Welcome to the new year! What new things are you going to do this year? How about inventing the future? The theme of this issue is new mobility. When I was a student, self-driving vehicles were a matter of science fiction, but today, the idea sounds plausible. As this issue shows, self-driving vehicles could be a near-term reality, thanks to many technologies that have been and are being deployed.
Alan Kay, the developer of object-oriented programming, is known for saying, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” As students, you are learning what has already been achieved, but I’m sure your professors want you to cultivate the ability to invent the future. I often hear students wondering why they need to learn some topic, especially if new methods have already been developed, like learning arithmetic when we have calculators and computers. Neural networks and deep learning are all the rage now and enabling the growth of new technologies, many of which are being used in self-driving vehicles, especially for computer vision in navigation and obstacle avoidance. These networks learn using a technique called back propagation, which was established in its initial form by multiple people in the 1960s but was first applied to neural networks in the 1980s.
For more about this article see link below.