Apple's AI director on advances in machine learning for its self-driving car project

Apple's secretive autonomous car project has shifted focus over the years, but this year, it seems to be picking up speed. In April, the company received a permit to test self-driving cars in California, while in June, Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that they were working on software that could allow cars -- and maybe other things -- to drive themselves. During a talk on Friday, Apple's director of artificial intelligence research, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, spoke about some of the company's recent advances in machine learning that would be useful for such a project. Wired reports that Salakhutdinov spoke before a group of AI experts at the end of this year's Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in Long Beach, California. There, he spoke about how Apple is using machine learning to analyze data to from a vehicle's cameras. He talked about techniques used in a recently published study on the advances that the company has made in using AI to detect pedestrians and cyclists using LiDAR.