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6 Takeaways From TechCrunch Mobility 2021

June 15, 2021

Data plays a vital role in solving the critical edge cases required to gain city approval and deploy autonomous transportation at scale. Pilot projects are underway across the U.S. and cities such as Las Vegas are leading the way for progressive policies, testing and adoption of autonomous mobility applications.

iMerit’s Founder and CEO Radha Basu and Chris Barker (Founder and CEO, CBC) and Michael Sherwood (Chief Innovation Officer, City of Las Vegas) participated in a panel discussion at TechCrunch Mobility 2021. The speakers discussed progress, challenges and the road ahead in harnessing data to enable multiple modes of autonomous transportation in major cities across the U.S.

TechCrunch_Mobility

Here are six key takeaways from the session: 

  1. Identifying and solving edge cases in new geographies will define the last mile of success for autonomous vehicle deployments. Using public works data and data drawn from on-road trials will help train machine learning models on unusual occurrences and the actions to be taken in such scenarios.
  2. Highly skilled human-in-the-loop data annotators will be as vital as air traffic controllers and driving instructors in achieving fully autonomous transportation in the future. They will play a huge role in the progress and real-time deployment of transportation infrastructure across cities.
  3. Achieving a high level of safety within autonomous transportation programs going to market is the top priority for local authorities and automobile manufacturers, and data service providers.
  4. Cities and private sector entities have collected a treasure trove of data from a variety of sources. Managing these data flows and refining them into usable formats will be the next big frontier in mobility. Anonymizing and safely sharing autonomous transportation datasets through an open-source platform is key to the future of autonomous transportation.
  5. Data drawn from sensors, traffic movement and numerous other sources can be leveraged to not only build transportation systems but to positively impact businesses, healthcare, entertainment, and infrastructure in a region, and improve the overall mobility experience of consumers.
  6. There will be an increased demand for domain experts in areas like GIS and mapping, data validation and audit, and experts with a deep understanding of specific geographies or sectors like entertainment or healthcare.

Watch the entire panel discussion with iMerit’s Founder and CEO Radha Basu, Chris Barker (Founder and CEO, CBC) and Michael Sherwood (Chief Innovation Officer, City of Las Vegas) here.

TechCrunch Mobility Session