Self Driving Cars | 9th | week 2 |.
Can you tell us a little bit about the work you're doing with self-driving cars. I've been working on self-driving cars for the last few years. It's a domain that's exploded, obviously, in interest since early competitions back in the 2005 domain. And what we've been working on really is putting together our own self-driving vehicle that was able to drive on public roads in the regional Waterloo last August. With the self-driving cars area, one of our key research domains is in 3D object detection. So this remains a challenging task for algorithms to perform automatically. Trying to identify every vehicle, every pedestrian, every sign that's in a driving environment. So that the vehicle can make the correct decisions about how it should move and interact with those vehicles. And so we work extensively on how we take in laser data and vision data and radar data. And then fuse that into a complete view of the world around the vehicle. When we think of computer vision, we usually think immediately of self-driving cars, and why is that? Well, it's because it's hard to pay attention when driving on the road, right? You can't both be looking at your smartphone and also be looking at the road at the same time. Of course, it's sometimes hard to predict what people are going to be doing on the street, as well. When they're crossing the street with their bike or skateboard, or whatnot. So it's great when we have some sort of camera or sensor that can help us detect these things and prevent accidents before they could potentially occur.