There is no question that the portability and omnipresence of cameras in today’s society has improved driver safety -- video of a vehicle crash helps people find out specifically what went wrong.
But what if you could impart artificial intelligence into those camera systems in vehicles, and predict problems on the road and prevent disaster?
Netradyne’s Driver-I technology uses machine learning to predict and prevent accidents in the commercial transportation industry San Diego, California-based Netradyne has developed technology designed to do just that, integrating cameras and deep learning with their Driver-i, a “vision based” system, mounted in or on commercial vehicles.
Rather than merely recording events triggered by the vehicle’s movements, Driver-i uses a TeraFLOP processor - one trillion calculations per second - connected to cameras to identify information such as road signs, traffic lights by color, pedestrians, other vehicles, following distance, tailgating, lane prediction and even weather to learn about driving conditions.
Sandeep Pandya, president of Netradyne, said he and his colleagues envisioned a driver safety system that was one step beyond simple recording.
“We felt the age of AI has come back, basically it is in a resurgence, and we could apply this technique, this capability, to the driver safety problem,” he said.
Driver-i is currently being used in large commercial fleets of trucks, according to the company. It is not solely focused on problems, and also rewards drivers for good performance.
With personal assistants like Apple’s Siri, Alexa from Amazon, and music apps like Spotify predicting your next favorite artist, artificial intelligence has become a common part of everyday life. But how far has the technology come in 2016?
Advancement can be measured a variety of ways, such as facial-recognition and speech recognition.
OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research group based in the San Francisco Bay area, home to the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University, aims to tackle that question. It's mission is to build safe artificial intelligence, and ensure AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible.
“Measuring the progression and intelligence of AI systems is a very hard and very important problem,” said Jack Clark, strategy and communications director at OpenAI.
The OpenAI collaborative built Universe, a tool for assessing and developing more capable AI systems. Benchmarks like Universe will help give scientists a better read on the progression of AI, Clark said. OpenAI notes that even though here have been rapid advances in narrow artificial intelligence over the past several years, computers are very far off from developing a more general knowledge of how things work -- the human equivalent of “common sense.”
Jakub Marian, a Czech mathematician, author and linguist who writes about artificial intelligence, said current AI implementations can only perform tasks people would usually describe as menial, although that work may be very complex.
Agents can be taught to recognize objects in photos, work with natural language or control robots in a certain predefined way.
“They can outperform people in these specific tasks, but they don't possess the ability to cope with a problem they have never met before,” he said. According to Marian, machines cannot “think outside the box.”
Mainly what artificial intelligence provides is the number crunching and data analysis humans could never have the time or stamina to do, said Netradyne’s Pandya.
It helps us to connect our various devices and share data, which will in turn enable scientists to create systems to make people’s lives easier.
According to Pandya, the age of machines controlling humans is far off. “There is no reason to fear robots taking over … that is science fiction, in my opinion,” Pandya said. “Today, people in the field are excited about AI and that there is so much hype around it again, just because we now have a more efficient way of churning through a mass of data that the world has released now as a result of being hyper connected.”
