Alumnus Alex Kendall, co-founder and CEO of Wayve – a pioneer in Embodied AI for autonomous driving – returned to Cambridge recently to give a lecture as part of the Department of Engineering’s 150th anniversary celebrations.
It was during his PhD in Deep Learning, Computer Vision and Robotics, under the supervision of Professor Roberto Cipolla in the Machine Intelligence Laboratory, that the groundwork for what would become Wayve began to take shape.
Wayve has since raised more than $1 billion of funding from partners like SoftBank, Microsoft, Nvidia and Uber, and is focused on bringing the benefits of Embodied AI to autonomous mobility worldwide. Alex's research has won numerous awards including the BMVA and ELLIS prizes.
Embodied AI promises to bring the benefits of intelligent machines to the physical world to transform society with increased safety, sustainability and freedom. Autonomous driving will be the first large-scale application and brings the most complex engineering challenge of our era, spanning topics like robotics, simulation, safety and public acceptance.
You can catch up on Alex’s lecture titled The Road to Embodied AI, below, with an introduction by Professor Colm Durkan, Head of the Department of Engineering. Here Alex (Trinity College, 2014) shares his journey from PhD research at Cambridge to founding Wayve and deploying fleets of autonomous vehicles globally, to what we might expect to come next.
