The development of automation will create real-life benefits for both customers and the society in terms of productivity, safety, energy- and fuel efficiency. Volvo Group already offers automated solutions as support to drivers and machine operators and has shown several self-driving concept vehicles.
“Further development of artificial intelligence, or intelligent machines, will enable us to offer more advanced solutions to our customers, says Petter Wirfält who leads a group of artificial intelligence engineers at the Volvo Group.
“One area is machine learning, with image recognition as one example. This is the ability of computers to acquire, process, and analyze data coming primarily from visual sources like the cameras on a vehicle.
The idea is to feed the system with a huge amount of images of different objects so the system can learn to recognize them.”
AI is important in many areas of the industry and the society and it is because of this the Swedish Government has started an initiative to establish a AI collaboration arena for applied research and innovation projects with a co-located data factory together with large companies, academia and other stakeholders.
“The strength with a kind of national center like this is that we there can attract top talents, learn from all the joint co-located knowledge and develop a unique data set that is needed for AI research and development”, says Petter Wirfält.
The new arena will have a very broad scope and include not only technical products and systems but also business and finance, life science and medicine, political science, law and the arts.
“I do believe that we have a lot to learn from each other, says Petter Wirfält.
The arena and data factory will be located at Lindholmen Science Park in Gothenburg, Sweden and the planned start of operations is during Q3 2018.