AI is not only vital in ensuring successful and efficient navigation, but it's a crucial element in ensuring the journey from A to B is as safe and comfortable as possible. The biggest benefit of AI is its ability to boost efficiency and complete complex tasks that cannot be easily managed by humans. When it comes to navigation, this translates to evaluating real-time conditions with optimum route guidance that helps the driver avoid traffic, amongst other road hazards. The implementation of AI into cars, however, is no easy task. When the control over navigation is taken out of the driver's hands, there's a need to ensure that the data the AI is working with is up to code.

Location technology specialist, TomTom, and the University of Amsterdam (UvA), announced the launch of a new public-private research lab. Atlas Lab will focus on using Artificial Intelligence (AI) for developing advanced, highly accurate and safe high definition (HD) maps for self-driving vehicles. The lab is part of ICAI, the national Innovation Centre for AI, based in the Amsterdam Science Park. In collaboration with TomTom, the UvA is embarking on research on the use of AI for creating HD maps suitable for all levels of autonomous driving. Theo Gevers, one of the Scientific Directors at Atlas Lab, comments: "At the UvA we are already doing research on automated recognition of items in images and videos. Yet the recognition of items and creation of HD maps in highly complex situations like a moving car, is still a huge challenge. This collaboration with TomTom provides an extra dimension to new and challenging AI-research."

The history of Apple Maps has proved more uneven than the tarmac on an unfinished freeway. Its launch in 2012 was controversial and much-maligned, and though it has improved out of all recognition since, news that it is being rebuilt is welcome. This was reported in an extensive and brilliant article by Matthew Panzarino at TechCrunch. Let's be clear, I really like Apple Maps. I think its design is more appealing than rivals, thanks to its gentle, understated-but-happy colors and elegant sense of proportion.

Automotive solutions giant TomTom will be enhancing its Road Trips service using machine learning to tell users what their next road trip should be. Like everything in life, we all have our preference as to what kind of roads we like to drive. Some like rolling hills, others prefer to keep things flat. TomTom's Road Trips is a community-based service which features some routes from TomTom itself but mostly relies on users to submit their own. Within the first week, 350 routes were published.

China has historically been a weak spot in TomTom's global map coverage for regulatory reasons. CEO Harold Goddijn said in a statement that Baidu would adopt TomTom's mapmaking platform, while Baidu has technologies of its own in autonomous driving and artificial intelligence.

Navigation and mapping company TomTom -- which provides data to companies like Uber and Apple as well as for its own GPS systems -- has made an acquisition to add more autonomous driving technology to its platform. It has acquired Autonomos, a Berlin startup that has worked in R&D consultancy for various self-driving projects out of Germany. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed. Autonomos was founded in 2012 by a group of computer science and artificial intelligence academics who had worked on driving projects at the Free University of Berlin. That has included building vehicles for the DARPA Grand Challenge competitions.

Our third regional GPU Technology Conference in as many weeks reached another packed house today, as NVIDIA co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang unveiled technology that will accelerate the deep learning revolution. "GPU computing is at the beginning of something very, very important, a brand new revolution, what people call the AI revolution, the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution," Huang told a crowd of 1,600 scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and press, gathered at Amsterdam's gleaming waterfront music hall. "However you describe it, we think something really big is around the corner." In the latest stop in a tour that will bring GTC to eight cities around the world, Huang unveiled Xavier, our next-generation system-on-chip for powering self-driving cars; announced an agreement with TomTom, the Dutch mapping and navigation group, to use AI to create a cloud-to-car mapping system for self-driving cars; detailed our DriveWorks Alpha 1 release, and highlighted the work we're doing with some of Europe's most innovative startups and research labs. In the previous two weeks, Haung spoke at regional GTCs in Beijing and Taiwan that each drew crowds of more than 2,000.