Press Coverage

Pre-COVID-19 three-quarters of U.S. workers - approximately 118 million people- commuted to work solo. Working on ways to improve people's mental and physical health, Pablo Paredes, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford School of Medicine and director of the Pervasive Technology Lab, id developing non-intrusive ways to detect and alleviate stress during the commute.

The Automated Vehicles Symposium held virtually this year during the last week of July, featured plenary sessions and over 40 breakout sessions across the four-day event. The opening keynote was moderated by Chris Gerdes, professor, mechanical engineering with Tracy Murrell, Matthew Schwall, and Qi Hommes Waymo, Waymo, on the question of transitioning to driver-out. Some of the highlights and key take-aways are summarized in this article by Richard Bishop.

Ines Azevedo, Associate Professor, Stanford Energy Resources Engineering, along with co-author Dr. Fan Tong, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, examined the most beneficial vehicle fuel technology for transportation in the US and the trade-off between decarbonization and air pollution mitigation. The results show electric vehicle use must accompany clean energy grids to mitigate both climate change and air pollution. Link

The National Research Cloud, an initiative proposed by John Etchemendy and Fei-Fei Li, co-directors of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (seen here at left) and backed by Stanford, CMU and Ohio State and tech companies including Google, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM received bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate.

Modern cars with superior vehicle engineering like electronic stability control are safer for legions of drivers but for those who prefer the more pure driving experience of machines of the past, older cars provide an understanding of handling that had less-than-friendly handling characteristics.

Research from the Stanford Intelligent Systems Lab and Autonomous Systems Lab titled "Efficient Large-Scale Multi-Drone Delivery using Transit Networks" was nominated by the International Conference on Robotics and Automation for best multi-robot systems paper. The paper outlines a system for hundreds of drones to use bus or trams to redesign how packages are distributed in cities.

Autonomous vehicle technology has made big strides in the the past number of years. High-tech sensors: lidar, cameras and radar help autonomous cars see but challenges remain such as refining the software for fully autonomous vehicles, says Marco Pavone, director of the Autonomous Systems Lab and faculty co-director of CARS. 

Dorsa Sadigh, assistant professor, computer science and electrical engineering, discusses AI system approaches in this article which highlights work by research labs at UC Berkeley, Stanford and University of Texas.