WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Sometimes the centre of gravity in tech is very clear, but as we enter 2022 there are lots of areas where trillion dollar questions are wide open. These are the questions I wonder about today, from crypto to cars to fast fashion - there are others.

Everything you need to know about lidar in five minutes or less including what it means and its uses.

When Commander detects that something in the road ahead cannot be handled by itself, it gracefully transitions control to Telessist, our novel remote assistance technology. Telessist enables our robotaxi service to scale quicker, safely driving riders through any scenario that the world can throw at us.

The guide to understanding the current state of the art in hardware & software for self-driving vehicles.

The coronavirus pandemic means the AR glasses have become even more useful for those working on the 911, Cayenne, Taycan, and other Porsches.

Chinese startup UDI deploys self-driving vans to deliver food to lockdown areas. To do that, the startup has hired 100 employees and is preparing to put its assembly line into high gear in the next several months. “I’m not saying we solved all the problems,” Professor Liu says, citing system integration and cost as the biggest challenges. “Can we do better? Yes, it can always be better.”Click here to edit the content

Engineering teams at Tesla, GM, Honda, and others are struggling to make self-driving cars work properly.

Demand for location services and location intelligence continues to expand across multiple sectors, including automotive, enterprise and IoT, mobility services, mobile apps and digital advertising. Location platforms which can meet the needs of key sectors and use-cases will be best placed placed for growth.

Expansion through pilot with tech company Nuro. Walmart continues expanding its Grocery Pickup and Delivery service, currently with nearly 3,100 pickup locations, and deliveries from more than 1,600 stores. 

Shared mobility services are more convenient — and in some cases, more affordable — than owning a car. We break down a number of these emerging modes of transport by trip length.
Personal car ownership isn’t dead yet.
That said, as cities in the US grow more congested, public transportation systems are failing and traffic is worsening, all of which is making quick and efficient transport more difficult.

Here's my conversation with George Hotz (@realGeorgeHotz), founder of @comma_ai and an outspoken personality in the tech world.

Elon Musk is CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has plans to colonize Mars, and thinks AI may turn humans into its pets. Here's how Musk's companies are actually taking on virtually every industry.

Robo-cars are picking up everything its sensors see, hear, and detect. So to corral all this information, Cruise — through a hackathon event — created an open-source data visualization platform called Webviz. Other autonomous vehicle companies offer different aspects of the self-driving process, like Baidu's Apollo open-source autonomous driving platform. Now Cruise is opening up its application for anyone who works with robotics.

US corporates are currently using facial recognition for everything from fast food orders to trying on makeup to issuing life insurance policies, and more.

For the past few months Tesla has been slowly sharing details of its upcoming “Hardware 3” (HW3) changes soon to be introduced into its S/X/3 lineup. Tesla has stated that cars will begin to be built with the new computer sometime in the first half of 2019, and they have said that this is a simple computer upgrade, with all vehicle sensors (radar, ultrasonics, cameras) staying the same. Today we have some information about what HW3 actually will (and won’t) be.

This conversation happened after the release of the paper from our group at MIT on driver functional vigilance during use of Tesla's Autopilot. The Tesla team reached out to me offering a podcast conversation with Mr Musk. I accepted, with full control of questions I could ask and choice of what is released publicly. I ended up editing out nothing of substance. This was an insightful discussion on various aspects of Tesla Autopilot that I hope catalyzes further nuanced conversation on the future of AI-assisted driving. Starts at 2:35. The full outline of the video is as follows:
0:00 Introduction
2:35 Start of conversation: Autopilot motivation
4:01 Display the vehicle's perception of the driving scene
7:11 Algorithms, data, and hardware development
10:23 Edge cases and common cases in driving
12:18 Navigate on Autopilot
13:57 Hardware and software path toward fully autonomy
17:08 Driver supervision of Autopilot
20:13 Human side of Tesla Autopilot (driver functional vigilance)
23:13 Driver monitoring
24:30 Operational design domain
26:57 Securing Autopilot against adversarial machine learning
28:29 Narrow AI and artificial general intelligence
30:10 Physics view of love
31:53 First question for an artificial general intelligence system

Driverless vehicles are hardly a novel concept anymore, but what is really going on in the autonomous car industry? How do self-driving cars work? Who are making these cars? Why is it taking this long? This article will answer these questions.

Nuro, the autonomous delivery startup, has raised $940 million in financing from the SoftBank Vision Fund, a whopping amount that will be used to expand its delivery service, add new partners, hire employees and scale up its fleet of self-driving bots. Nuro has raised more than $1 billion.

Statistically, the least reliable part of the car is ... the driver. Chris Urmson heads up Google's driverless car program, one of several efforts to remove humans from the driver's seat. He talks about where his program is right now, and shares fascinating footage that shows how the car sees the road and makes autonomous decisions about what to do next.

Experimental Design imagines another scenario: neighborhoods eliminate the growing stream of delivery vehicles by organizing central locations or deploying a kind of package delivery van that comes around once or twice a day like an ice-cream truck. Neighbors might gather around the day’s influx of retail goods and exchange news, transforming the hermetic life behind closed garage doors into a more open and collaborative kind of community.

Dave Mercer has been driving trucks across America since 1986. He has hauled ice cream to Nevada, burgers to Oregon, and trailers to Baltimore. “It can be a rough life,” he says. “You’re away from…

The future of navigation will be centralized around HD maps. While plenty of companies exist to provide this type of data, all are limited by paywalls and strict Terms-of-Service. It is time for this paradigm to change. Comma.ai is releasing US interstate HD maps from our 5,000,000+ miles of data.

Once prospective partners in the ecosystem have been identified, there are a variety of ways to work with them, ranging from collaborations that involve a limited financial commitment to outright acquisitions.

The digital center of competence (DCoC) is responsible for setting direction and ensuring that learning is widely shared. In this structure, the competence center does not have P&L responsibilities, but it does have its own budget, and each business unit (BU) owns its own internal digital initiatives. The DCoC assumes three important functions to develop products and services, build skills across BUs, and create external networks.