CES 2016: Toyota announces all-star leadership for $1B Research Institute ZDNet

AI might be a hot topic but you'll still need to justify those projects. The Toyota Research Institute (TRI) just announced its technology leadership team at CES. In November Toyota announced an initial five-year, $1 billion investment in TRI, which will be a research and development enterprise designed to bridge the gap between fundamental research in robotics and artificial intelligence and product development. In other words, the mandate is to develop all the cool AI stuff happening in labs and DARPA-backed research projects and bring it to market. Comparisons have been drawn to famous industrial laboratories like Bell Labs and PARC, which are jointly responsible for an impressive chunk of silicon-age advances. Some of TRI's specific mandates are to enhance the safety of automobiles, with the ultimate goal of creating a car that is incapable of causing a crash; to increase access to cars to those who otherwise cannot drive, including the handicapped and the elderly; to help translate outdoor mobility technology into products for indoor mobility; and to accelerate scientific discovery by applying techniques from artificial intelligence and machine learning.