In a preprint paper, Uber researchers describe MultiNet, a system that detects and predicts the motions of obstacles from autonomous vehicle lidar data. From a report: They say that unlike existing models, MultiNet reasons about the uncertainty of the behavior and movement of cars, pedestrians, and cyclists using a model that infers detections and predictions and then refines those to generate potential trajectories. Anticipating the future states of obstacles is a challenging task, but it's key to preventing accidents on the road. Within the context of a self-driving vehicle, a perception system has to capture a range of trajectories other actors might take rather than a single likely trajectory. For example, an opposing vehicle approaching an intersection might continue driving straight or turn in front of an autonomous vehicle; in order to ensure safety, the self-driving vehicle needs to reason about these possibilities and adjust its behavior accordingly.

MultiNet takes as input lidar sensor data and high-definition maps of streets and jointly learns obstacle trajectories and trajectory uncertainties. For vehicles (but not pedestrians or cyclists), it then refines these by discarding the first-stage trajectory predictions and taking the inferred center of objects and objects' headings before normalizing them and feeding them through an algorithm to make final future trajectory and uncertainty predictions. To test MultiNet's performance, the researchers trained the system for a day on ATG4D, a data set containing sensor readings from 5,500 scenarios collected by Uber's autonomous vehicles across cities in North America using a roof-mounted lidar sensor. They report that MultiNet outperformed several baselines by a significant margin on all three obstacle types (vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists) in terms of prediction accuracies. Concretely, modeling uncertainty led to improvements of 9% to 13%, and it allowed for reasoning about the inherent noise of future traffic movement.

Hot on the heels of Uber scrapping thousands of e-bikes and e-scooters, Bird is taking similar action. The micromobility company is reportedly disposing of thousands of e-scooters in the Middle East and shutting down its operations in the majority of the region as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. CNBC reports: The e-scooters being scrapped belong to Circ, which was acquired by Bird for an undisclosed sum in January. There are between 8,000 and 10,000 Circ scooters across cities in Qatar, Bahrain and United Arab Emirates, according to one former employee and one company source who asked to be kept anonymous as they've signed a confidentiality agreement. Bird is paying around $300,000 to have all of Circ's scooters in the Middle East scrapped, the former employee told CNBC.

Bird said it has "temporarily paused operations" in the Middle East because of the hot weather, adding that it is using the break to "recycle" some vehicles. Bird will continue to operate its own scooters in Tel Aviv. "During this pause, we are taking the opportunity to responsibly recycle parts of the old Circ fleet that were previously used in the region," a Bird spokesperson said. "Following extreme wear and tear, the Circ vehicles no longer met our rigorous quality standards. Selling or re-use of these vehicles would potentially result in safety and reliability issues, which would not have been fair or ethical to the purchasers or potential riders. We look forward to resuming our service throughout more parts of the region later this year."

The coronavirus is helping to erode the hype around artificial intelligence; data scientists get the axe and some 'old-fashioned' solutions work better. From a report: When SharpestMinds, a startup that sells mentoring services to data scientists, surveyed its alumni in April and again in May, it found that 6% of respondents had been affected by furloughs, pay cuts or layoffs. That's a drop on the ocean compared to the enormous layoffs in, say, the restaurant business, but it's notable because these jobs are generally thought to be business-critical roles requiring high-demand specialized skill sets. Uber recently shut down its AI research lab, and Airbnb's layoffs included at least 29 full-time data scientists, according to its directory of those let go.

The pain for data scientists will likely increase as companies rethink how they spend, predicts SharpestMinds founder Edouard Harris. Hiring for such roles has slowed significantly, down by 50% since before the pandemic, he adds. On the other hand, that means there's still demand, though it's diminished. What's happening is not so much a reckoning as a "rationalization" of the application of AI in businesses, says Rajeev Sharma, head of enterprise AI at Pactera Edge, a technology-consulting firm. "[Companies] feel this is a time they can get rid of extra hires or lower performers who are not a good cultural fit," he adds.

An anonymous reader shares an analysis: Since the pandemic started, there's been approximately 61,260 tech layoffs. Close to 30% of the layoffs came from public tech companies, 85% of those companies are unprofitable. No deep insights here, just the simple fact that the once growth hyper focused startups grew to be publicly traded companies without ever sorting their unit economics, and now their mediocracy has real consequences on real people. This includes household names such as Uber, Lyft, Casper, and Eventbrite which we've all used, and raises the question: why did we allow so many unprofitable companies IPO? When did losing money become acceptable and the new normal for publicly traded companies? Chamath Palihapitiya's "VC Ponzi Scheme" monologue comes to mind.

Food delivery services like Grubhub should be thriving, especially during the pandemic. But they're not, The Markup reports: In August 2019, analysts from the investment firm Cowen estimated that Uber Eats was losing $3.36 on every order and would continue to lose money on every order for the next five years. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi acknowledged that Uber Eats is not yet profitable in an email to employees in March after its parent company laid off more than 3,700 employees.... In early March, DoorDash filed to go public despite losing an estimated $450 million in 2019, according to The New York Times. DoorDash declined to comment on that estimate or its path to profitability, but regarding the latter CEO Tony Xu told Fortune in February that "we're working our way there...."

Meanwhile, other companies have been ditching the food delivery business: Yelp sold Eat24 to Grubhub, Square sold Caviar to DoorDash, and Amazon shut down its Amazon Restaurants delivery service.

Grubhub, which also owns Seamless, is publicly traded and the only one of the big four that has achieved profitability. Still, it lost more than a third of its value after revenue fell below investors' expectations in the third quarter of 2019. In a letter to shareholders, the company revealed two things: Customers were "promiscuous," or not loyal to the Grubhub platform, and the delivery part of the business was fundamentally not profitable. Instead, delivery was just a "means to an end" — getting restaurants to sign up on the Grubhub platform and then upselling them on "marketing" benefits, like greater visibility in Grubhub's search results. In other words, like many tech companies, GrubHub is primarily an advertising company.

"Bottom line is that you need to pay someone enough money to drive to the restaurant, pick up food and drive it to a diner. . . ," the company wrote. "At some point, delivery drones and robots may reduce the cost of fulfillment, but it will be a long time before the capital costs and ongoing operating expenses are less than the cost of paying someone for 30-45 minutes of their time."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Uber is destroying thousands of electric bikes and scooters, after selling its Jump business to Lime. Videos of its red bikes being crushed at a recycling centre were shared on social media, angering cycling advocates. Uber said it had decided to destroy thousands of its older-model vehicles due to maintenance, liability and safety concerns.

In 2018, Uber said it would focus more on its electric bike and scooter business than on cars. But on May 7 this year, Uber announced a deal that saw Lime take over the Jump bike business. As part of the deal, Uber invested $170 million in Lime, while Lime acquired "tens of thousands" of Uber's Jump bikes -- and the associated intellectual property. Lime's chief executive Wayne Ting has said he prefers the design of Uber's bikes and will deploy more of them in the future. However, there were also "tens of thousands" of older-model bikes that Lime did not inherit as part of the deal. Videos shared on Twitter show the bikes arriving at a recycling facility in North Carolina to be destroyed. "We explored donating the remaining, older-model bikes," Uber said in a statement. "But given many significant issues -- including maintenance, liability, safety concerns, and a lack of consumer-grade charging equipment -- we decided the best approach was to responsibly recycle them."

The decision to destroy these bikes comes amid a national bike shortage. "We have never seen anything like this in a very long time," said Dave Nghiem at College Park Bicycles in College Park, MD. "We have never locked down half the planet like this so they can't do their jobs to build bikes. So, no one has been building bikes for three months. If no one is building bikes, there's no bikes on the continent," said Dave.

Kurt of Bike Share Museum seems to think it is all about killing Jump, "destroying every bike they can, and slowly taking Lime down in the process." He adds: "We also can't emphasize enough how disgusting it is for UBER to scrap 20,000 bicycles in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic where bicycles have literally become an object of survival. Heavy as they are, these could be transportation for the many who have been brought to financial ruin during COVID-19."

Amazon is joining India's online food delivery market just as top local players Swiggy and Zomato reduce their workforce to steer through the coronavirus pandemic and months after Uber Eats' exit from the nation. From a report: The e-commerce giant, which has invested more than $6.5 billion in India, today launched its food delivery service, called Amazon Food, in select parts of Bangalore. The company had originally planned to launch the service in India last year, which it then moved to March but pushed it further amid the nationwide stay-at-home order the Indian government issued in late March. In the run up to the launch, the e-commerce giant began testing the food delivery service with select restaurant partners in Bangalore with employees earlier this year, TechCrunch reported in late February. "Customers have been telling us for some time that they would like to order prepared meals on Amazon in addition to shopping for all other essentials. This is particularly relevant in present times as they stay home safe," an Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Robotaxis have a real public image problem, according to new survey data collected by an industry group. Partners for Automated Vehicle Education surveyed 1,200 Americans earlier this year and found that 48 percent of Americans say they would "never get in a taxi or ride-share vehicle that was being driven autonomously." And slightly more Americans -- 20 percent versus 18 percent -- think autonomous vehicles will never be safe compared to those who say they'd put their names down on a waiting list to get a ride in an autonomous vehicle.

PAVE says its data doesn't reflect skepticism or fear based on the killing of a pedestrian by one of Uber's autonomous vehicles, nor the series of drivers killed while using Tesla's Autopilot. In fact, those events don't even register with much of the population. Fifty-one percent said they knew nothing at all about the death of Elaine Herzberg in Arizona, and a further 37 percent only knew a little about the Uber death. Similar numbers said they knew nothing at all (49 percent) or very little (38 percent) about Tesla Autopilot deaths. But those who reported knowing a lot about the deaths were more likely to tell the survey they thought autonomous vehicles were safe now. According to the survey data, getting a ride in a robotaxi might change some of those minds. Three in five said that they'd have more trust in autonomous vehicles if they had a better understanding of how those vehicles worked, and 58 percent said that firsthand experience -- i.e. going for a ride in a self-driving car -- would make them trust the technology more. "Of the 1,200 survey respondents, 678 reported owning an [advanced driver assistance system] ADAS-equipped vehicle, and three-quarters of them said they 'will feel safer on the road when I know that most other vehicles have enhanced safety features,' with the same number saying they are eager to see what new safety features will be on their next vehicle," the report adds.

"Interestingly, drivers who own cars with forward collision warning (FCW), blind spot monitoring (BSM), lane departure warning (LDW), and automatic emergency braking (AEB) were also more likely to believe that safe autonomous vehicles would be available within the next 10 years compared to those without those features."

SoftBank Group said its Vision Fund business lost 1.9 trillion yen ($17.7 billion) last fiscal year after writing down the value of investments, including WeWork and Uber. From a report: The company posted an overall operating loss of 1.36 trillion yen in the 12 months ended March and a net loss of 961.6 billion yen, according to a statement on Monday. The Tokyo-based conglomerate released figures in two preliminary earnings statements last month. The losses are the worst ever in the company's 39-year history. SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son's $100 billion Vision Fund went from the group's main contributor to profit a year ago to its biggest drag on earnings. Uber's disappointing public debut last May was followed by the implosion of WeWork in September and its subsequent rescue by SoftBank. Now Son is struggling with the impact of the coronavirus on the portfolio of startups weighted heavily toward the sharing economy. 50 of the Vision Fund's 88 portfolio companies had a cut in valuation in the 12 months to March 31, 2020, said Son, adding that 15 could soon file for bankruptcy.

Uber is cutting several thousand additional jobs [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], closing more than three dozen offices and re-evaluating big bets in areas ranging from freight to self-driving technology as Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi attempts to steer the ride-hailing giant through the coronavirus pandemic. From a report: Mr. Khosrowshahi announced the plans in an email to staff Monday, less than two weeks after the company said it would eliminate about 3,700 jobs and planned to save more than $1 billion in fixed costs. Monday's decision to close 45 offices and lay off some additional 3,000 people means Uber is shedding roughly a quarter of its workforce in under a month. Drivers aren't classified as employees, so they aren't included. Stay-at-home orders have ravaged Uber's core ride-hailing business, which accounted for three-quarters of the company's revenue before the pandemic struck. Uber's rides business was down 80% year-over-year in April.

Uber is launching a new set of safety features in its app, including a tool that checks if drivers are wearing face masks before starting trips. From a report: The move is an attempt by the firm to restore momentum in its core ride-hailing business as countries look to gradually start lifting their coronavirus lockdown restrictions. Starting Monday, drivers and riders will be required to wear face masks and coverings in an effort to stop the spread of the disease. But unlike riders, drivers will now be required to verify that they're wearing face masks by taking a selfie before accepting a booking. Riders will also be required to sit in the back seat.

The San Francisco-based company, which has been heavily affected by shelter-in-place measures worldwide, will also invest $50 million to distribute supplies such as masks, hand sanitizer and disinfectant to drivers and couriers. Uber is partnering with Clorox in the U.S. and Unilever in Europe to provide the supplies. "Keeping everyone safe means that everyone must take proper precautions, not only to protect yourselves, but to protect your driver and protect the next person who may be getting into the car after," Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told reporters Wednesday over a Zoom call.

phalse phace shares a report from The Wall Street Journal: Uber is seeking to acquire Grubhub in an all-stock deal that would unite two of the biggest players in meal delivery at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has sparked a surge in demand for their services. Uber, which in addition to its flagship ride business operates a big meal-delivery unit known as Uber Eats, earlier this year approached Grubhub with a takeover offer and the companies continue to discuss a possible combination, according to people familiar with the matter. Grubhub recently proposed a deal in which its shareholders would receive 2.15 Uber shares for each Grubhub share, some of the people said.

Uber lost $2.9 billion in the first quarter as its overseas investments were hammered by the coronavirus pandemic, but the company is looking to its growing food delivery business and aggressive cost-cutting to ease the pain. Tech Xplore reports: The ride-hailing giant said Thursday it is offloading Jump, its bike and scooter business, to Lime, a company in which it is investing $85 million. Jump had been losing about $60 million a quarter. "While our Rides business has been hit hard by the ongoing pandemic, we have taken quick action to preserve the strength of our balance sheet, focus additional resources on Uber Eats, and prepare us for any recovery scenario," said CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in a statement. "Along with the surge in food delivery, we are encouraged by the early signs we are seeing in markets that are beginning to open back up."

On Wednesday, San Francisco-based Uber said it was cutting 3,700 full-time workers, or about 14% of its workforce, as people avoiding contagion either stay indoors or try to limit contact with others. Its main U.S. rival Lyft announced last month it would lay off 982 people, or 17% of its workforce because of plummeting demand. Careem, Uber's subsidiary in the Middle East, cut its workforce by 31%. Uber brought in $3.54 billion in revenue in the first quarter, up 14% from the same time last year. Revenue in its Eats meal delivery business grew 53% as customers shuttered at home opted to order in. Gross bookings grew 8% to $15.8 billion, with 54% growth in the food delivery business and a 3% decline in rides, on a constant currency basis. The report adds that rides were down 80% globally during the month of April. "But rides have been increasing for the past three weeks and bookings in large cities across Georgia and Texas, two states that started re-opening, are up 43% and 50% respectively from their lowest points," the report says.

Lots of developers really want to learn Go, a programming language for large systems created by Google, meanwhile most developers are sick of attending meetings, and most of those working at multinational corporations aren't happy there. From a report: That's according to the results of a survey of over 16,655 developers from 76 countries carried out by HackerEarth, a company with offices in India and San Francisco that provides tools for recruiters to remotely assess developer coding skills. Go comes out top of the languages most developers want to know. The survey finds that 32% of experienced developers pick Go as the programming language they want to learn, well ahead of Python, which 24% say they want to learn. The desire for learning Go lines up with the results of a similar survey by remote developer hiring firm HackerRank. Go is used at Google, Netflix, American Express, Salesforce, IBM, Target, Twitch, Twitter, Uber, and Dropbox.

The coronavirus pandemic has gutted the so-called sharing economy. Its most valuable companies, which started the year by promising that they would soon become profitable, now say consumer demand has all but vanished. It is not likely to return anytime soon. From a report: In earnings reports this week, Uber and Lyft disclosed the depth of the financial damage. The companies said their ride-hailing businesses all but collapsed in March, the last month of the first quarter, as shelter-in-place orders spread through Europe and the United States. The red ink extends beyond ride hailing. The home-sharing company Airbnb, which investors valued at $31 billion, had planned to go public this year. Instead, the company has slashed costs and raised emergency funding, and on Tuesday it laid off 1,900 employees, about 25 percent of its staff. It also reduced its revenue forecast for this year to half of what it brought in last year. "While we know Airbnb's business will fully recover, the changes it will undergo are not temporary or short-lived," Brian Chesky, Airbnb's chief executive, wrote in a memo to employees.

In an SEC filing dating back to last week, Uber disclosed plans to layoff 3,700 employees. The figure amounts to around 14% percent of the ride hailing giant's total workforce. From a report: In the document, the company states that the job loss is part of a planned reduction in operating expenses, "in response to the economic challenges and uncertainty resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the company's business." While Uber hasn't suspended operations altogether amid widespread shutdown, the company has no doubt taken a massive hit to its bottom line, as state governments have issued stay at home orders for non-essential workers. In a letter to staff, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi noted that the cuts will come from from community operations and recruiting. Uber will also be closing around 40 percent of its Greenlight locations -- used for in-person driver assistance.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra along with city attorneys from Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco filed a lawsuit asserting Uber and Lyft gain an unfair and unlawful competitive advantage by misclassifying workers as independent contractors. From a report: The suit argues Uber and Lyft are depriving workers of the right to minimum wage, overtime, access to paid sick leave, disability insurance and unemployment insurance. The lawsuit, filed in the Superior Court of San Francisco, seeks $2,500 in penalties for each violation under the California Unfair Competition Law, and another $2,500 for violations against senior citizens or people with disabilities. "The companies, we believe and argue are shirking their obligation to their workforce," Becerra said in a call today. By shirking those obligations, Becerra said, Uber and Lyft are shifting those costs to California taxpayers. "American taxpayers end up having to help carry the load that Uber and Lyft don't want to accept," Becerra said. "These companies will take the workers' labor, but they won't accept the worker protections." This lawsuit comes after Uber and Lyft have spent millions of dollars to try to combat California law AB 5, which makes it harder for tech companies to classify workers as independent contractors.

Less than 24 hours after it was reported that Uber was considering layoffs of 20% of staff, its big rival Lyft said it would be reducing its staff by 17%, working out to 982 employees, and furloughing an additional 288, due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. TechCrunch reports: It also will put in place salary reductions of 30% for executive leadership, 20% for vice presidents and 10% for all other employees, while members of Lyft's board of directors will forego 30% of their cash compensation for the second quarter of 2020. Lyft said that it will take a restructuring charge of between $28 million and $36 million as a result, which will come through in its Q2 financials. Transportation has been hit in a particularly tough way, in part because people are not moving around as much due to stay-at-home orders; and in part because of the worries of infection that people have around driving in vehicles in close quarters where others have been.

The Lyft layoffs are only a part of the labor discussion. Drivers for Lyft (and other ride-hailing platforms around the globe) are likely seeing similarly reduced incomes. If demand is high, drivers can profit through increased platform spend. If Lyft is cutting staff, it's easy to presume that platform spend (GMV) is sharply down. This is expected, given the company's withdrawn 2020 guidance, but worth considering from the perspective of the self-employed driver with a car note to cover. Lyft has promised $6.5 million in "initiatives that support drivers and vulnerable communities" impacted by COVID-19, and Uber has made efforts to support some drivers during the pandemic. Both companies have also publicly discussed how their platform might help during the crisis, with Uber looking into delivering medications and Lyft working on delivery efforts for support orgs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Uber argued in a recent court filing that former employee Anthony Levandowski committed fraud, an action that frees the company from any obligation to pay his legal bills, including a judgment ordering the star engineer to pay Google $179 million. Uber's fraud claim was part of its response to Levandowski's motion to compel the ride-hailing company into arbitration in the hopes that his former employee will have to shoulder the cost of the $179 million judgment against him. The motion to compel arbitration, and now Uber's response, is part of Levandowski's bankruptcy proceedings. It's the latest chapter in a legal saga that has entangled Uber and Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that is now a business under Alphabet.

In this latest court filing, Uber has agreed to arbitration. However, Uber also pushed back against Levandowski's primary aim to force the company to stand by an indemnity agreement. Uber signed an indemnity agreement in 2016 when it acquired Levandowski's self-driving truck startup Otto. Under the agreement, Uber said it would indemnify -- or compensate -- Levandowski against claims brought by his former employer, Google. Uber said it rescinded the indemnification agreement several months prior to the inception of Levandowski's bankruptcy case "because it was procured by his fraud," according to the court filing. Uber revoked the indemnification agreement after Levandowski was indicted by a federal grand jury with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets while working at Google, where he was an engineer and one of the founding members of the group that worked on Google's self-driving car project.

Uber withdrew its financial guidance for 2020 and said it will write down about $2 billion in investments after the coronavirus pandemic upended the ride-hailing business. From a report: The San Francisco-based company said the writedown of its minority investments will range from $1.9 billion to $2.2 billion. Uber holds shares in various ride-hailing and food delivery businesses around the world. The company valued holdings in China's Didi Chuxing and Southeast Asia's Grab at a combined $10.3 billion at the end of last year. It didn't identify which investments were driving the charge. A financial assistance program created by the company for drivers and delivery people coping with the effects of the virus will have a marginal impact on revenue. The result will be a $17 million to $22 million reduction in the first quarter and $60 million to $80 million in the second, Uber said. Shares rose as much as 8.5% in extended trading after Uber's statement Thursday.