I do wonder if perhaps Uber made the video darker before releasing. Or used a camera that is not the main sensing camera. Because I would hope the cars are smart enough to increase ISO to get more detail at night time.
2) They should be using a dark adapted / night vision camera and probably are, the video feed presented is just that, the best one that "presents".
3) They should be using thermal infrared to spot living things
4) They were severely over driving their headlights if what we are seeing is "reality" as seen by the onboard computer.
I want to know how much access to the hardware Uber had after the accident, including physical and remote. I also want to see the streaming logs and full provenance.
When you walk outside in the daytime, everything is bathed in a uniform light from the sun, but you have no trouble distinguishing between objects, as they emit and reflect light differently.
Probably not relevant to conditions at 10pm on Monday, when it was between 70F and 57F (the range for 6pm Monday to 12am Tuesday.)
> Pavement would almost certainly be warmer than that.
Sure, when it was 92F the pavement would probably be 140+F.
> How's a thermal camera supposed to detect 98F on a background that is proably +/- 5 degrees of that?
At night, the pavement would be much cooler than a human; at the high temperature you report, it would probably be much hotter; there's a place in between where the problem you have would be occur, sure, but it's neither at the high nor, more to the point, in the conditions when the accident occurred.
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C____X_/To my knowledge the fast frame rate (>9 Hz) thermal sensors are still ITAR-restricted, seriously limiting their application in autonomous vehicles among the other things.
I'd like to see Uber's logs of all the other pedestrian and vehicle near misses where the computer took corrective action.
What testing did Uber do on a closed course with adversarial conditions? Ball rolls into road with a child following, pedestrians walking under a flickering street lamp, people dressed in costumes, a parade, a protest, service workers, a pickup truck with a lost load.
When the driver fails to do a task that the computer seems necessary with a high degree of confidence, both get shutdown for further evaluation.
Regulations are written with blood.
I've recently wondered why there isn't some sort of "test", where they throw various scenarios at the self-driving cars, and see how they react.
Apparently killing bystanders is now okay, if there's a software component to the massacre.
This is the salient point that I was looking for.
Interestingly, US and European headlights standards are very, very different and this accident is a clear example. US headlights are intended to "illuminate the roadway", whereas European headlights are intended to "illuminate obstacles on the road and in the margins". That's not just a wording difference, rather the part numbers for US-spec and European-spec headlight assemblies are different.
I would be surprised under the new CEO.
> Levandowski seemed to struggle in other ways as well. In December, Uber dispatched 16 self-driving cars, with safety drivers, in San Francisco without seeking a permit from the California DMV. The test went poorly—on the first day, a self-driving car ran a red light, and the DMV ordered Uber to halt its program in the state.
> The company suffered further embarrassment when a New York Times article, citing leaked documents, suggested that Uber’s explanation for the traffic violation—that it had been caused by human error—wasn’t complete. The car malfunctioned, and the driver failed to stop it.
> The misdirection came as no surprise to the Uber employees who’d spent time at Otto’s San Francisco headquarters. Someone there had distributed stickers—in OSHA orange—with a tongue-in-cheek slogan: “Safety third.”
For instance, plug-in devices must have fuses. The standard gives no guidance about the right size of fuses, but a reasonable engineer would of course pick a good size. The standard’s main effect is to avoid cutting safety features to save cost.
We shipped a mobile office robot. We sweated the details of it not running into people or crashing, but the UL cert only verified that we had fuses and flame-retardant plastics and the like.
I mean, there ought to be the point at which someone says, "this company has a long, consistent, documented history of antisocial behaviour and complete disrespect for law, therefore they shall not be allowed to work on this society-changing and life-critical technology". That this doesn't happen is, I feel, a failure of our society/regulatory apparatus.
In 2016 they tried just turning their autonomous vehicles loose in SF without regulatory approval. They got shut down. Rather than apply for permits, they headed off to Arizona, where the then-new governor welcomed them with open arms, an "anything-goes approach", and a lot of anti-regulation blather: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/11/technology/arizona-tech-i...
This video was released by the police department.
Are you suggesting someone from Uber drove down to the scene at 10pm, somehow managed to grab the SD card from the dashcam with all the police there, ran back to their car, uploaded it to their laptop, fired up Premiere, edited the brightness, downloaded the modified video back into the SD, ran back to the scene with the tampered evidence, and only then the police got to it?
Sorry, but if this isn't a conspiratory theory, I don't know what is.
To be fair though, Uber can probably extract, and potentially even change this data, remotely. Given their track record, that's not outside the realm of possibility at all. They'd be stupid to attempt it with the world staring at them, but this is also the company that had Greyball, the hell map, blatantly disregarded laws in many countries and had to hire Eric Holder's company to run damage control.
Edit to add: I don't really think they intentionally darken the image, but this probably isn't even the camera the car runs off of.
Disclaimer: I have a frustratingly poor understanding of this subject, something I desperately need to remedy.
So I feel Uber would have selected whichever feed best supported the explanation that it was "impossible" to avoid such an accident, and handed it to investigators. Given the number of people agreeing with the "impossible to avoid" explanation even in a tech-savvy crowd like HN, I'd say the PR strategy's worked well and saved Uber some more bad press.
There are Raw equivalents for video, but consumer cameras are all post rendered, and heavily compressed. So modification is going to change all kinds of metadata, but in particular there will be more than the expected quantization from double compression.
Again, if that were demonstrated, I think it would show a corrupt intent. The intent to deceive.
OpenEXR is another such format that's camera agnostic, not totally dissimilar to Adobe DNG vs the (proprietary) Raw format used by a particular make/model of camera.
exp: http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/www_detector/ccdgroup/optheory/ccd...
There shouldn't be any copyright/IP claim on the autonimously created sensor data.
The video doesn't show the rider until less than a second before the collision. Yet it's an article of faith among you guys that this video which does not show an easy path to avoidance actually does, due to various magic incantations:
+ The road lighting wasn't bad. A real eye would have shown something different that the camera can't[1], therefore the video proves what it doesn't show.
+ LIDAR and IR should have shown that, therefore Uber is hiding something because the video doesn't show data that must have been present.
I just don't get it. I'm watching this video and seeing what is clearly a huge tragedy and a near-unavoidable collision.
[1] This is not at all true in the real world, by the way. But I see little value in arguing what is clearly a point of faith and not reason.
Because then my question is, have you ever used a camera at night? It can't see as much as you (at video rates).
What don't you get about people discussing other sensing technologies? Just because it wasn't clear from this video and this camera, there are other sensors which don't require illumination with visible light. Even a front facing radar might do a good job of slowing down.
If you want to make a point about cameras or eyes with evidence, do so. The evidence in the linked video supports there opposite of what you claim.
I give up.
[1] Again, this is just not true. Cameras sensors have HIGHER dynamic range and ISO bandwith than eyes. What is true is that people have better AI behind the scaling decisions and can search better across wide-dynamic-range environments than typical cameras. But again, that presupposes that the driver would have been looking for the black-clothed biker walking a bike without reflectors in the dark shadows between street lights. Which, wait for it, NEEDS EVIDENCE.
IMO this was still a hard case for a human[0], but it shouldn't be a hard case for LIDAR-equipped self-driving car. They were not doing Tesla-style stunts with "we'll drive only with a visual-spectrum camera". They had a suite of sensors on-board.
I expect it'll turn out that either it was Uber-specific problem (e.g. software bug, or lying about LIDAR capabilities, or both), or a deeper problem in sensor tech for self-driving cars in general. The second case would be really disappointing, as - given all that has been published so far - one would expect self-driving car tech to avoid accidents like this.
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[0] - I mean, really, a pedestrian going through a road like this with zero reflective lighting? Is it even legal in US? In Poland it isn't.
This shit happens and it's more common than you'd think.
And the employees aren't helpless either. If they don't like this new CEO, they can choose to withhold information, don't write things down that are no longer approved of, etc while their direct manager looks the other way. They can collectively undermine the CEO until he's completely ineffective and forced to leave.
The culture is one of the hardest things to change inside of a company once it's established. It's self-reinforcing.
So we have to wait a couple of years to see if he's successful. There's no guarantee he'll win just because he's at the top.
The culture is one of the hardest things to change once it has been established. It prevents companies from entering certain market segments; from competing in certain ways; from taking certain actions. In a large company, it's so difficult to change, that it's easier and more effective to establish groups outside of the company to pursue new initiatives.
For example, this is the reason why AWS is separated from the retail segment inside amazon. Why Walmart won't compete with Nordstrom. And why large companies regularly create subsidiaries to innovate on new ideas or pursue new market segments (and they're often established off-site, so the corporations culture doesn't carry over).
GM makes a great example about how difficult that can be. They spent billions on Saturn as an experiment to build a new car company. Later they tried to integrate Saturns success into GM by adopting their culture and other practices... but it didn't matter what the management wanted... Saturn died and GM didn't change. Saturn's culture didn't infect GM--GM successfully killed a culture that tried to change them, even after seeing the success of Saturn.
Why the false dichotomy? How is telling your employees "you will be fired for lack of integrity" equal to "bossing them around"? This is quite the straw-man and it undermines the rest of your points for me. It's not like the only 2 options out there are to order people around like your servants or let them do whatever illegal hell they want. He could be strict about the red lines on integrity without ordering them around like his servants with regards to general management. Why do you make it seem like the only possibilities are the extremes?
What this means is that the CEO cannot order everyone to behave with integrity. They must be convinced of what integrity is, what type of behavior that represents, etc. So that when they make these small decisions, they are consistent with the culture the CEO is trying to create.
You can't order them to behave with integrity--because that's so vague as to be meaningless. Everyone will make up their own definition of integrity, and it'll always fit so they turn out to be right.
So I don't see the false dichotomy... There's no order a CEO can give that will change the culture in the way you describe (at least not in a large company like Uber).
(I think it's worth pointing out that the people inside of Uber who made the bad decisions likely didn't see them as bad or wrong. Their mission and culture supported those decisions, and they believe them to be right. So when you say 'behave with integrity'... that's meaningless, because they believed they were right when they made the wrong decision initially. They were already acting with what they believed to be integrity.)
Yeah, it's impossible to define it. But thankfully, you don't have to unambiguously define ethics and integrity for all of humanity and posterity to get somewhere useful. We're not writing probably correct algorithms here, we're dealing with humans. Some linear combination of "something illegal", "something you don't want landing on the New York times next to your name", "I know it when I see it", and "if this still isn't clear for you, you test me at your own risk" would be sufficient to take care of it: either they'll figure it out by themselves or they'll find out the hard way.
I'm not an expert on this stuff but I think you're misunderstanding or mixing up the ISO value with exposure compensation. The ISO value corresponds to the sensor's sensitivity, and even RAW photos (which are more or less dumps of the raw sensor data) are captured with specific ISO values, and look different at different ISOs.
The ISO determines the sensitivity of the sensor in the camera to the photons hitting each bucket in the "sensor array". This sensitivity combined with frequency of the photon hits determines the data that makes up the actual image. If you could theoretically dump the RAW data from an image recorded for a different ISO for the same image, it would be different for each one.
You can't "boost" an image's ISO post-capture, because the sensor data is already captured. What you can do is increase the values of those pixels that are appreciably close to buy not equal to zero, but for which data exists, giving the impression of pulling out data from the shadows, but the limitations/complexities are too much to go into here. When you do so in practice, you do not have as much relative detail in those extremes.
What we interpret as "noise", typically in high ISO low light photography, is a real thing that the computer cannot perfectly compensate for, because it's a fundamental property of both the hardware, but more importantly, of background light/radiation and the probability/quantum nature of light...
i) what human eyes need to do to get details from a dark image (increase ISO and risk washing out bright areas); and
ii) what human eyes do when looking out at the real world (rely on the huge dynamic range that the human visual system is capable of, which dynamic range is about an order of magnitude larger than any video camera sensor);