Kai Wang
Director of Prediction, Zoox

AI in Transportation/Aerospace

June 6, 10:00am
Location: Magnolia

How Autonomous Vehicles Use Advanced AI and Machine Learning to Navigate Dense Urban Environments

Our brains process and make millions of micro-decisions every second, especially while driving and navigating through a dense urban environment. You quickly become aware of the numerous dynamic and ever-changing aspects of your surroundings, and have to decide accordingly based on constantly generating new predictions of how the situation around you is likely to reveal itself. Advanced AI systems are built to calculate millions of if-then statements in seconds, bringing human-level decision making to robots on roadways. Kai Wang, Director of Prediction at Zoox, Amazon’s robotaxi subsidiary, will discuss how autonomous vehicles apply advanced machine learning (ML) systems to predict the future behavior of the dynamic and ever-changing aspects of its surroundings, including the intentions and movements of dynamic agents in the scene.

Kai Wang is the Director of Prediction at Zoox. At Zoox, the Prediction team is responsible for modeling the future behavior of all dynamic agents (vehicles, pedestrians, bicyclists, etc.) around our vehicle so that we can navigate through the world in a safe and efficient manner. Kai has been with Zoox since 2016 and prior to that was a Software Engineer at Google working on Computer Vision. Kai received his Ph.D. from UC San Diego and B.S. from the University of Washington, both in Computer Science.