Intel claims its driver assistance technology is superior to that of Uber's

An unfortunate incident occurred on March 19 in Tempe, Arizona when a self-driving Uber vehicle hit a woman pedestrian, Elaine Herzberg (49), crossing the road at midnight resulting in her death. The tragic incident has raised questions about the efficacy of AI and our dependence on it for automation. Following the incident, Intel took a dig at Uber by running the footage of the collision through its advanced driver assistant system (ADAS), which was developed by its subsidiary Mobileye. Mobileye CEO Prof. Amnon Shashua wrote that the ADAS detected the woman a second before the impact.

Prof. Shashua says Mobileye's ADAS could detect the impact even when the program was run on a suboptimal video feed released by the police. Mobileye's program used pattern recognition and free-space detection modules that helped in identifying the moving object — in this case, Ms. Herzberg — even though the dash-cam video was apparently subjected to some unknown downsampling.

He opines that while artificial intelligence is believed to have attained a certain degree of maturity, identification of hundreds of corner cases and data validation tests on ADAS programs cannot be skipped. He says, "Experience counts, particularly in safety-critical areas".

Mobileye has been in the business of developing ADAS for over 15 years and currently there are 27 automakers employing the technology. Prof. Shashua feared that incidents like these can cause trust deficits among consumers that can potentially stifle work in this area. Prof. Shashua calls all those involved in developing AI for automation for a meaningful discussion to address these concerns. Mobileye has developed a Responsible Sensitive Safety (RSS) model that lays down mathematical compliance for common sense notions. 

This is the first instance of a self-driving vehicle killing a pedestrian on public roads. Authorities have not yet officially blamed Uber or its self-driving program for the crash but Arizona Governor Doug Ducey has written to the company terming the incident as an "unquestionable failure" on car safety.

Uber said that it has now proactively suspended self-driving vehicle testing in Tempe, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and Toronto. 

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