Alibaba confirms development of driverless vehicle technologies

Gasgoo (Shanghai)- According to local media, Chinese e-commerce titan Alibaba is researching and developing L4 (and higher level) driverless vehicle technologies. Meanwhile, some vehicles (reportedly, the Lincoln MKZ refreshed models) have already been tested on roads and dozens of vehicles have been under development.

Alibaba has confirmed this news to local media. Besides, the company revealed that under the leadership of Professor Wang Gang, chief scientist of Ali A.I. Labs, the autonomous driving research is processing rapidly. Apart from that, no more information can be exposed.

In March 2017, Professor Wang Gang joined Ali A.I. Labs as chief scientist and is responsible for the R&D of machine learning, computer vision and natural language understanding (NLU). In 2016, he was awarded as one of MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35 in 2017 for his contribution in deep neural networks design.

In January this year, Alibaba’s iDST (Institute of Data Science and Technologies) took the championship in pedestrian detection, which also refreshed its ranking in KITTI, the global authoritative leaderboard in machine vision algorithm. Meanwhile, in a competition raised by the renowned dataset of pedestrian re-identification the Market1501, Alibaba ranked No.1 worldwide with its first-target hit rate up to 96.17%.

In September last year, Alibaba officially announced that its operation system YunOS would be upgraded into AliOS with driving scenarios as highlight.

Before that, Alibaba and SAIC Motor built a joint venture dubbed Banma to offer integral Intelligent-connected vehicle solutions to auto industry.

Alibaba also became one of major investors of Chinese EV startup Xpeng Motors whose founder and chairman were former president of Alibaba Mobile Business Group. Besides, the Internet giant also put investments in some AI companies, such as Face++ and SenseTime, and several AI chip providers like Cambricon and DeepPhi Tech.