This Week’s Tech Highlights: SpaceX Launch, AI Transformers, Cloud Servers & More

SpaceX conducts static fire test for Crew Dragon launch

On April 17, SpaceX performed a static fire of the Falcon 9 rocket at Kennedy Space Center in preparation for a crewed launch scheduled for April 22. The mission will carry four astronauts to the International Space Station, with docking expected on April 23.

Facebook plans social audio product to rival Clubhouse

Facebook announced a suite of new social audio products, including a Clubhouse‑like app, a podcast discovery tool in partnership with Spotify, and a voice‑only video‑meeting product called Rooms. Other companies such as Twitter and Apple are also exploring similar audio‑centric services.

JD Cloud and Seagate launch next‑generation cloud servers

JD Cloud partnered with Seagate to build servers that use innovative architecture and cooling designs to minimize fan noise and vibration, improving hard‑drive reliability and read/write performance, especially for Seagate Exos X18 enterprise drives.

Google postpones mandatory offline support for PWAs in Chrome

Google has delayed its plan to require Progressive Web Apps to work offline in Chrome after developers reported issues and provided feedback.

NVIDIA unveils its first CPU and new AI hardware

At the GTC conference NVIDIA introduced three Arm‑based processors: the Grace CPU for high‑performance computing, the Bluefield‑3 DPU, and a 1000‑TOPS automotive SoC for autonomous driving.

Adobe co‑founder Charles Geschke passes away

Charles Geschke, co‑founder of Adobe and pioneer of PDF, Photoshop and Acrobat, died at 81. He earned his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon before co‑founding Adobe.

Beijing launches the nation’s first intelligent‑connected vehicle policy pilot zone

The Beijing Intelligent‑Connected Vehicle Pilot Zone issued its implementation plan and granted the first road‑test permits to companies such as Baidu, Didi and Pony.ai, enabling large‑scale autonomous‑driving trials.

Swin Transformer sets new state‑of‑the‑art in computer vision

Microsoft Research introduced the Swin Transformer, a hierarchical visual transformer that uses shifted windows and local attention, achieving top performance on many CV benchmarks.

StablePose: geometry‑stable patch groups for 6‑DoF object pose estimation

Researchers from the National University of Defense Technology proposed StablePose, which predicts 6‑DoF object poses by aggregating geometrically stable surface patches, improving accuracy for robotics and AR applications.