I just got back from Udacity's student conference. They showed a video of the Udacity self-driving car performing at Level 2 autonomy running code from Udacity students which I thought was very cool. They do have an in house engineering team driving what's probably a majority of the work, but the problems they discussed were discrete problem areas which I imagine scale well.

The company is apparently now a registered self-driving car manufacturer, in addition to being an education company.

Having a lot of smart people work in parallel is fun but it would be far more productive for all of them to work together.

Here is a crazy thought for these kind of contests, make the first round competitive and award to the winner team. Then make a second collaborative round where everyone who gets a pull request accepted gets invited to see the code in action.

We need the money to go towards helping create open source communities instead of reusing the competitive approach from academia.

"it would be far more productive for all of them to work together" -> not necessarily. It's not very common but there are examples of having multiple teams try to solve the same problem in parallel. It ends up speeding up development - they will come up with different approaches, and the best (or a combination) can be selected.

Evolution is a process of massive parallelisation.

It's somewhat effective.

I'm looking for someone to build a team with. The discussion forum isn't helpful, is anyone here interested?

Sounds like fun :) I can join the existing team, or send out an invite.

I'm located in Vancouver, Canada, have many years of C++/Python experience and been studying ML/DL as a hobby.

I'd be interested. I have a lot of programming experience, just started on machine learning. etc. My email is in my HN profile.

I am but then again all I have is a burning desire to learn about and build this stuff. I have no experience in it.

I'm also interested. I have few years of programming and ML/DL experience. Find mail on my profile.

I'm interested and happen to have some prior (largely hobbyist research) experience in the field

I am interested too. Please let me know how to get in touch.

I am interested too. How do we contact each other?

Interested too, email is on my profile

i'm interested too. always wanted to get into ML/self driving cars

I would also be interested

Where are you located?

i am interested. how to contact you offline?