Waymo's AI Content Search tool lets engineers quickly find objects in driving records

AI is the method by which self-driving cars perceive joggers, cyclists, traffic lights, road signs, trees, shrubs, and more, and it informs the way in which they choose to behave when encountered with those signals. The vehicles in Waymo's fleet aren't an exception to the rule -- they tap AI to make real-time driving decisions, in part by matching obstacles spotted by their onboard sensors to the billions of objects in the Alphabet company's database. Large data sets are invaluable in the autonomous driving domain because they enable the underpinning AI to self-improve. But it's been historically tough for engineers to surface samples within those sets without investing time and manual effort. That's why Waymo developed what it calls Content Search, which draws on tech similar to that which powers Google Photos and Google Image Search to let data scientists quickly locate almost any object in Waymo's driving history and logs.