“Data as the new source code,” was one of the many thought-provoking statements made by Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang in his keynote speech at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference. In the above interview, autonomous vehicle expert and Princeton professor, Alain Kornhauser, gives his take on Huang’s talk and other news, including:
- the role of the human as back-up in an automated world
- the importance of simulation that uses real-world data to improve safety
- reaction to Huang’s comment that the reason Nvidia is developing the technology is that it will save lives and that the recent crash in Arizona will increase investment in the field
- it will be difficult to solve the last 20% and further the 1% of the edge cases
- Kornhauser suggests we are at the turning point on the proverbial hockey stick of demand, which is echoed by the continued progress in more powerful chips focused on autonomous driving. The evolution of Drive PX2 to Drive Xavier and Drive Pegasus to a future chip, Orin (which Huang mentioned, but didn’t share specifications and is probably the version that becomes widely used in commercial deployments) is indicative how the brains of autonomous driving continue to advance.
- on the topic of commercial deployments, Kornhauser opines on the announcement regarding Waymo’s purchase of 20,000 Jaguar I-Pace SUVs for its ridesharing service.
- Waymo’s commercialization of service will provide the opportunity for some real-world testing of earlier modeling by Kornhauser and his students on the societal efficiencies that could be gained through autonomous taxi services.
- the role of 5G and whether it a must-have or a nice-to-have feature and how is Google implementing their teleoperator without 5G [see article on Alphabet’s recent investment in Scotty Labs]
- finally, Kornhauser emphasize that data sharing between all the players is critical to learning from crashes and improving safety.
Regarding sharing, one of the unique opportunities to share knowledge across the autonomous vehicle ecosystem will be the 2nd Annual SmartDrivingCars Summit that Kornhauser is organizing at Princeton. The agenda for this May 15th-17th event is here.
To learn more, go to:
http://summit.smartdrivingcar.com/
