The US Department of Transportation opened a new opportunity for US small businesses to leverage advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve transportation. The Complete Streets AI Initiative (CSAI) is a $15-million, multi-phase effort being offered through the Department’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program. CSAI seeks to develop new... Read more →

Stellantis N.V. has acquired the artificial intelligence framework, machine learning models and intellectual property rights and patents of CloudMade, a developer of smart and innovative big data-driven automotive solutions. The acquisition—as an asset deal—will support the mid-term development of STLA SmartCockpit (earlier post) and reinforces Stellantis’ software strategy outlined in... Read more →

In a computational study leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), scientists at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory assessed 160 billion molecules to screen the molecules for suitability as liquid carriers of hydrogen. The team whittled down the candidates to a mere 41; the task passes into the hands... Read more →

Hyundai Motor Company presented its vision for a hydrogen-powered, software-driven transformation beyond mobility applications at CES 2024. Hyundai Motor Group has already announced a commitment to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, substantiated by a clear RE100 roadmap to use 100% renewable energy in its overseas factories by 2045 and in... Read more →

Volkswagen, in cooperation with technology partner Cerence, is integrating ChatGPT into its vehicles. At CES 2024 Volkswagen is presenting the first vehicles in which the artificial-intelligence-based chatbot ChatGPT is integrated into VW’s IDA voice assistant. In the future, customers will have seamless access to the constantly growing artificial intelligence database... Read more →

IBM and FuelCell Energy, Inc. will work together to boost the performance of FuelCell Energy’s technology using Foundation Models, a form of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). The aim of this collaboration is to support both companies’ efforts to lead a global transition to renewable energy sources that emit little to... Read more →

Last month, Toyota Research Institute (TRI) showcased its new Accelerated Concepts program in active safety for the international media. TRI’s Human Interactive Driving (HID) team aims their research not at self-driving robotaxis but rather at active safety, incorporating both high autonomy and high driver engagement. This approach makes driving both... Read more →

New research out of IBM Research’s lab in Almaden, California, nearly two decades in the making, has the potential to drastically shift how we can efficiently scale up powerful AI hardware systems. Since the birth of the semiconductor industry, computer chips have primarily followed the same basic structure, in which... Read more →

Researchers at the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) have developed a technology for real-time detection of micro defects on the fuel cell surface during the production process. The technology is based on deep learning and enables real-time 3D measurement. It can detect defects on the surface shape... Read more →

Toyota Research Institute (TRI) announced a breakthrough generative AI approach based on Diffusion Policy to teach robots new, dexterous skills quickly and confidently . This advancement significantly improves robot utility and is a step towards building “Large Behavior Models (LBMs)” for robots, analogous to the Large Language Models (LLMs) that... Read more →

NOVONIX Limited, a battery materials and technology company, and SandboxAQ, an enterprise SaaS company that combines artificial intelligence (AI) with quantum analysis (AQ), will collaborate to predict the lifespan of lithium-ion batteries by leveraging SandboxAQ’s AI-driven chemical simulation software and NOVONIX’s Ultra-High Precision Coulometry (UHPC) technology and extensive battery cell... Read more →

A team of scientists from Ames National Laboratory is developing a new machine-learning (ML) model for discovering critical-element-free permanent magnet materials. The model predicts the Curie temperature of new material combinations. Curie temperature is the maximum temperature at which a material maintains its magnetism. A paper on the work is... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) announced $29 million in funding for seven team awards for research in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data resources for fusion energy sciences. Nineteen institutions will apply advanced and autonomous algorithms to address high-priority research opportunities in fusion and plasma sciences. The teams include... Read more →

ACCURE Battery Intelligence, a developer of predictive analytics software to ensure battery safety, performance and extended life for energy storage, electric vehicles, and other applications, secured a €7.2-million ($7.8-million) investment. The round was led by Blue Bear Capital and HSBC Asset Management, and included Riverstone Holdings and Capnamic Ventures. The... Read more →

General Motors is leading a $60-million Series B financing round in Mitra Chem, a Silicon Valley-based, AI-enabled battery materials innovator. The company’s AI-powered platform and advanced research and development facility in Mountain View, California, will help accelerate GM’s commercialization of affordable electric vehicle batteries. GM and Mitra Chem will develop... Read more →

Hyundai Motor Group announced a strategic investment in Tenstorrent, an artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor company based in Toronto, Canada, which will allow the Group to integrate AI into future Hyundai, Kia and Genesis vehicles, and other future mobilities, including robotics and advanced air mobility (AAM). Hyundai Motor Company and Kia... Read more →

Hyundai Motor Company and Kia Corporation introduced the AI-enabled, blockchain-based Supplier CO2 Emission Monitoring System (SCEMS) to manage the carbon emissions of its cooperative business partners. SCEMS is designed to compute carbon emissions at every stage of a cooperative partner’s supply chain while assuring data transparency and integrity. Hyundai Motor... Read more →

NIO officially opened its new 1,500 square meter Innovation Center in Berlin, Germany. In response to the need for software that’s central to the user experience, the Berlin Innovation Center will be responsible for the development of new technologies and its respective localisation, testing and validation in Europe. NIO’s new... Read more →

Following a successful pilot project, Audi has begun rolling out an artificial intelligence (AI) system for quality-control of spot welds in car body construction. The AI was developed and tested beforehand at the Neckarsulm site. By the end of the year, the technical infrastructure for the use of AI will... Read more →

Toyota Research Institute (TRI) unveiled a generative artificial intelligence (AI) technique to amplify vehicle designers. Currently, designers can leverage publicly available text-to-image generative AI tools as an early step in their creative process. With TRI’s new technique, designers can add initial design sketches and engineering constraints into this process, cutting... Read more →

By Mark Boyle, AMADA WELD TECH Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are widely used in our modern, digital society to monitor our habits, serve “appropriate” advertising, suggest which new television series to watch, and more. AI/ML is also being implemented, less visibly, in industrial environments to determine... Read more →

CerebrumX Lab, a leading AI-driven automotive data services & product provider (earlier post), announced a strategic investment from BlackBerry that will help the company ramp up the delivery of new data-driven, in-vehicle products and services that make it easier for automakers to create turnkey user-centric applications and enterprise solutions. CerebrumX... Read more →

NVIDIA announced that BYD will extend its use of the NVIDIA DRIVE Orin centralized compute platform in a broader range of its NEVs. The enhanced partnership expands BYD’s use of DRIVE Orin (earlier post) across the multiple models in its next-generation Dynasty and Ocean series of vehicles, bringing safe and... Read more →

Daimler Truck subsidiary Torc Robotics, a pioneer in commercializing self-driving vehicle technology, signed an agreement to acquire Algolux Inc. Torc is acquiring Algolux for its award-winning intellectual property and expertise in the areas of computer vision and machine learning. Algolux perception technology in two views, combining both regular computer vision... Read more →

Cornell engineers have developed machine learning models to simplify and reinforce models to calculate the fine particulate matter (PM2.5) contained in urban air pollution. Described in a paper in the journal Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, the modeling approach has low data requirements and is computationally efficient. Previous... Read more →

The CIRCLES (Congestion Impacts Reduction via CAV-in-the-loop Lagrangian Energy Smoothing) Consortium, comprising Vanderbilt University, UC Berkeley, Temple University and Rutgers University-Camden, in coordination with Nissan North America and Tennessee Department of Transportation, recently concluded a five-day open-track experiment testing an artificial-intelligence-equipped cruise control system designed to increase fuel savings and... Read more →

CerebrumX Lab Inc. (CerebrumX), an AI-driven automotive data services & management platform, will incorporate Ford connected vehicle data to support data-driven usage-based insurance (UBI) as-a-Service model for Insurers. This model offers a quicker and more cost-effective implementation of UBI programs by using embedded telematics for eligible Ford and Lincoln connected... Read more →

A team at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) has developed a data-driven artificial intelligence (AI) framework to design liquid fuels exhibiting tailor-made properties for combustion engine applications to improve efficiency and lower carbon emissions. An open-access paper on their work is published in the Nature journal Communications... Read more →

Toyota and Google Cloud announced an expanded partnership that brings together Toyota and Lexus next-generation audio multimedia systems and Google Cloud’s AI-based speech services. Customers can now experience the first results of the partnership in the latest generation Toyota Audio Multimedia and Lexus Interface infotainment systems, including in 2023 models... Read more →

Velodyne Lidar has acquired Bluecity, a Montreal-based artificial intelligence (AI) software company, in an all-stock transaction. The addition of Bluecity is expected to be immaterial to operating expenses and cash usage. Bluecity’s executive, software development and sales teams will join Velodyne. Velodyne and Bluecity have been partnering for many years... Read more →

NVIDIA introduced NVIDIA DRIVE Thor, its next-generation centralized computer for safe and secure autonomous vehicles. DRIVE Thor, which achieves up to 2,000 teraflops of performance, unifies intelligent functions—including automated and assisted driving, parking, driver and occupant monitoring, digital instrument cluster, in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) and rear-seat entertainment—into a single architecture for... Read more →

Automated operations company Motive has published a study showing that businesses can improve fuel efficiency and optimize vehicle maintenance by using data insights and AI-powered automation. In the study, Motive analyzed more than 800 commercial fleets across a two-year period beginning in January 2020, identified what top fleets with the... Read more →

Toyota Research Institute (TRI) and Northwestern University are collaborating to help accelerate new materials discovery, design and development with the world’s first nanomaterial “data factory.” This AI-driven methodology goes beyond the traditional trial and error by exploring vast parameter sets, collecting data and then empowering AI to search the materials... Read more →

Hyundai Motor Group has launched the Boston Dynamics AI Institute, with the goal of making fundamental advances in artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and intelligent machines. The Group and Boston Dynamics will make an initial investment of more than $400 million in the new Institute, which will be led by Marc... Read more →

Monolith, an AI software platform used by the world’s leading automotive, aerospace and industrial engineering teams from Siemens to Honeywell, announced that engineering teams at the BMW Group are using its software to accelerate the development of their vehicles. By training Monolith self-learning models with the company’s engineering test data,... Read more →

BrightDrop, the GM business focused on decarbonizing last-mile delivery, is acquiring fleet optimization software from Marain Inc., a California-based technology startup. BrightDrop will integrate Marain’s artificial intelligence-powered fleet optimization software into BrightDrop’s ecosystem of last-mile solutions to analyze, forecast and identify multi-modal solutions for fleet customers as they plan their... Read more →

A consortium, including LanzaTech and Danone, has developed a new route to monoethylene glycol, (MEG), which is a key building block for polyethylene terephthalate, (PET), resin, fibers and bottles. The technology converts carbon emissions from steel mills or gasified waste biomass directly into MEG. The carbon capture technology uses a... Read more →

Hyundai Motor Group (HMG) reaffirmed its commitment to expand investment in the US to further its goal to provide sustainable and smart mobility solutions to its US. The Group’s plans, which involve an investment of more than US$10 billion, are designed to accelerate innovation and mobility electrification. Last week, Hyundai... Read more →

Untether AI, a developer of at-memory computation for artificial intelligence (AI) inference acceleration, announced a collaboration with General Motors, supported by the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Vehicle Innovation Network (OVIN), to accelerate the development of next-generation artificial intelligence perception systems for autonomous vehicles. More than 90% of the... Read more →

Quantum computing company IonQ and Hyundai Motor Company are partnering to apply quantum machine learning to image classification and 3D object detection for future mobilities. Image classification and 3D object detection are foundational steps toward the next generation of mobilities, including autonomous vehicles. Together, IonQ and Hyundai will look to... Read more →

The same propulsion technology that goes into rockets has made hypersonic speeds—Mach 5 and beyond, i.e., more than 5 times the speed of sound—possible since the 1950s. However, to make hypersonic flight more common and far less expensive than a rocket launch, engineers and scientists are working on advanced jet... Read more →

The BMW Group is publishing the world’s largest data set to streamline and accelerate significantly the training of artificial intelligence in production. The synthesized AI dataset—known as SORDI (Synthetic Object Recognition Dataset for Industries)—consists of more than 800,000 photorealistic images. These are divided into 80 categories of production resources, from... Read more →

NVIDIA has started production of its NVIDIA DRIVE Orin autonomous vehicle computer, showcased new automakers adopting the NVIDIA DRIVE platform, and unveiled the next generation of its NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion architecture. The company also announced that its automotive pipeline has increased to more than $11 billion over the next six... Read more →

Researchers from Ames Laboratory and Texas A&M; University have trained a machine-learning (ML) model to assess the stability of new rare-earth compounds. The framework they developed builds on current state-of-the-art methods for experimenting with compounds and understanding chemical instabilities. A paper on their work is published in Acta Materialia. Machine... Read more →

Jaguar Land Rover has formed a multi-year strategic partnership with NVIDIA to develop jointly and to deliver next-generation automated driving systems plus AI-enabled services and experiences for its customers. Starting in 2025, all new Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles will be built on the NVIDIA DRIVE software-defined platform, delivering a... Read more →

Seeing Machines, the advanced computer vision technology company that designs AI-powered operator monitoring systems to improve transport safety, announced a collaboration with Ambarella, an AI vision silicon company, to bring integrated Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) and occupant and driver monitoring system (OMS and DMS) solutions to the market. This... Read more →

Ambarella, an AI vision silicon company, announced its new Artificial Intelligence Image Signal Processor (AISP). Ambarella’s new AI-based ISP architecture uses neural networks to augment the image processing done by the hardware ISP integrated into its SoCs. This approach enables color imaging with low light at very low lux levels... Read more →

Ambarella, an AI vision silicon company, announced the CV3 AI domain controller family at CES. This fully scalable, power-efficient CVflow family of SoCs provides the automotive industry’s highest AI processing performance, at up to 500 eTOPS, representing a 42x increase over Ambarella’s prior automotive family. Featuring up to 16 Arm... Read more →

Chin-based EV maker NIO recently unveiled its fifth mass-production model, the ET5 (earlier post). The mid-size sedan’s AI features are powered by the NIO Adam supercomputer, built on four NVIDIA DRIVE Orin systems-on-a-chip (SoCs), achieving a total of more than 1,000 TOPS of performance. In addition to centralized compute, the... Read more →

Baidu, Inc., JiDU Automotive and Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. announced that JiDU’s first production vehicle will feature an intelligent digital cockpit system assisted by Baidu and Qualcomm Technologies. This system is based on the 4th Generation Snapdragon Automotive Cockpit Platform from Qualcomm Technologies, together with the next generation intelligent cockpit system... Read more →