Webinar Series: How Artificial Intelligence Is Reshaping the World

UAA’s College of Business and Public Policy announces “Driving into the Future,” the final installment of its special webinar series on Artificial Intelligence (AI). The Thursday, April 22 lunchtime event is open to the public and will focus on the development of autonomous vehicles.

Participants will learn about 2004’s pivotal breakthrough for autonomous cars, when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency created the DARPA Grand Challenge under the direction of our guest speaker Dr. Tony Tether. The autonomous vehicle competition turbocharged development, using advances in AI, mobile computing, sensors, computer vision, and LIDAR. In his presentation “What was behind the creation of SIRI and Autonomous Cars?”, Dr. Tether will describe the DARPA Grand Challenge. He will also discuss the technology behind SIRI, which led to Alexa and Google Assistant. That critical functionality showed that a computer could gather online information, allowing autonomous vehicles to predict the road and traffic ahead.

By 2019, many car and technology companies had implemented autonomous car programs, and Google’s Waymo launched the world’s first commercial self-driving car service. Guest speaker Nick Armstrong Crews, Senior Software Engineer at Waymo and UAA alum, will present a current look at autonomous vehicles in “Self-driving cars are here… and they’re awesome!” He will provide many examples “why these are perhaps humanity’s most capable and complex embodied artificial minds to date, and how these clever, plucky little robots can save lives and transform cities.”