Ride sharing company Uber has been moving into the world of self-driving cars, autonomous operations, and AI for a while. It is now acquiring Geometric Intelligence, a company focusing upon Deep Learning and Machine Intelligence, that will provide the core for the newly announced Uber AI lab. The lab will be headed by Geometric Intelligence co-founders Gary Marcus and Zoubin Ghahramani, both well-known for their work in this area, and will have 15 founding members.

Uber has a vision of autonomous transportation that could have revolutionary implications for movement of people and things. Self-driving cars are the current focal point of today’s work on autonomy due to revolutionary implications and tremendous financial opportunities. They will affect every business model in the transportation industry, from personal travel to freight delivery, including fueling, routing, and optimization. There is also an almost desperate search for top-level talent as major transportation companies from Tesla to Toyota and data companies seek to crack the autonomy puzzle. Autonomy is difficult, but competition is accelerating its development.

Geometric’s four founders are Gary Marcus, Zoubin Ghahramani, Doug Bemis and Ken Stanley. According to the company web site, Gary Marcus is a scientist, bestselling author, and entrepreneur. His published works include The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science and The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought. He is also Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU.

Zoubin Ghahramani is a world leader in the field of machine learning and Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He is known in particular for fundamental contributions to probabilistic modeling and Bayesian nonparametric approaches to machine learning systems, and to the development of approximate variational inference algorithms for scalable learning.

Doug Bemis has served as CTO for several other startups, including Syntracts LLC and Windward Mark Interactive. Doug also received a PhD from NYU in neurolinguistics, for work using magnetoencephalography to investigate the neural bases of semantic composition. Subsequently, he worked with Stanislas Dehaene at Neurospin in France.

Ken Stanley is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida. He is a leader in neuroevolution (combining neural networks with evolutionary techniques), where he helped invent prominent algorithms such as NEAT, CPPNs, HyperNEAT, and novelty search. His ideas have also reached a broader audience through the recent popular science book, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective.

The Uber AI team seems well-balanced, and heavily weighted in Machine Learning through a variety of approaches. The stakes are high, and this bodes well for future advances in autonomy that will be of benefit across the AI and robotics areas. Although details of the Geometric approach are sketchy at this point, its model appears to focus upon combining a rules-based approach with machine intelligence inference. Such hybrid approaches could offer the best of all possible worlds.

According to the release from Uber’s Jeff Holden, “In spite of notable wins with machine learning in recent years, we are still very much in the early innings of machine intelligence. The formation of Uber AI Labs, to be directed by Geometric’s Founding CEO Gary Marcus, represents Uber’s commitment to advancing the state of the art, driven by our vision that moving people and things in the physical world can be radically faster, safer and accessible to all.”