Computer Vision News - November 2021

3 Summary 9 Raquel Urt sun For me, I believe I should utilize my skills to provide positive impact in this world. There are many ways to do this. I’m very passionate about self-driving because, as you mentioned, there are many people that don’t have access to transport. Quite often people tell me about how this technology will change their life or somebody else’s. That’s verymotivating. At the same time, from a personal perspective, unfortunately I know many people who have had severe traffic accidents, so I’m very motivated to bring safety to our roads. Also, I think that self-driving vehicles will change the landscape of our cities. Less parking, more green spaces, less congestion, shared resources, reduced car ownership. One of the things we’ve seen in the pandemic is that the supply chain has been very effective. If we’re able to transport goods so that everybody can have what they need to do what they want to do, I think that will be fantastic. What should we expect to see next from Waabi? As I said, we’re focusing now on transportation of goods. That’s the first thing that you will see from us. Again, it’s about bringing this technology simply to the world and making a positive impact. But Waabi has a lot of ambitions meaning that the work doesn’t stop there. We believe that we can do so much more, but we need to focus. That’s whywe are heads down on this first use case, but the technology that we are building generalizes across use cases, which is very important for the future after that. In these last four years, do you think the panorama has become longer or shorter than you thought? Is the work you’re doing with Waabi going to make this horizon even shorter? That’s a fantastic question! The more that I work on this domain, and in particular having industry experience and really understanding what everybody is doing, where they are going, their technology, etc., I can see that there has been a change of narrative. It’s not just about what I think, but everybody has finally acknowledged that this is an extremely hard problem to solve and it’s harder than people say it is. The narrative has changed from the idea that we will have this at scale imminently to a realization of the difficulty. From that point of view, for now there are much longer timelines. It’s not that anything has changed, it’s simply that there is more public recognition that that’s the case. I believe with what we are doing at Waabi, we can commercialize this technology at scale much faster. So “I believe that if there is a path to solve this, it’s this path!”