision by teaching models to understand spatial relationships, reason about driving decisions, anticipate risks, and consider alternative outcomes.

Along with having 20,000 long-tail scenarios, nuReasoning provides unparalleled annotation. Each long-tail event, selected from Motional’s millions of miles of driving data, has a video clip of at least 20 seconds that is embedded with high-quality and human verified reasoning. Through this annotation, researchers are able to understand not just what an AV perceives, but why specific actions were taken and why alternative choices were ruled unsafe.

A nuReasoning miniset release earlier this year has already been downloaded over 50,000 times, underscoring the need for a dataset of this kind within the advanced AI research community.

As shown above, one nuReasoning scenario features a nighttime construction zone and shows that the AV stopped before proceeding forward. The stop could be taken as the AV not understanding how to proceed through the zone. The scenario annotation details that the AV actually stopped correctly for a small animal crossing the road up ahead. Alternate routes were rejected because of construction barriers and the animal’s unknown speed and direction.

“To safely expand AV fleets, autonomous driving systems must react to rare, chaotic edge cases with the same assured logic as an experienced human driver,” said Phil Michel, Motional’s Senior Vice President of Autonomy and AI. “At Motional, we’re prioritizing transparent AI so we can clearly evaluate real-time decision-making and risk assessment. By making nuReasoning openly available, we’re offering a shared foundation to help the entire industry solve edge cases and advance toward scalable autonomous operation.”

To catalyze global research, Motional is hosting a nuReasoning Challenge, launching at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) in Sweden. The dataset and Challenge were created in partnership with the UCLA Mobility Lab and Professor Jiaqi Ma.

nuReasoning Dataset

Mined from real-world Motional fleet data across Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Boston, and Singapore, nuReasoning features:

Over 105 hours of carefully selected reasoning intensive edge cases including unusual pedestrian activity, work zones and night road construction, animal crossings, and limited visibility scenarios.
Diverse reasoning annotations support a broad range of VLA model training, including Spatial Reasoning, Decision Reasoning, and Counterfactual Reasoning.

247,000 reasoning annotations with human verified quality assurance.
Multi-modal sensor types to provide complete scene representation in 3D space. 

Additionally, Motional has integrated its proprietary Omnitag data search engine, giving nuReasoning researchers an intuitive navigation layer to query dataset distributions by scenario type, difficulty level, and location. Furthermore, Omnitag unlocks powerful natural language semantic search, allowing users to search complex tactical interactions, such as “emergency vehicle approaching behind with a construction site nearby ” and instantly isolate matching data.

nuReasoning Challenge at European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)

Motional and the UCLA Mobility Lab are hosting the nuReasoning Challenge, launching at ECCV in Sweden.

The Challenge is designed as a joint evaluation of planning and reasoning on 1,000 private-test scenarios.

Explainable Trajectory & Motion Planning: Benchmarking physical motion planning accuracy and safety compliance when guided by explicit counterfactual reasoning.
Long-Tail Visual Question Answering & Scene Reasoning: Evaluating a model’s ability to accurately infer spatial relationships, causal decision traces, and risk factors in edge cases.

Interested participants can find more information here. Submissions will be evaluated, and Challenge winners will be announced at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) in December.

Pioneering Open Safety Standards: From nuScenes to nuReasoning

nuReasoning extends Motional’s legacy of advancing AV research through open data, beginning with nuScenes in 2019, the industry’s first multi-modal public AV dataset, and continuing through nuImages, Panoptic nuScenes, and nuPlan. By providing open benchmarks, Motional empowers academic and commercial engineers to establish unified safety standards for AV perception, trajectory planning, and explainable AI.

Motional’s datasets are available for commercial licensing or free academic use subject to Motional’s non-commercial terms and conditions. Interested users can contact nuscenes@motional.com.

About Motional:

Motional is an autonomous vehicle technology company on a mission to make driverless vehicles a safe, reliable, and accessible reality. The company formed in 2020 and is majority-owned by Hyundai Motor Group, one of the world’s largest vehicle manufacturers. Motional has extensive experience in commercial robotaxi operations, with service currently available on the Uber network in Las Vegas and plans for driverless operations by the end of 2026. Headquartered in Boston, Motional has operations in the U.S. and Singapore. For more information, visit www.Motional.com and follow the company on LinkedIn.

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SOURCE Motional

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Yubi Group Launches ‘TopScore’ at GFF 2026 to Widen Credit Health Awareness for Indian borrowers

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MUMBAI, India, Sept. 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Yubi Group, the AI-powered operating system for financial services, today launched TopScore, a consumer credit-health app, unveiled at the Global Fintech Fest (GFF) 2026. The launch arrives at a pivotal moment for financial inclusion in India: even as over a billion Indians are now eligible for credit, recent studies suggest nearly one in two have never checked their credit score, and many first encounter it only as a loan rejection, without understanding what shaped it or what to do next. Credit access has scaled; credit understanding has not.

The app was unveiled by Mr. Ajay Kumar Choudhary, Non-Executive Chairman and Independent Director of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), Independent Director on the Board of Yubi Group, and a former Executive Director of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

Speaking at the launch, Mr. Choudhary said, “Financial health begins with early education, not late collections. When consumers understand their credit habits before taking on debt, we break the default cycle and curb NPAs across the entire system. Solutions like TopScore are an integral pillar of the effort to improve credit literacy and protect everyday citizens from debt stress.”

Gaurav Kumar, Founder & CEO, Yubi Group, shared the vision behind the launch saying, “For years, debt management in India was reactive, focused on collections, recovery, and managing NPAs after financial stress had already set in. That era is ending. By channeling deep credit infrastructure and predictive technology toward the consumer, we are shifting from reactive recovery to proactive credit health. TopScore is the natural culmination of that evolution. It moves the conversation beyond simply accessing credit to helping people borrow smarter, build lasting financial health, and prevent debt stress before it begins.”

TopScore is a comprehensive credit-health companion built around three simple steps: check, understand, and grow. Users start with a free credit score and full report, drawn from Experian, one of India’s leading credit bureaus with the user’s own consent, and translated from complex bureau data into plain language across 10 languages, including Hindi and English. An AI Score Coach turns that report into a personal, step-by-step plan, showing what is helping a user’s profile and what is holding it back, while a Human Coach, (a real credit expert who speaks the user’s language) is available for the moments where human intervention is required. A built-in score predictor lets users play out real-life scenarios and see their estimated effect before acting. And the app goes beyond numbers: TopScore assists users in raising disputes to correct reporting errors, and in pursuing a consent-first, borrower-initiated path to resolve past dues directly with their lender and rebuild.

TopScore will be available on Google Play Store and the Apple App Store soon.

While TopScore is a bold step into the consumer space, it stands on the foundation of the Yubi Group. For years, Yubi has been the engine powering the systems behind India’s credit landscape. By channeling that institutional understanding into a consumer product, Yubi Group is uniquely positioned to serve the entire credit lifecycle, from awareness to access to rebuilding.

About Yubi Group:

Yubi Group is the world’s only AI-powered operating system (OS) for financial services, founded in 2020 by CEO Gaurav Kumar. At its core is YuVerse, an applied AI suite powering four specialized companies – Yubi, Accumn, Spocto X, and YuCollect – that together deliver end-to-end solutions in lending, underwriting, and collections. Backed by leading investors including Peak XV, Insight Partners, Lightspeed, B Capital Group, Dragoneer, and TVS Capital, Yubi has facilitated over ₹3.2 lakh crore in credit and 3.5 crore transactions, serving 17,000+ enterprises and 6,200+ investors & lenders while reducing collections costs by 57%. The company is redefining transparency, compliance, and performance across India’s financial services sector. 

Visit www.go-yubi.com to learn more.

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/3008967/Yubi_TopScore_Launch.jpg

 

 

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Owl Autonomous Imaging Selected for Pentagon-Led DUTCH Award to Advance Uncooled Thermal Imaging

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Fabless semiconductor company brings advanced LWIR technology and scalable North American manufacturing to next-generation defense systems

ROCHESTER, N.Y., Sept. 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Owl Autonomous Imaging, Inc. (Owl AI), a U.S.-based fabless semiconductor company developing advanced long-wave infrared (LWIR) technology, today announced that it has been selected for an award supporting the Delivering Unmatched Thermal Capability–Hastened (DUTCH) initiative, led by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of War for Critical Technologies and the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) C5ISR Center.

Under the award, Owl AI will apply its expertise in uncooled LWIR semiconductor and imaging technology to the development and demonstration of next-generation thermal capabilities. As a fabless semiconductor company, Owl develops technology across the thermal imaging chain, from focal plane arrays and digital readout technology through camera cores and complete thermal camera systems.

Owl AI’s KnightOwl HD™ platform is designed to deliver high-quality uncooled LWIR imaging with the low-power architecture, compact form factor and scalable manufacturing approach required by emerging autonomous and defense systems.

“We are excited to support the DUTCH initiative and the effort to accelerate the next generation of uncooled thermal technology,” said Chuck Gershman, CEO and co-founder of Owl Autonomous Imaging. “We developed KnightOwl HD around the needs of a new generation of systems that require higher-quality thermal imaging, lower power, smaller form factors and a path to much broader deployment. We believe scalable thermal imaging can become an important enabling technology for drones, robotics and critical defense programs like Drone Dominance.”

Owl AI’s fabless model uses semiconductor and MEMS manufacturing partners in the United States and Canada, supporting Department of War priorities for secure, resilient and scalable supply chains for mission-critical technologies.

The DUTCH award expands Owl AI’s work with the U.S. defense community and supports the company’s broader objective of moving advanced LWIR thermal perception from a specialized sensing technology to a highly scalable platform for the next generation of autonomous systems.

About Owl Autonomous Imaging

Owl Autonomous Imaging, Inc. (Owl AI) is a U.S.-based fabless semiconductor company developing advanced long-wave infrared imaging and thermal perception technology for the emerging world of Physical AI.

Owl AI develops technology across the thermal imaging stack, including proprietary focal plane arrays, digital readout technology, compact camera cores and complete thermal camera systems. In addition to thermal imaging, Owl develops proprietary AI algorithms and multimodal fusion capabilities that combine thermal data with other sensing modalities to enable perception capabilities including detection, classification and environmental understanding.

By combining semiconductor innovation, LWIR imaging and AI-enabled thermal perception, Owl AI enables intelligent systems to perceive and operate in darkness, degraded visual environments and other conditions where conventional vision systems are limited. Owl AI develops technology for drones, robotics, defense, automotive autonomy and industrial applications. For more information visit https://owlai.us 

Media Contact
Wade Appelman, Chief Business Officer
Owl Autonomous Imaging
wadea@owlai.us
781-439-7480

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SOURCE Owl Autonomous Imaging

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Loop8 Kills the Master Password

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Nothing to remember. And the password manager is only one part: Loop8 is a privacy controller covering notes, private messaging and two-factor codes, all behind your biometrics.

GLENDALE, Calif., Sept. 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Loop8 today made its privacy app generally available. The app is free to download and use, and there is no master password anywhere in it. Users open it with the biometrics already built into their phone. Passwords are only part of what it holds: Note8 protected notes, True8 Connect private messaging, two-factor codes and dark web monitoring all sit behind the same biometrics, and Loop8 never saves any of it on its own servers.

Most password managers and secure note apps encrypt what users give them and then keep it on company servers, which puts millions of vaults in one place for a single breach to expose. Loop8 has no such place. Everything a user stores is encrypted on the phone, and the backup copy goes automatically to the user’s own iCloud account on iOS or Google account on Android. The encryption key never leaves the device, so even that backup cannot be opened without the phone.

Data does travel through Loop8’s servers to reach another device, encrypted end to end with keys that stay on user devices, so the company cannot read what it carries and keeps no copy after delivery.

Registration takes two pieces of information, an email address and a phone number. Loop8 does not ask for a name, a home address, an age or a gender.

A master password is also the thing people end up writing down, and the thing an attacker can talk them out of. Phishing works because a secret can be repeated to a stranger over the phone. No one can be talked into handing over a fingerprint. Loop8 has no password to write down, and none to hand over.

If the phone is lost

The encrypted backup in the user’s own cloud is still there, but it cannot be opened without the key from the lost device. That is where trusted contacts come in. Loop8 asks users to name people they trust, and those people are what restores access. There is no reset link to click, and Loop8 cannot restore an account itself, because it never held the content or the key.

What’s in the privacy controller

Free with the app

Note8. A one-page notes app behind the user’s biometrics, built for people who have a hard time with password managers, including older users. It can also copy a protected note into a family member’s Loop8 app, so a spouse or an adult child can take over if something happens.
True8 Connect. Private messaging between two people, not stored on Loop8’s servers. Messages delete themselves after eight days, with no recovery and no archive.
Authenticator. Two-factor codes, generated and kept on the device.
PrivacyMate. Scans the dark web for compromised data and provides real-time notifications to users while they browse on a desktop.

In the paid version

The password manager. Credentials kept on the phone and opened with biometrics. No master password, and no copy on Loop8’s servers.
MySafe. A desktop tool that keeps its contents on the computer and does not copy them to the cloud on its own. Users who want a backup send it to storage they already own, such as their own Google Drive.
Seven extra licenses. Every paid license comes with seven more at no cost, so a user can cover family and community instead of buying one seat at a time.

“Most people aren’t security experts, and they shouldn’t have to be,” said Zarik Megerdichian, founder and CEO of Loop8. “We built Loop8 for everyone else. It’s simple, and there’s nothing for you to manage. Hackers go after big companies because that’s where millions of accounts sit in one pile. We don’t keep that pile. The master password had a good run. As of today, people have another option.”

Availability

Loop8 is free on the Apple App Store for iOS and on Google Play for Android. The free version includes Note8, True8 Connect, the authenticator and PrivacyMate. The paid version adds the password manager and MySafe for $8, and every paid license comes with seven more at no cost.

On the desktop, Loop8 runs on both Mac and Windows and syncs through the Loop8 browser extension, which is available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge.

About Loop8

Loop8 makes a privacy controller, a single app that keeps a person’s passwords, notes, private messages and two-factor codes behind their own biometrics. User content stays on the user’s own devices and in their own cloud accounts. Loop8 never stores it on its own servers. The app is free, and registration asks only for an email address and a phone number. Loop8 is based in Glendale, California. For more information, visit loop8.ai.

Media Contact

Zarik Megerdichian CEO, Loop8 pr@l8p8.com | (818) 208-0238 www.loop8.ai

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SOURCE L8P8 Inc.

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