We present a traffic simulation named DeepTraffic where the planning systems for a subset of the vehicles are handled by a neural network as part of a model-free, off-policy reinforcement learning process. The primary goal of DeepTraffic is to make the hands-on study of deep reinforcement learning accessible to thousands of students, educators, and researchers in order to inspire and fuel the exploration and evaluation of deep Q-learning network variants and hyperparameter configurations through large-scale, open competition. This paper investigates the crowd-sourced hyperparameter tuning of the policy network that resulted from the first iteration of the DeepTraffic competition where thousands of participants actively searched through the hyperparameter space.

Building effective, enjoyable, and safe autonomous vehicles is a lot harder than has historically been considered. The reason is that, simply put, an autonomous vehicle must interact with human beings. This interaction is not a robotics problem nor a machine learning problem nor a psychology problem nor an economics problem nor a policy problem. It is all of these problems put into one. It challenges our assumptions about the limitations of human beings at their worst and the capabilities of artificial intelligence systems at their best. This work proposes a set of principles for designing and building autonomous vehicles in a human-centered way that does not run away from the complexity of human nature but instead embraces it. We describe our development of the Human-Centered Autonomous Vehicle (HCAV) as an illustrative case study of implementing these principles in practice.

We consider the paradigm of a black box AI system that makes life-critical decisions. We propose an "arguing machines" framework that pairs the primary AI system with a secondary one that is independently trained to perform the same task. We show that disagreement between the two systems, without any knowledge of underlying system design or operation, is sufficient to arbitrarily improve the accuracy of the overall decision pipeline given human supervision over disagreements. We demonstrate this system in two applications: (1) an illustrative example of image classification and (2) on large-scale real-world semi-autonomous driving data. For the first application, we apply this framework to image classification achieving a reduction from 8.0% to 2.8% top-5 error on ImageNet. For the second application, we apply this framework to Tesla Autopilot and demonstrate the ability to predict 90.4% of system disengagements that were labeled by human annotators as challenging and needing human supervision.

We propose a framework for semi-automated annotation of video frames where the video is of an object that at any point in time can be labeled as being in one of a finite number of discrete states. A Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is used to model (1) the behavior of the underlying object and (2) the noisy observation of its state through an image processing algorithm. The key insight of this approach is that the annotation of frame-by-frame video can be reduced from a problem of labeling every single image to a problem of detecting a transition between states of the underlying objected being recording on video. The performance of the framework is evaluated on a driver gaze classification dataset composed of 16,000,000 images that were fully annotated over 6,000 hours of direct manual annotation labor. On this dataset, we achieve a 13x reduction in manual annotation for an average accuracy of 99.1% and a 84x reduction for an average accuracy of 91.2%.

Active authentication is the problem of continuously verifying the identity of a person based on behavioral aspects of their interaction with a computing device. In this study, we collect and analyze behavioral biometrics data from 200subjects, each using their personal Android mobile device for a period of at least 30 days. This dataset is novel in the context of active authentication due to its size, duration, number of modalities, and absence of restrictions on tracked activity. The geographical colocation of the subjects in the study is representative of a large closed-world environment such as an organization where the unauthorized user of a device is likely to be an insider threat: coming from within the organization. We consider four biometric modalities: (1) text entered via soft keyboard, (2) applications used, (3) websites visited, and (4) physical location of the device as determined from GPS (when outdoors) or WiFi (when indoors). We implement and test a classifier for each modality and organize the classifiers as a parallel binary decision fusion architecture. We are able to characterize the performance of the system with respect to intruder detection time and to quantify the contribution of each modality to the overall performance.