Toyota to Tie Up with MIT and Stanford U. in AI Research
Toyota Motor and two leading US universities are tying up in an artificial intelligence research with an outlay of $5,000 (6 million yen) in five years. The company plans to accelerate its AI project by collaborating with MIT and Stanford University spearheading in this area. It's another showcase of industry-academia collaboration toward tackling next-generation technologies.
The project first eyes on installing collaboration research centers within the research labos of both universities specializing in computer sciences and AI and have these centers function as a receptor of research activities primarily on object recognition and high-level situation discrimination. The company will apply research results to automobile production and robotics. TOYOTA seeks cooperation of Mr. Gil Pratt who was involved in the management of disaster rescue robot contests at the Defense Advanced Res. Project Agency (DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense.
Apart from environmental technology, Toyota aims at furthering research on driving support and robots with added investment in these fields. To procure funds for the development of next-generation technologies, new stocks were issued last July for investors to retain for medium and long terms. Investment funds were set in collaboration with Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, etc.
In the automobile sector, research tie-ups with outside research institutions are fast in progress. Google embarked already in 2010 on developing automatic driving device based on research results of Stanford University. Last January, Nissan tied up with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to speed up research on automatic driving device.
In auto-parts department, Delphi Corporation entered in capital/business alliance with US Automatica, a Carnegieâ€Mellon University-based automatic driving software developer, in 2014, and succeeded this spring in transcontinental automatic driving.
Car industries are activating industrial-government-academia collaborations to enforce their position in the area of artificial intelligence they have hitherto been less attentive.