Uber builds AI team in Toronto

san francisco — Uber Technologies, in the midst of legal battle with Alphabet over selfdriving car technology, is building a new artificial intelligence team in Toronto to help improve its autonomous vehicle software.

The team will be part of Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group, the unit that’s developing much of its autonomous technology. It will be led by Raquel Urtasun, an expert in the AI fields of machine learning and computer vision at the University of Toronto. Uber is also investing $5 million over several years in the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

The city of Toronto has seen many researchers defect to the US. To prevent further brain drain, it set up an urban innovation hub, called the MaRS Discovery District, to attract companies and encourage investment in Canadian start-ups. Uber will be putting its AI offices there.

Urtasun will help Uber continue to build software that allows selfdriving cars to perceive the world around them. These vehicles need to understand everything from the colour of a stoplight to whether a traffic cop is waving a car on or telling it to stop.

Waymo, an autonomous car development company spun out of Alphabet, alleges Uber executive Anthony Levandowski stole thousands proprietary files from Waymo while he was working there and then brought them to Uber. Uber has called the complaint “a baseless attempt to slow down a competitor.”