The Record - Issue 19: Winter 2020

65 “Microsoft’s autonomous journey started along- side the rise in demand for autonomous driving technology enablement in the cloud,” said Henry Bzeih, chief strategy and technology officer for automotive at Microsoft. “With Microsoft’s inte- grated toolchain, aspiring autonomous driving companies can find an end-to-end cloud solution from data ingestion to the deployment of validated trainingmodels in this environment. Furthermore, the Microsoft for Start-ups programme provides access to Microsoft’s top support system, which includes contact with architects and experts, as well as early access to Azure, co-development opportunities and joint customer opportunities for autonomous driving solutions to accelerate the growth of such technology.” One company that has taken advantage of these capabilities in the development of autonomous driving is Wayve, which is building artificial intelligence which learns from observing human driving via reinforcement learning. The com- pany is using Microsoft Azure to help develop their computer vision system, which can be trained in one city and then driven in another. “We are excited by the opportunities that Azure will create for Wayve as we push our machine learning to new levels of scale using data from fleets of connected vehicles across the world,” said Alex Kendall, the firm’s CEO. “ Humans have so many accidents that we almost take it for granted, but every safety incident with an autonomous vehicle becomes news” AUTOMOT I V E