SATURN 2019 Talk: Self-Driving Cars and AI: Transforming Our Cities and Our Lives

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are critical to reaching full autonomy in self-driving cars. I will present two autonomy systems and describe the use of machine learning in each of them, as well as the software development process used to build them. I will summarize recent progress in commercializing these systems and make some observations about the potential impact of these systems in our daily lives. Some of the biggest remaining challenges include efficiently solving the long tail of unusual events on the road, scaling up from demos to commercially viable systems, and verifying the safety of these AI-based systems. I will finish with thoughts on addressing those issues.