5 ms·

BMW shares AI tools used in production

321 points by saranshk 7y ago

snops 7y ago
Algorithms doesn't seem to be the right term, this seems to be more tooling, like this wrapper for Tensorflow and YOLO training that runs a variety of monitoring tools for you: https://github.com/BMW-InnovationLab/BMW-YOLOv3-Training-Automation https://github.com/BMW-InnovationLab/BMW-YOLOv3-Training-Aut...
- jsinai 7y ago
  Well they are the algorithms that are they are using, whether they built them or not
  - EsssM7QVMehFPAs 7y ago
    They have simply checked in the libdarknet.so - quite overselling on the algorithm part in the blog.
- dang 7y ago
  OK, we've s/algorithms/tools/'d the above.
FrankenApps 7y ago
Yes, I agree it’s mostly tools...
samcodes 7y ago
This is impressive only because they are in automotive. I worked in that industry for years, they are generally at least a decade behind the rest of the software world
- mtgx 7y ago
  A decade behind would mean their software security is at Windows 7 level at least. It's far from that. More like Windows XP first edition at best.
- zcw100 7y ago
  Tesla isn't but this is one of the biggest problems I have with Tesla that I don't hear many people talking about. Tesla is more like a laptop with wheels than a car with a computer. That's fine but I'm not going to upgrade my car on the same schedule that I upgrade my laptop. It would be nice if Tesla allowed you to buy a new "shell" and transfer over your old battery pack. I wonder what the cost breakdown between battery pack and everything else is.
  - kalleboo 7y ago
    $15,000 for a replacement battery pack for the model 3, so manufacture cost will be a bit under that.
- ianhowson 7y ago
  The tech in this blog post isn't at all representative of BMW at large. There's a ton of 'decade behind' stuff that runs in VMs on Win10 machines.
syntaxing 7y ago
As a MechE this is really cool to see. Is there similar tooling available online that I can read about?
currymj 7y ago
the YoloV3 (the model that these tools are designed to work with) paper is extremely funny and worth reading for anyone who hasn't. https://pjreddie.com/media/files/papers/YOLOv3.pdf https://pjreddie.com/media/files/papers/YOLOv3.pdf
- dr_dshiv 7y ago
  Mind blown, thanks. What genre of papers does this belong to? I want to read more.
  - sansnomme 7y ago
    Quite a few ML papers are written this way. See e.g. Single Headed Attention RNN
- davalapar 7y ago
  Lost it at page 4 figure 3 caption: > You can tell YOLOv3 is good because it’s very high and far to the left. Can you cite your own paper? Guess who’s going to try, this guy→[16] This guy cites.
  - iudqnolq 7y ago
    I lost it at citation 1, the Wikipedia page for analogy
- iudqnolq 7y ago
  Thank you! My favorite passage: > YOLOv3 is a good detector. It’s fast, it’s accurate. It’s not as great on the COCO average AP between .5 and .95 IOU metric. But it’s very good on the old detection metric of .5 IOU. Why did we switch metrics anyway? The original COCO paper just has this cryptic sentence: “A full discussion of evaluation metrics will be added once the evaluation server is complete”. Russakovsky et al report that that humans have a hard time distinguishing an IOU of .3 from .5! “Training humans to visually inspect a bounding box with IOU of 0.3 and distinguish it from one with IOU 0.5 is surprisingly difficult.” [18] If humans have a hard time telling the difference, how much does it matter? > But maybe a better question is: “What are we going to do with these detectors now that we have them?” A lot of the people doing this research are at Google and Facebook. I guess at least we know the technology is in good hands and definitely won’t be used to harvest your personal information and sell it to.... wait, you’re saying that’s exactly what it will be used for?? > Oh. Well the other people heavily funding vision research are the military and they’ve never done anything horrible like killing lots of people with new technology oh wait..... > I have a lot of hope that most of the people using computer vision are just doing happy, good stuff with it, like counting the number of zebras in a national park [13], or tracking their cat as it wanders around their house [19]. But computer vision is already being put to questionable use and as researchers we have a responsibility to at least consider the harm our work might be doing and think ofways to mitigate it. We owe the world that much. In closing, do not @ me. (Because I finally quit Twitter). > 1 The author is funded by the Office of Naval Research and Google.
cryptocoder 7y ago
This is great. It would be good if all life-critical software was open-sourced like this. Maybe something that should in fact be required? But, ”in turn, we receive support in taking our AI software to the next level of development” I bet they are mainly looking for help. They are trying to figure out why their software is not capable to do what it is supposed to, and hoping someone can assist. I’m ready to consult them on this if they are open to hear the bad news first...
- smabie 7y ago
  You’re saying I should be forced as a developer to share the code of everything I do? That sounds pretty despotic, tbh.
  - cryptocoder 7y ago
    I agree. But that’s not what I meant to say: only for life-critical software (think autonomous vehicles, airplanes, medical robots and devices).
  - kick 7y ago
    Why not? If a person perceives proprietary software to be harmful, as a lot of people do, then it only follows there should be laws against it. Or, alternatively, if they see it like they do speech, others should be able to decompile it, comment, and redistribute it without consequence.
- adrianmonk 7y ago
  > life-critical software The article could be clearer on this, but when it refers to "production", I think it means factories and logistics. (At least that's how I put together "production" in the headline with "implementing next-level production processes throughout its plants" from the first sentence.) In other words, I think they use these algorithms in manufacturing systems, and they aren't putting this software into the cars' computers.
  - cryptocoder 7y ago
acro 7y ago
Here's a nice video of the YoloV3 (which these tools are using) in action from the author of YoloV3 (Joseph Redmon): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPU2HistivI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPU2HistivI
fock 7y ago
sorry for the negative vibes, but this looks a lot like some fake buzz to create some credible BMW-traineed profiles – none of the profiles linked with the project is older than 5 days...
- ignoramceisblis 7y ago
  At least on using the age of git/GitHub repos to determine the legitimacy of a project/effort: I would say it's not uncommon for some groups to time the release of their code with the publication of some announcement of it. I'd also say it's not unusual to adjust (for example, collapse) the git repo history when publishing code.
amelius 7y ago
I sure hope they don't let people's lives depend on the output of deep learning models.
- cyorir 7y ago
  Why not? Deep learning models are very promising for certain autonomous driving tasks. Take a look at this survey paper for examples: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.07738 https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.07738
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

321 points by saranshk 7y ago

Algorithms doesn't seem to be the right term, this seems to be more tooling, like this wrapper for Tensorflow and YOLO training that runs a variety of monitoring tools for you: https://github.com/BMW-InnovationLab/BMW-YOLOv3-Training-Automation https://github.com/BMW-InnovationLab/BMW-YOLOv3-Training-Aut...

jsinai 7y ago
Well they are the algorithms that are they are using, whether they built them or not
- EsssM7QVMehFPAs 7y ago
  They have simply checked in the libdarknet.so - quite overselling on the algorithm part in the blog.
dang 7y ago
OK, we've s/algorithms/tools/'d the above.

FrankenApps 7y ago

Yes, I agree it’s mostly tools...

samcodes 7y ago

This is impressive only because they are in automotive. I worked in that industry for years, they are generally at least a decade behind the rest of the software world

mtgx 7y ago
A decade behind would mean their software security is at Windows 7 level at least. It's far from that. More like Windows XP first edition at best.
zcw100 7y ago
Tesla isn't but this is one of the biggest problems I have with Tesla that I don't hear many people talking about. Tesla is more like a laptop with wheels than a car with a computer. That's fine but I'm not going to upgrade my car on the same schedule that I upgrade my laptop. It would be nice if Tesla allowed you to buy a new "shell" and transfer over your old battery pack. I wonder what the cost breakdown between battery pack and everything else is.
- kalleboo 7y ago
  $15,000 for a replacement battery pack for the model 3, so manufacture cost will be a bit under that.
ianhowson 7y ago
The tech in this blog post isn't at all representative of BMW at large. There's a ton of 'decade behind' stuff that runs in VMs on Win10 machines.

syntaxing 7y ago

As a MechE this is really cool to see. Is there similar tooling available online that I can read about?

currymj 7y ago

the YoloV3 (the model that these tools are designed to work with) paper is extremely funny and worth reading for anyone who hasn't. https://pjreddie.com/media/files/papers/YOLOv3.pdf https://pjreddie.com/media/files/papers/YOLOv3.pdf

dr_dshiv 7y ago
Mind blown, thanks. What genre of papers does this belong to? I want to read more.
- sansnomme 7y ago
  Quite a few ML papers are written this way. See e.g. Single Headed Attention RNN
davalapar 7y ago
Lost it at page 4 figure 3 caption: > You can tell YOLOv3 is good because it’s very high and far to the left. Can you cite your own paper? Guess who’s going to try, this guy→[16] This guy cites.
- iudqnolq 7y ago
  I lost it at citation 1, the Wikipedia page for analogy
iudqnolq 7y ago
Thank you! My favorite passage: > YOLOv3 is a good detector. It’s fast, it’s accurate. It’s not as great on the COCO average AP between .5 and .95 IOU metric. But it’s very good on the old detection metric of .5 IOU. Why did we switch metrics anyway? The original COCO paper just has this cryptic sentence: “A full discussion of evaluation metrics will be added once the evaluation server is complete”. Russakovsky et al report that that humans have a hard time distinguishing an IOU of .3 from .5! “Training humans to visually inspect a bounding box with IOU of 0.3 and distinguish it from one with IOU 0.5 is surprisingly difficult.” [18] If humans have a hard time telling the difference, how much does it matter? > But maybe a better question is: “What are we going to do with these detectors now that we have them?” A lot of the people doing this research are at Google and Facebook. I guess at least we know the technology is in good hands and definitely won’t be used to harvest your personal information and sell it to.... wait, you’re saying that’s exactly what it will be used for?? > Oh. Well the other people heavily funding vision research are the military and they’ve never done anything horrible like killing lots of people with new technology oh wait..... > I have a lot of hope that most of the people using computer vision are just doing happy, good stuff with it, like counting the number of zebras in a national park [13], or tracking their cat as it wanders around their house [19]. But computer vision is already being put to questionable use and as researchers we have a responsibility to at least consider the harm our work might be doing and think ofways to mitigate it. We owe the world that much. In closing, do not @ me. (Because I finally quit Twitter). > 1 The author is funded by the Office of Naval Research and Google.

cryptocoder 7y ago

This is great. It would be good if all life-critical software was open-sourced like this. Maybe something that should in fact be required? But, ”in turn, we receive support in taking our AI software to the next level of development” I bet they are mainly looking for help. They are trying to figure out why their software is not capable to do what it is supposed to, and hoping someone can assist. I’m ready to consult them on this if they are open to hear the bad news first...

smabie 7y ago
You’re saying I should be forced as a developer to share the code of everything I do? That sounds pretty despotic, tbh.
- cryptocoder 7y ago
  I agree. But that’s not what I meant to say: only for life-critical software (think autonomous vehicles, airplanes, medical robots and devices).
- kick 7y ago
  Why not? If a person perceives proprietary software to be harmful, as a lot of people do, then it only follows there should be laws against it. Or, alternatively, if they see it like they do speech, others should be able to decompile it, comment, and redistribute it without consequence.
adrianmonk 7y ago
> life-critical software The article could be clearer on this, but when it refers to "production", I think it means factories and logistics. (At least that's how I put together "production" in the headline with "implementing next-level production processes throughout its plants" from the first sentence.) In other words, I think they use these algorithms in manufacturing systems, and they aren't putting this software into the cars' computers.
- cryptocoder 7y ago

acro 7y ago

Here's a nice video of the YoloV3 (which these tools are using) in action from the author of YoloV3 (Joseph Redmon): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPU2HistivI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPU2HistivI

fock 7y ago

sorry for the negative vibes, but this looks a lot like some fake buzz to create some credible BMW-traineed profiles – none of the profiles linked with the project is older than 5 days...

ignoramceisblis 7y ago
At least on using the age of git/GitHub repos to determine the legitimacy of a project/effort: I would say it's not uncommon for some groups to time the release of their code with the publication of some announcement of it. I'd also say it's not unusual to adjust (for example, collapse) the git repo history when publishing code.

amelius 7y ago

I sure hope they don't let people's lives depend on the output of deep learning models.

cyorir 7y ago
Why not? Deep learning models are very promising for certain autonomous driving tasks. Take a look at this survey paper for examples: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.07738 https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.07738

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]