NVIDIA Revs Up Autonomous Car Development at Legendary Research Site

Ladies and gentlemen, start your algorithms.

NVIDIA’s research unit for self-driving cars is growing and taking over space in the historic former Bell Labs building, in Holmdel, N.J.

Our team of some of the best minds in autonomous vehicle development is doubling its office space at the site. That means we’ve got room for more engineers eager to pioneer deep learning — and track test it.

Bell Works, as the facility is now known, and our exact office space inside, was the research office of machine learning and deep learning pioneers such as Yann LeCun, Leon Bottou, Yoshua Bengio, Vladimir Vapnik and many others. In the ‘80s, they invented convolutional neural networks, which form the basis of today’s deep learning and have revolutionized fields such as image classification and speech recognition. So it’s a fitting place for the groundbreaking work we’re doing.

Bell Labs research alumni — including Urs Muller and Larry Jackel, who worked with LeCun and the others in the ‘90s on convolutional networks — are now at NVIDIA and remain obsessively focused on deep learning for autonomous driving to improve safety.

Muller, a Swiss Ph.D. who leads our auto efforts at the site, reveres the inventive Bell Labs past and personifies the hard-charging visionary focused on shaping the world’s future.

“In the old days, we couldn’t use computer vision at all because it was so primitive and there was a lack of compute power,” Muller said. “Now we can recognize people, cars, signs, lanes and potential hazards.”

Building for Dreaming Big

The Holmdel location was the birthplace of research not only for convolutional networks but also countless other technology game changers, including contributions to the Unix operating system, foundational for the internet.

Bell Works today remains both a historic research center and an architectural marvel. The building is designed by Eero Saarinen, a Finnish-American industrial designer and architect whose neo-futurism style shines at the TWA Flight Center at New York’s Kennedy airport.

The modernist, glass-walled Bell Works building, which is the length of three football fields, was listed last year on the National Register of Historic Places. Along with NVIDIA, it houses a mix of tech startups and corporate research labs.

At this location, the NVIDIA research team is now ground zero for applied AI. Our autonomous driving group here tackles unsolved deep learning problems for self-driving cars, enhancing the high-performance NVIDIA DRIVE platform for autonomous vehicles.

Track Ready — Are You?

NVIDIA’s Holmdel team is both an intrepid research group and a crew that can hit the track to road test ideas in five minutes, letting them iterate quickly.

With its East Coast location, the campus is ideally suited for putting autonomous vehicles to the test — in all seasons of weather conditions. The site boasts three miles of private test roads just outside its garage, which is packed with test vehicles and support gear.

Just outside the private track, the area nearby has plenty of winding roads ideal to put our self-driving cars through rigorous tests, as shown in this recent eight-mile-long, fully autonomous test drive.

If you have what it takes, and are ready to build a ride straight from the future, see our careers page.

The post NVIDIA Revs Up Autonomous Car Development at Legendary Research Site appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.

by Scott Martin via The Official NVIDIA Blog