Uber picks Toronto as latest location for self-driving car research
What do San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and now, Toronto, have in common? Well, aside from devoted baseball fans and dozens of generic urban similarities, there is now officially one unique thing that unites them: being hosts of research stations for Uber's self-driving car division, known officially as its Advanced Technologies Group (ATG).
It appears that there were several factors that led to Toronto being chosen. A major one was the presence of Raquel Urtasun, a University of Toronto professor who has become quite influential in the self-driving industry. Her research has focused on perception algorithms, which allow autonomous vehicles to better compute their surroundings. Urtasun will lead the ATG branch but will still retain most of her U of T duties.
Urtasun won't be the only Canadian benefitting from the ATG. Uber has pledged to bring lots of local workers from within the Toronto-Waterloo corridor on board with its project. According to Tech Crunch, there will even be at least eight University of Toronto students on Uber's payroll.
If all goes well, the move could play a big role in establishing Toronto as a major player in the artificial intelligence world. As part of the partnership between Uber and the city, Uber will also be investing lots of capital into the Vector Institute, a recently-opened Toronto hub for AI research. Urtasun is heavily involved with the Vector Institute and it will play a significant role in supporting and complementing Toronto's ATG branch.
For anyone wondering if this means that self-driving cars will now be populating Toronto's roads, the answer is no—for now at least. There are no immediate plans to use the city as a driving station. Uber's test program made headlines this spring after one of its cars was involved in an accident in Tempe, Arizona, but the company and the car were found to have not been at fault in the situation.