The autonomous vehicle industry has reduced its speed. Its future is here, but it's not quite as in focus as the next signpost. Even the most fervent believers have re-evaluated their enthusiasm for the human-free driving mode.

What's ahead for autonomous driving and an array of other pending driving technology is among the many topics in many industries set for explanation, examination and speculation beginning March 18 during the four-day Nvidia GPU Technology Conference (GTC).

Danny Shapiro, Nvidia's vice president of automotive, is our guest on this episode of The Weekly Driver Podcast. Co-host Bruce Aldrich is on vacation, James Raia interviews Shapiro about the pending conference.

"The autonomous space is progressively very nicely," says Shapiro. "It's taken longer than we initially thought," Shapiro says. "The whole industry underestimated the complexity of being able to safely navigate. We are not there yet, but we are progressing quite nicely."

Shapiro was also guest on The Weekly Driver Podcast (Episode #123) in February 2020

The conference involves the advancing usages of the Central Processing Units (CPUs) and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) computing engines. Both are silicon-based microprocessors with different architectures.

The naming sponsor, Nvidia, is the Santa Clara-based multinational corporation that designs and supplies graphics for data science and high-performance computing. It's also the dominant global supplier of AI hardware and software.

Founded in 1993, Nvidia took its name from invidia. It's the Latin word for envy, the ancient Greek Titan deity of hatred and jealousy. The company chose its name to symbolize its vision and innovation in the fields of graphics and computing.

The quickly evolving automotive industry and its AI future will share the conference with similar advancing innovations in healthcare, accelerated computing and data science.

Organizers note more than 900 talks, training sessions, workshops and panels and more than 300 exhibitors and demonstrations are scheduled.
"

Any companies that are doing work in AI will have NVIDIA in their data center, in their workstations or their vehicles," Shapiro says. "We have hundreds of car companies and truck companies; robot taxi companies have our have our data platform in their vehicles."

According to Shapiro, organizers anticipate 20,000 in-person attendees and several hundred thousand virtual attendees.

In the automotive portion of the conference, Shapiro details AI's part in improved safety. Humans still have erratic behavior whether they are driving or pedestrians. Many companies, Shapiro notes, are integrating driver assistance platforms.

"The owner of the vehicle, the person behind the wheel is the driver still responsible but artificial intelligence is making the road a lot safer,” Shapiro says. "It can alert them (the driver) and it can take over certain functions on the highway, lane-keeping, emergency braking, adaptive cruise control.

"These are all very complicated software systems that are getting better and better. Now, there's the notion of a software-defined car or a vehicle that can get updates just like your phone. Vehicles are just getting smarter and smarter."

The Weekly Driver Podcast encourages and appreciates feedback from our listeners. Please forward episode links to family, friends and colleagues. And you are welcome to repost links from the podcast to your social media accounts.

Please send comments and suggestions for new episodes to James Raia via email: james@jamesraia.com.