Israel: Cortica Will Apply 'Unsupervised Learning' AI Tech to Help Self-Driving Cars Get Smarter

Artificial intelligence specialist Cortica is launching an automotive division that will apply AI tech to self-driving cars. Cortica isn't the first company to try imbuing autonomous cars with AI, but its approach is different from most of the competition.

Cortica wants to use "unsupervised learning" to get self-driving cars to recognize the environment. For the record, "supervised learning" involves teaching an AI system to recognize something by showing it examples. To teach a self-driving car what a stop sign is, for example, developers could upload pictures of stop signs so the AI system has a reference.

Unsupervised learning throws out these examples. Instead, the system has to learn to recognize objects by looking at common characteristics. In theory, this should allow a self-driving car to recognize a stop sign by noting that it is red and has eight sides, without developers having to upload images of stop signs in every conceivable condition or configuration.