An Incredible Passion for Self-Driving Cars
One of the things that impressed me above all else when I first joined Udacity was the deep extent to which virtually everyone here self-identifies as a teacher. You would think — for people involved in amazing fields like Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, and Self-Driving Cars — that the temptation to just immerse in all the buzz and excitement of innovation would make it virtually impossible to stay committed to the “Students First” ideals of teaching. Yet while our instructors are definitely great stewards of the community, respected influencers in the field, significant drivers of innovation, and active followers of the news of the day, they remain at heart committed educators.
Don’t get me wrong. We’re excited about these fields. Really excited. Just the news in the past few days in the Self-Driving Car space alone would be enough to put anyone interested in the field into a state of almost unbearable excitement.
And yet, that’s ultimately not what motivates the people on the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree team. What I’m about to share with you, is what really motivates them.
As part of the process of building a new Nanodegree program, we spend a great deal of time talking with potential students about their hopes, their dreams, their needs, and their stories, to try and make sure we ultimately offer something of genuine value. The responses we got back from people about why they’re interested in Self-Driving Cars were literally awe-inspiring, and the whole company has been in kind of a state of awe ever since. As teachers, it’s really moving to be reminded in such direct ways of just how much the act of learning can mean to someone.
I would like to share some of those responses with you here:
“I was born in West Germany and have loved cars since I can remember. I wanted to make the best car in the world, but the German government didn’t give me citizenship, because my Dad is not German. Anyway, the Self-Driving Car Nanodegree program is a great opportunity for me to revisit my love for cars. I believe, thanks to the Nanodegree, I will be able to move towards the path of achieving a great personal value. In addition, self-driving cars can reduce the number of deaths and greatly increase the ease of travel as well as transportation. Self-driving cars (and trucks, trains, ships, planes) can create a revolution in travel: improving safety, efficiency, reducing cost, increasing ease and pleasure of travel, and also creating new industries which we haven’t yet conceived of.”
“Self-driving cars are a problem which involves many disciplines I am interested in. Computer Vision, Machine Learning and hopefully some basic Robotics as well (I am hoping we get to build a toy version of a self-driving car so we can see how well our algorithms work in reality). Aside from that I think a lot of the problems regarding traffic and pollution in the Bay Area (and other places) could be solved by having better and more efficient public transportation. It would be a dream come true to be able to apply the learnings from this course to develop self-driving public transportation.”
“First, I have been fascinated by the vision of automated driving for years and as all my friends know, I could talk about the implications for hours. This technology will change cities altogether, but more importantly, in the near future, it will save lives and I want to be a part of this solution in my career. Second, by taking this Nanodegree program, I will brush up on my mathematical skills, improve my programming skills, and work on a real-world application of Machine Learning and Computer Vision. All of which are skills I care about and want to excel at. I was in a tragic car crash as a child and learning about the technology that will keep others from being in the same situation gives me great pleasure.”
“Firstly, I would like to leave a better world than the one I was born into, and by helping the transition to self-driving cars, I would be helping to decrease the car accident fatality rate. Secondly, climate change is our biggest threat, and by making a more efficient transportation system, I would be helping to reduce the carbon footprint. Thirdly, as demand is high in the sector, I would like to have the chance to opt into a better economic lifestyle by working in the industry.”
“First, I’m interested in the scale of the decision-making problems involved in building self-driving car systems and how the use of new technologies such as deep neural networks and machine learning will empower autonomous vehicles. Andrew Ng calls deep learning technology the electricity of the 21st century. The question is, how will it fundamentally re-energize our transportation system? Second, I’m interested in how regulation challenges to ensure safety and resolve ethical choices will affect the design of algorithms, such as for example, the need to explain and debug neural networks as they take on increasingly more critical tasks. Finally, it’s an exciting field not only for its technical challenges, but also for its potential to create a whole new transportation infrastructure and reduce inefficiencies in the transport of physical goods, and, quite importantly lead to the creation of a large amount of new jobs in the process of building it and a reinvigoration of our economy, just as the Federal-Aid Highway Act did for the interstate system after the second World War. These are some of the challenges and expectations that I think makes the field very exciting!”
This is going to be an incredible program. ANOTHER incredible program, I should say. Our students and graduates are amazing, and if these responses are any indication, the new students who will be enrolling in the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program are going to be just as amazing. It’s a wonderful thing to be a teacher when there are learners like this in the world, and it’s a wonderful thing to teach Self-Driving Car technology when our future students have such an incredible passion for Self-Driving Cars!
Sign up today to be notified when the Self-Driving Car Nanodegree program officially launches!
~
This post was written by Christopher Watkins, Senior Writer, Udacity
