It's a common Silicon Valley story: a young person reads science-fiction novels or watches some movies that feature robots and decides to make futuristic technology their life's work.Shilpa Gulati leads the Behavior Prediction Team at Waymo and has worked on NASA projects as well as at Apple and self-driving startup Nuro, and she holds a doctorate in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas, Austin.
originally published in the 1950s. Students of both Asimov and robots know that the extensive series contains Asimov's now-famous"Three Laws of Robotics," which have actually shaped contemporary thinking about machine intelligence as it transitions from fantasy to reality.Asimov's books also featured something that would entrance a 12-year-old Gulati:"positronic brains," as Asimov termed them .
After starting out at an aerospace company, Gulati joined Bosch in the early 2010s. She later moved on to Apple, leading an autonomous-systems team, and then to Nuro. Behavior prediction is a challenging area, particularly as Waymo begins to commercialize its service, beginning in the Phoenix area withWaymo's autonomous"driver" — a combination of software programming and hardware sensors and radars — has racked up millions of miles in real-world testing and billions in simulations. The driver can operate in a sophisticated rendering of reality. But it can't predict everything that will happen on the road.