The Neural Information Processing Systems Conference is the largest AI academic event of the year, held every December on Long Beach, California. This year, Apple’s AI director, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, discussed several of their projects related to automated driving, something that surprised many because it broke the company’s usual secrecy.
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The main project discussed consisted of a system that recognized pedestrians and vehicles from their 3-D point cloud information. Other Apple projects include a method for identifying different items on the road thanks to special cameras that are placed on top of cars. This technique is called SLAM, and could prove to be very useful in several areas that include automated driving, VR and AR. The latter two could be very good developments for Apple’s phones and computers, giving the company an edge that’s been lacking in recent years.
TechnologyReview reports that these automated developments are not new for Apple, but that these rumors had never been confirmed until recently, with Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, confirming them and claiming that automated developments are the technology of the future and that they’re also “the mother of all AI projects.”
Apple is a secretive company, releasing very little information on their projects compared to other competitors such as Google and Facebook. The fact that Apple is being more open and disclosing more of their research suggests that there’s a lot of tension and competition between tech companies, who all seem more powerful and prominent than ever. It’s not just Apple who’s cool now.
