Technology

Uber expands to artificial intelligence

Uber

Uber has made a market debut with Uber Al Labs that is a research group focusing on the use of artificial intelligence technology. The focus is on route of food delivery to self-driving cars that navigate the roads. Geometric intelligence, is a startup focusing on artificial intelligence that Uber has acquired for an undisclosed sum. Members of the startup will staff the research project.

The company’s announcement of this lab comes forward as a new step in the Al market providing how it is offering self-driving cars in Pittsburgh. Uber is also streamlining many of its features on the app, making it easier for users. The Al initiative will work on problems across business, including the self-driving pilot.

Geometric Intelligence, the startup presiding over the project was founded in 2014 by three professors and a grad student. Gary Marcus is a cognitive scientist from New York University. He is the head director of the new Uber Al Labs. Zoubin Ghahramani is a professor at Cambridge of machine learning and is the co-director. Kenneth Stanley and Douglas Bemis are also a part of the project.

Uber Al Labs acquisition is competing with big softwares

The project aim is to focus on sparse data problem which is on how to build artificial intelligence that quickly recognizes objects or situations. It also aims to do this with a much smaller amount of “training” input data in comparison to what is in need by recent technological techniques.

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All of this points out that Uber is developing a very powerful speech-and image recognition software which is similar to Google and Microsoft. However, the aim is to produce a software that is less data hungry in algorithms. The machine intelligence is still in the early parts. It will extend later on to self-driving navigation systems and more new robotic devices.

Image via Cato
December 5, 2016