Computer Vision News - November 2021

2 Summary Exclusive Interview 4 “We are actually going to change the world!” We last spoke to Raquel Urtasun four years ago when she had just started her first job in industry at Uber. Now, as the Founder and CEO of Waabi, she is at the forefront of the next generation of self-driving technology. The Entrepreneur just included Raquel among the 100 Women of Impact in 2021, and she has been starring for years now in our own inspiring group of 100 Women in Computer Vision. Waabi just raised a $100 million Series A initial funding. Raquel brings us up to date with what she’s up to and tells us what the future holds for her exciting new venture. Raquel, so much has changed since our last interview. Would you like to update our readers? Sure! We’ve seen meaningful progress inself-drivingover thepast twodecades since the DARPA Grand Challenge, but when it comes to commercial deployment, very little has changed. There are very small and very simple operational domains wherewe see self- driving vehicle testing, but it’s far from the promise of self-driving at the scale that is going to transform our lives. Ifyou think about why that is the case, why we don’t have this technology yet, in my expert opinion the main reason is