If there was a central takeaway to Nvidia’s GTC event last week in San Jose it was this: autonomous vehicles are already operating or at least testing in virtual every corner of the planet including companies such as Tier IV and ZMP in Japan, and Pony.ai and Baidu in China. But two U.S. companies standout globally for the growing… Read More
Author: Roger C. Lanctot
NVIDIA GTC 2018 Then There Were Three
The Good the Bad and Tesla and Uber
In “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” circa 1971, Gene Wilder plays a vaguely misanthropic Willy Wonka who leads the young winners of his golden wrapper contest on a tour of the seven deadly sins within his candy factory and labs. (Who can forget Augustus Gloop?) At one point, Mike Teavee, a television-obsessed… Read More
Nvidia: What the Doctor Ordered
Nvidia has an affinity for taking on computational challenges. Whether it be diagnostic tools derived from medical imaging, mapping the earth’s core or defining the structure of HIV, Nvidia is there with GPU computational resources to amp up the teraflops and shrink the computing time. In fact, according to Nvidia’s most recent… Read More
Uber’s Epic Fail Changes Everything
This morning at Nvidia’s AI and Deep Learning Conference, GTC 2018, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang will give a keynote in which he will tout the company’s extraordinary progress in fostering and advancing the cause of artificial intelligence and deep learning along with the correlated autonomous driving industry. Hundreds… Read More
Uber’s Monkey in the Wrench
The news of a pedestrian fatality in Tempe, Ariz., resulting from the operation of an Uber autonomous vehicle has set off alarm bells throughout the AV development community. As always in such circumstances there will be a simultaneous rush to judgement and the immediate termination of all such testing, as well as a call for calm… Read More
Self-Driving Car Catch-22 and the Road to 5G
In the novel “Catch-22” from which the eponymous 1970 movie was made we learn of a fictional bureaucratic means by which the U.S. Air Force was able to keep bomber pilots (who might be going crazy) from successfully requesting a release from flying missions based on a medical evaluation. The rationale behind this supposed “catch”… Read More
What Car Will You Drive Tomorrow?
Today more than ever where you live may well determine what kind of car you drive. Federal governments and, lately, cities are stepping forward to determine what kinds of cars are available to consumers and how they will be built.
The latest such initiatives are efforts by the Trump Administration in the U.S. to explore lowering … Read More
MWC 2018: The Anonymous Car
European regulators are poised to once again shift European car makers to the back of the queue when it comes to realizing the value of connected cars. While the rest of the world is obsessively pursuing the creation of autonomous vehicles, the European Commission with the help of the GSMA is working toward the creation of the anonymous… Read More
Blackberry Reboot Nears Completion
Jalopnik’s report that car maker Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) had experienced a failed software update that had thrown the infotainment systems in some MY 2017-18 vehicles into a never-ending cycle of rebooting was a reminder that cars are indeed becoming smartphones on wheels. Blackberry CEO John Chen has no doubts… Read More
What GM Can Learn from Tesla
General Motors has had wireless connections to its cars for more than 21 years, thanks to Project Beacon, better known as OnStar, now operated as Global Connected Consumer Experience. OnStar has likely saved hundreds of lives, if not thousands, by summoning emergency responders to the scenes of crashes where airbags deployed.… Read More
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