Waymo, Google’s self-driving car sibling company, has acquired the Oxford artificial intelligence company Latent Logic for an undisclosed amount, giving Waymo its first presence in the UK.

Latent Logic, a spinout company from Oxford University, specialises in “imitation learning”, teaching machines how to act by showing them examples of humans doing the same actions. It was founded in 2017 by the academics Shimon Whiteson and João Messias.

Waymo hopes the company’s expertise can be put to use teaching AI drivers how to deal with complex behaviour such as a car cutting off another at a roundabout, a pedestrian emerging from a parked car, or a cyclist skidding in rain.

“The team’s expertise in reinforcement learning and imitation learning can help further accelerate Waymo’s progress in areas from simulation to behaviour prediction and planning,” the company said in a statement.

The Alphabet subsidiary is also intending to use its new base in Oxford to build a second pool of AI talent outside its headquarters in Mountain View, California. The UK is a world leader in AI research, including autonomous vehicles, and many talented researchers will not or cannot relocate to the US – no matter how deep the recruiter’s pockets.

Drago Anguelov, Waymo’s principal scientist and head of research, said: “We see an exciting opportunity in Europe, not only in continuing to build our partnerships with major automakers but also in benefitting from the world-class technology and engineering capabilities in Oxford and beyond.”

Whiteson, who will continue to work as a professor of computer science at Oxford, added: “By joining Waymo, we are taking a big leap towards realising our ambition of safe, self-driving vehicles. In just two years, we have made significant progress in using imitation learning to simulate real human behaviours on the road. I’m excited by what we can now achieve in combining this expertise with the talent, resources and progress Waymo have already made in self-driving technology.”

The acquisition is about research only, however: for the time being, Waymo has no plans to launch its self-driving taxis in the UK. Those remain strictly active only in Phoenix, Arizona, where they have recently begun to operate in a fully driverless manner, ferrying paying passengers around the city without even a human safety driver in the front seat.

The company does plan to operate in Europe in the near future, however, working with Renault to develop a self-driving taxi service for the 2024 Paris Olympics, when it hopes to be able to shuttle travellers from Charles de Gaulle airport to La Défense.

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US automaker Ford today announced that it is beginning to develop in Israel a decision-making system for driving autonomous cars. Such a system is now a major challenge facing autonomous car developers, because difficult decisions must be made within a fraction of a second in a car surrounded by moving traffic. Sources close to Ford say that the company will invest $12 million in the new activity.

The new team will operate as part of SAIPS, the company acquired by Ford two years ago, and which has since been responsible for developing important parts of Ford’s autonomous vehicle program. Among other things, the company develops a visual cognitive system that makes it possible to detect and identify pedestrians and vehicles in the vicinity of the autonomous vehicle even in difficult weather and lighting conditions and another core system that makes it possible to draw a completely automatic high-resolution 3D map of cities in which the car will drive itself.

Prof. Shie Mannor, a senior faculty member at Technion, Israel Institute of Technology and one of the world’s leading researchers in reinforcement learning, will lead Ford’s new activity. In this field of research, now one of the hot topics in machine learning, the algorithm interacts with the surroundings, thereby learning how to improve its decision-making according to the positive or negative reinforcement it receives. Four graduates of Mannor’s research laboratory are joining him at SAIPS: Dr. Eli Marom, Dr. Gal Dalal, Dr. Assaf Hallak, and Dr. Elad Gilboa. This team will be led by machine learning expert Dr. Boris Sherman. An undisclosed number of additional employees will also be recruited.

Ford CTO and VP research and advanced engineering Dr. Ken Washington said, “Development of safe and reliable autonomous vehicles requires going beyond the limits of current knowledge in computer science and artificial intelligence (AI). In the past two years, SAIPS has been doing this with great success, thereby making a substantial contribution to Ford’s autonomous vehicle program. I am confident that the new addition to the team will expedite innovation and enable us to meet the aggressive targets we set for ourselves on the journey to building smart vehicles.”

SAIPS, which currently has 30 employees, was founded in 2013 by CEO Udy Danino, principal algorithms engineer Noga Zieber (manager of the company’s US branch), and CTO Rotem Littman. “The combination of SAIPS’s proven capabilities and the expertise of the research team under Prof. Mannor’s guidance will enable us to generate innovation all along the road to developing the autonomous vehicle,” Danino said today.

Sources also told “Globes” that Audi, part of the Volkswagen group, is considering the establishment of an active research and development center in Israel to develop advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). The activity will be conducted through Automated Intelligent Driving (AID) company founded last year by Volkswagen for the purpose of constituting the group’s “expertise center” and developing software and hardware that will make fully autonomous driving possible by 2021.

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