Uber Builds New AI Team North of the Border as It Battles Lawsuit in the U.S.

Matt Posky
by Matt Posky

Uber must be feeling somewhat confident in its legal battle with Waymo over stolen autonomous tech, because it’s assembling a new artificial intelligence team in Canada.

The group will serve as part of Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group, which has found itself at the core of the lawsuit, and focus on enhancing the company’s autonomous vehicle software.

Based in Ontario, the team will be headed by Raquel Urtasun, a leader in the field of machine learning at the University of Toronto. Uber also plans to invest $5 million in the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a nonprofit associated with the university. Despite being an important hub for the North American automotive industry, Toronto has seen engineers and researches move to the United States for work. Hoping to anchor talent in the North, the city established the MaRS Discovery District. MaRS is designed to attract companies and inspire investments into Canadian startups and seems to have worked its magic on Uber, who will be setting up the AI offices there.

According to Bloomberg, Urtasun will aid Uber in the future development of vision software that allows an autonomous vehicle’s camera system to make sense of the world around it. She’s taking a leave of absence from the university in order to focus on the project, allotting only a single day per week for U of T and the Vector Institute.

“The University of Toronto has long been considered a global leader in artificial intelligence research. That’s why we’re so pleased to see Professor Raquel Urtasun, one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of machine perception, take on this incredibly exciting role,” Meric Gertler, president of the University of Toronto, said in a statement.

[Image: Volvo]

Matt Posky
Matt Posky

A staunch consumer advocate tracking industry trends and regulation. Before joining TTAC, Matt spent a decade working for marketing and research firms based in NYC. Clients included several of the world’s largest automakers, global tire brands, and aftermarket part suppliers. Dissatisfied with the corporate world and resentful of having to wear suits everyday, he pivoted to writing about cars. Since then, that man has become an ardent supporter of the right-to-repair movement, been interviewed on the auto industry by national radio broadcasts, driven more rental cars than anyone ever should, participated in amateur rallying events, and received the requisite minimum training as sanctioned by the SCCA. Handy with a wrench, Matt grew up surrounded by Detroit auto workers and managed to get a pizza delivery job before he was legally eligible. He later found himself driving box trucks through Manhattan, guaranteeing future sympathy for actual truckers. He continues to conduct research pertaining to the automotive sector as an independent contractor and has since moved back to his native Michigan, closer to where the cars are born. A contrarian, Matt claims to prefer understeer — stating that front and all-wheel drive vehicles cater best to his driving style.

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  • Markf Markf on May 09, 2017

    Is is at all possible for you to make a single comment without referencing Trump? Do you have any other thoughts besides Trump? His greatest ever real estate deal is getting to live inside your head rent free.

  • Sutherland555 Sutherland555 on May 09, 2017

    More than happy to see well-paid high tech jobs coming north of the border and boosting our economy. There's a lot of talk about diversifying the Canadian economy away from being heavily dependent on resources so this is nothing but good news to me.

    • See 1 previous
    • Stuki Stuki on May 10, 2017

      @shoshone As opposed to most of what passes for "the economy" these days, techies are actually in the value add business. As in, produce something more valuable than the inputs consumed. They are not in any way, shape or form locust like. The entire idiot superstructure created of lawyers, banksters and other expendable riffraff that are, with the help of their captive junta, feeding off of what value techies are creating, are the ones causing problems. The techies did their thing much better, long before the parasites came dragging with Fed freshprint enabled stupid valuations of anything involving acts as advanced as spelling "coputer." None of them need the so called "capital" the free freshprint army get handed to them by The Fed in ever greater amounts; as all it does it drive up the cost of the inputs needed for innovation. Hence transfer control over innovation away from competent people, and towards merely connected ones. What is "destroying" the "housing market" (racket is infinitely more accurate than market), is the same old money printing. And in addition, the idiotic theft racket called zoning. In a market, prices clear by supply rising to meet demand. If you can find a way to produce a cell phone cheaper than the prevailing price, you produce it. Increasing supply, until prices drop to where you can no longer produce a cell phone cheaper than the prevailing price. You make out by the differential opened up by the efficiency improvement you made, the rest of the world by the lower prices it eventually enables. The way the housing racket works, would be analogous to if those who happened to own a cell phone in 1990, could forever ban anyone else from building one. To ensure the price of their own cell phone were kept artificially high. That'why houses are expensive in the Bay Area. If it was up to techies, rather than reams of lawyers, banksters, self righteous mediocrities of all stripes and corruptocrats, the "problem" of housing would be attacked the same way techies attack all problems: By building better, cheaper, faster, more advanced.... And continuously doing so. Destroying the value of old junk, ensuring it gets replaced by newer, better, as quickly as possible. Since techies are, as stated at the opening, actually competent, productive people. Who hence do not need, nor want, laws, bans, harassments and all the other pathologies brought about, by the totalitarian junta state propped up by the bankster/lawyer/sales hack/bureaucrat/other assorted backmarker scum that has, and continue to, run a once decent country ever more thoroughly into the ground.

  • Brian Uchida Laguna Seca, corkscrew, (drying track off in rental car prior to Superbike test session), at speed - turn 9 big Willow Springs racing a motorcycle,- at greater speed (but riding shotgun) - The Carrousel at Sears Point in a 1981 PA9 Osella 2 litre FIA racer with Eddie Lawson at the wheel! (apologies for not being brief!)
  • Mister It wasn't helped any by the horrible fuel economy for what it was... something like 22mpg city, iirc.
  • Lorenzo I shop for all-season tires that have good wet and dry pavement grip and use them year-round. Nothing works on black ice, and I stopped driving in snow long ago - I'll wait until the streets and highways are plowed, when all-seasons are good enough. After all, I don't live in Canada or deep in the snow zone.
  • FormerFF I’m in Atlanta. The summers go on in April and come off in October. I have a Cayman that stays on summer tires year round and gets driven on winter days when the temperature gets above 45 F and it’s dry, which is usually at least once a week.
  • Kwik_Shift_Pro4X I've never driven anything that would justify having summer tires.
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