Uber's driverless Volvo's will soon be seen piloting around Toronto as the ride-sharing company has established an office there.
Uber’s autonomous vehicle testing group is feeling the heat from Waymo’s trip hammer of allegations about stolen corporate secrets and the attempts by the company to get an injunction forcing Uber to suspend its testing operations in the U.S.
The key component being “in the U.S.”
No problem. Uber expanded its Advanced Technologies Group by opening an office in Toronto and placing a soon-to-be-growing team of researchers under the guidance of University of Toronto professor Raquel Urtasun.
Urtasun is not only an academic, but may be THE academic in the field as she is also the Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and Computer Vision. Her arrival couldn’t be better timed from Uber’s perspective as it could use some stability in its program these days.
(Criminal probe adds to Uber’s legal headaches. For the details, Click Here.)
However, she’s getting something out of it too.
“Doing research in self-driving cars, there is only so much you can do in an academic environment,” she told me in an interview about her decision to at least partially devote her time to a private enterprise. “You really need an industry partner that has resources to really make the difference.”
Waymo has asked the judge to slap Uber and Anthony Levandowski, a former Waymo employee who was until recently in charge of Uber’s ATG program, with injunctions preventing Uber from proceeding with its autonomous vehicle program, claiming that Uber was essentially using Waymo’s technology, especially its Lidar system.
Additionally, they asked the judge to bar Levandowski, who until recently headed up Uber’s autonomous program. He was replaced by Eric Meyhofer, who reports directly to CEO Travis Kalanick.
(Uber refutes Google’s stolen intellectual property charges. Click Here for the story.)
The move to step away was chronicled in an email from Levandowski to his employees that was revealed by Business Insider. He is working in other areas of the company, such as software and operations.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who hasn’t ruled on the request yet, did acknowledge he’s convinced that Levandowski took more than 14,000 documents when he left Waymo to start his own company, Otto, which produced a self-driving semi truck. However, he remains unconvinced that Uber actually used any Waymo secrets to produce its technology.
(Click Here for more about the lawsuit.)
“I’ve given you lots of discovery, and so far you don’t have any smoking gun” showing that Uber knew Levandowski possessed any Waymo trade secrets, Alsup said, according to Reuters.
The move to add the Toronto office helps Uber continue forward in its research and taps into a top resource for it as the university produces some of the top AI researchers in the world. Urtasun will not only head up the ATG, but also continue in her role at the university.