AI empowers self-driving systems of vehicles

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠AI has made systems of a self-driving vehicle much smarter with less human cost.

At the Auto China show in Beijing, many of the new car models on display are equipped with autonomous driving features.

Plenty of top Chinese AI companies have developed autonomous driving software for cars. One such company, SenseTime, says the industry has hit a challenging bottleneck.

In order to let the autonomous driving system correctly recognize and analyze what's been collected, and execute corresponding driving maneuvers, developers need to write lines and lines of code to set rules for each possible scenario.

This is attainable for less complicated locations like highways, but on city roads where human actions are much more erratic, it's hard for programmers to keep up.

"There are many complex scenarios which cannot be defined by rules. Meanwhile, the design for every scenario requires thousands of program engineers and a very long time," said Wang Xiaogang, co-founder and chief scientist of SenseTime.

So, at the auto show, SenseTime presented a different solution: instead of improving various devices like LiDAR sensors and radars, its system relies mainly on video cameras.

The work of on-road rule-setting is relegated to an AI system, which condenses all visual input into something easily understood by an algorithm.

"In our self-driving systems, each module, from perception, fusion, to positioning and control, has been integrated into a single neural network. This has significantly reduced the workload in code development," Wang said.

The challenges of this approach are obvious too. Like many AI systems, a neural network needs to be constantly trained to self-improve, and that requires data.

"In the future, data is absolutely key. You need to have a lot amount of data to just train your model," said Cui Dong, managing director of Boston Consulting Group.

Experts say going forward, the global smart car race is likely to go hand in hand with the race for AI prowess.

AI empowers self-driving systems of vehicles

The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities' separatist activities are self-deceptive attempts, and they will not hinder the unstoppable trend toward China's reunification, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Tuesday.

Recently, Taiwan's "foreign affairs department" issued a statement protesting the mainland's condemnation over the Taiwan authorities' bribery of Guatemalan leaders and officials in exchange for political support.

Commenting on that at a regular press conference in Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said, "The facts and evidence on DPP authorities' 'dollar diplomacy' with Guatemala are clear and solid. Guatemala's former president openly admitted that he had received bribery from the Taiwan authorities in exchange for maintaining so-called 'diplomatic relations' with Taiwan. Last year, Taiwan's hospital project in Guatemala was involved in a corruption case. Relevant Guatemalan officials were put into jail. This is just one example of the Taiwan authorities' 'dollar diplomacy.' No matter how angrily they protest or try to deny it, the fact that they sought political support through 'dollar diplomacy' will not change."

"Around the world, 183 countries have established diplomatic ties with China. That proves the DPP authorities' reckless pursuit of 'Taiwan independence' and secession to be futile and self-deceptive. Whatever the DPP authorities does, it will not shake the one-China principle, and will not hinder the unstoppable trend toward China's reunification. We hope that Guatemala and the very few other countries will come to recognize where the trend leads and make the right decision soon," he continued.

DPP authorities' secession attempts futile, self-deceptive: spokesman