
BMW shares AI tools used in production - saranshk
https://www.bmwblog.com/2019/12/13/bmw-shares-ai-algorithms-used-in-production-available-on-github/
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currymj
the YoloV3 (the model that these tools are designed to work with) paper is
extremely funny and worth reading for anyone who hasn't.

[https://pjreddie.com/media/files/papers/YOLOv3.pdf](https://pjreddie.com/media/files/papers/YOLOv3.pdf)

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iudqnolq
Thank you! My favorite passage:

> YOLOv3 is a good detector. It’s fast, it’s accurate. It’s not as great on
> the COCO average AP between .5 and .95 IOU metric. But it’s very good on the
> old detection metric of .5 IOU. Why did we switch metrics anyway? The
> original COCO paper just has this cryptic sentence: “A full discussion of
> evaluation metrics will be added once the evaluation server is complete”.
> Russakovsky et al report that that humans have a hard time distinguishing an
> IOU of .3 from .5! “Training humans to visually inspect a bounding box with
> IOU of 0.3 and distinguish it from one with IOU 0.5 is surprisingly
> difficult.” [18] If humans have a hard time telling the difference, how much
> does it matter?

> But maybe a better question is: “What are we going to do with these
> detectors now that we have them?” A lot of the people doing this research
> are at Google and Facebook. I guess at least we know the technology is in
> good hands and definitely won’t be used to harvest your personal information
> and sell it to.... wait, you’re saying that’s exactly what it will be used
> for??

> Oh. Well the other people heavily funding vision research are the military
> and they’ve never done anything horrible like killing lots of people with
> new technology oh wait.....

> I have a lot of hope that most of the people using computer vision are just
> doing happy, good stuff with it, like counting the number of zebras in a
> national park [13], or tracking their cat as it wanders around their house
> [19]. But computer vision is already being put to questionable use and as
> researchers we have a responsibility to at least consider the harm our work
> might be doing and think ofways to mitigate it. We owe the world that much.
> In closing, do not @ me. (Because I finally quit Twitter).

> 1 The author is funded by the Office of Naval Research and Google.

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kick
For people who don't get how the last statement ties in: on the actual paper,
the third line 'iudqnolq quotes has a superset 1 on it. The PDF doesn't allow
you to highlight the 1, so the punchline isn't as strong.

~~~
iudqnolq
I didn't notice I missed that. Thanks

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snops
Algorithms doesn't seem to be the right term, this seems to be more tooling,
like this wrapper for Tensorflow and YOLO training that runs a variety of
monitoring tools for you:

[https://github.com/BMW-InnovationLab/BMW-YOLOv3-Training-
Aut...](https://github.com/BMW-InnovationLab/BMW-YOLOv3-Training-Automation)

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jsinai
Well they are the algorithms that are they are using, whether they built them
or not

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EsssM7QVMehFPAs
They have simply checked in the libdarknet.so - quite overselling on the
algorithm part in the blog.

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samcodes
This is impressive only because they are in automotive. I worked in that
industry for years, they are generally at least a decade behind the rest of
the software world

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zcw100
Tesla isn't but this is one of the biggest problems I have with Tesla that I
don't hear many people talking about. Tesla is more like a laptop with wheels
than a car with a computer. That's fine but I'm not going to upgrade my car on
the same schedule that I upgrade my laptop. It would be nice if Tesla allowed
you to buy a new "shell" and transfer over your old battery pack. I wonder
what the cost breakdown between battery pack and everything else is.

~~~
kalleboo
$15,000 for a replacement battery pack for the model 3, so manufacture cost
will be a bit under that.

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acro
Here's a nice video of the YoloV3 (which these tools are using) in action from
the author of YoloV3 (Joseph Redmon):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPU2HistivI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPU2HistivI)

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fock
sorry for the negative vibes, but this looks a lot like some fake buzz to
create some credible BMW-traineed profiles – none of the profiles linked with
the project is older than 5 days...

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ignoramceisblis
At least on using the age of git/GitHub repos to determine the legitimacy of a
project/effort: I would say it's not uncommon for some groups to time the
release of their code with the publication of some announcement of it. I'd
also say it's not unusual to adjust (for example, collapse) the git repo
history when publishing code.

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syntaxing
As a MechE this is really cool to see. Is there similar tooling available
online that I can read about?

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amelius
I sure hope they don't let people's lives depend on the output of deep
learning models.

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cyorir
Why not? Deep learning models are very promising for certain autonomous
driving tasks. Take a look at this survey paper for examples:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.07738](https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.07738)

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FrankenApps
Yes, I agree it’s mostly tools...

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cryptocoder
This is great. It would be good if all life-critical software was open-sourced
like this. Maybe something that should in fact be required?

But, ”in turn, we receive support in taking our AI software to the next level
of development”

I bet they are mainly looking for help. They are trying to figure out why
their software is not capable to do what it is supposed to, and hoping someone
can assist.

I’m ready to consult them on this if they are open to hear the bad news
first...

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adrianmonk
> _life-critical software_

The article could be clearer on this, but when it refers to "production", I
think it means factories and logistics. (At least that's how I put together
"production" in the headline with "implementing next-level production
processes throughout its plants" from the first sentence.)

In other words, I think they use these algorithms in manufacturing systems,
and they aren't putting this software into the cars' computers.

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EsssM7QVMehFPAs
It's object tracking and classification, so imagine a 2 ton robot arm swinging
around a factory and failing to detect a person in the way.

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aidenn0
Factory floors will typically have a light-curtain around things like 2 ton
robot arms...

