HN user

shitals

59 karma

SO: http://stackoverflow.com/users/207661/shitalshah Github: https://github.com/sytelus Microsoft Research: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/shitals/

Posts8
Comments26
View on HN

TLDR; The idea of the new system is to turn Apple’s existing network of iPhones into a massive crowdsourced location tracking system. Every active iPhone will continuously monitor for BLE beacon messages that might be coming from a lost device. When it picks up one of these signals, the participating phone tags the data with its own current GPS location; then it sends the whole package up to Apple’s servers.

TLDR; AirSim is simulation software built upon Unreal Engine 4 from Microsoft Research. It now includes car simulation and real city-like environment where you can test your self-driving algorithms. You can just download the binaries and start calling its Python APIs in minutes.

Want to work on AI + Robotics at Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA? Does Aerial robotics, Unreal engine, physics, building low level firmwares excites you? You will need to have demonstrable great C++ coding chops, passion for tinkering, ability to get into unknown areas fast and great CS algorithms design skills. Any experience with Unreal Engine, Unity, Physics engines, robotics, drones, firmwares, deep learning etc would be big plus as well. We have already shipped AirSim[1] and we are excited to take it to next level and advance state of the art in reinforcement learning among other things!

The position requires US work authorization and interviews would be in-person at Redmond, WA. Please send resumes at shitals@micro####.com.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/airsim

Want to work on AirSim [1] as contractor at Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA? Does AI, Aerial robotics and drones excites you? You will need to have demonstrable great C++ coding chops, passion for tinkering, ability to get in to unknown areas fast and great CS algorithms design skills. Any experience with Unreal Engine, Unity, Physics engines, robotics, drones, deep learning etc would be big plus as well. Send resumes at shitals@micro####.com.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/airsim

You are absolutely at the right place. We have gone to extra length to design our code so that vehicle specifics are abstracted away behind interfaces. Also things are easily switchable. For example, don't like our physics engine, bring your own! As mentioned in release notes, we are working on other vehicle types. However water based crafts are not on our radar. My guess would be that physics would be more expensive and less accurate in general for water based vehicles.

We are not officially supporting Mac yet, but contributions are welcome :). Our code is cross platform and given enough efforts, I think it can be made available on pretty much any platform. One thing to think about is GPU requirements. Even moderate environments in Unreal can easily require GPUs with at least 4GB RAM.

One of our major focus is to use AI in real world. A lot has been done in applying AI to video games but we are still taking baby steps in applying it in real world. The question that we want to answer is this: can we train and test algorithms in simulated world and then use them in real world? This is known as transfer learning problem and its a huge area of research where people are investigating, for example, how can we use 80% simulated data and 20% real world data? The games typically found on commercial market are created for entertainment purposes. For example, game creator might decide to cheat on physics to optimize performance and may configure things so its easy but not too easy. Our focus was rather to pursue good physics, sensor models, vehicle dynamics, hardware-in-loop and so on. Also, we wanted to make this project as open source. Most commercial products typically involve complex chain of 3rd party licenses that almost make it impossible for them to be open source.