Earlier today, the Toyota Research Institute announced a number of new artificial intelligence and robotics research projects, including some collaborative projects with the likes of MIT and Stanford. It even plans to open two new offices in the home cities of the these universities: Cambridge, Massachusetts and Palo Alto, California. With an initial $1 billion investment over the next five years, the Japanese automaker is hoping to develop a vehicle that’s “incapable of causing a crash,” meaning that it uses the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Toyota revealed more details of an ambitious plan to invest in artificial intelligence and robots today during a keynote speech by Gill Pratt, CEO of the new $1 billion Toyota Research Institute (TRI) at CES in Las Vegas. Toyota will open two TRI facilities, near Stanford and MIT, and Pratt announced several high-profile new appointments and advisors. TRI will have a technical team consisting of several project managers formerly of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and a number of professors working part-time, including James Kuffner, who previously led robotics research at Google. The advisory board will include luminaries such as the robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks and the NYU and Facebook AI researcher Yann LeCun. Pratt also described two projects—one at Stanford, the other at MIT—that would feed into Toyota’s efforts to develop self-driving vehicles. These efforts could also produce fundamental and broad-reaching advances in artificial intelligence.
