Google and IBM to work on self-driving cars with Continental

reuters.com

33 points·nonsequ··9 comments

Some context for those wondering: A few years back, Continental bought the Siemens VDO Automotive business unit from Siemens. Siemens had been powering the dashboard and computing units of several auto companies, which is now owned by Continental.

Ah, thanks.

It's interesting to see how the corporate alliances are shaking out. Bosch is supplying hardware for BMW and Daimler-Mercedes self driving efforts... not sure who is behind Volkswagen Audi Group's efforts, as Stanford's efforts seem to be off the shelf components (LiDAR and such).

What does IBM have to contribute to self-driving cars? Google's work has gotten by far the most attention.

I couldn't find anything about IBM working specifically on self-driving cars, but given their work on AI (people haven't forgotten about Watson already, have they?), it seems only natural that they would have a lot to bring to the table.

Self-driving cars involve vision, classification, most likely planning and logical reasoning, path finding, classical machine learning stuff.

Watson is natural language processing. Models of language, search, some amount of logical inference I presume. Not very similar to self-driving cars.

"While your car starts, please enjoy this ad."

If my car is driverless without extra cost, I don't mind being shown some ads.

"If you would like to pause this ad, turn the door handle and jump out of your moving vehicle. We appreciate your business."

Would increase the lifespan of cars with rotary engines.

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