Podcast appearances and mentions of urban challenge

Generative AI is making it possible to not only remove the human from the driver seat, but, in the world of trucking and freight, from the vehicle entirely.  This week on Generative Now, Lightspeed Partner and host Michael Mignano speaks with Chris Urmson, CEO and co-founder of Aurora Innovation, a company that makes software for autonomous vehicles with a focus on the trucking industry. Chris shares his journey from participating in the self-driving vehicle DARPA Grand Challenge early in his career, to leading the autonomous vehicle program at Google. Michael also talks with Chris about why Aurora focuses on the trucking and freight industry, the challenge of designing AI systems for self-driving technology, and how technological advancements in radar and LiDAR have helped make autonomous vehicles possible . Chris discusses his insights about developing AI systems to mimic human driving, and how he sees the future of autonomous vehicles for both trucking and personal cars. Chris Urmson is the co-founder and CEO of Aurora Innovation. Before co-founding Aurora, Chris led the development of Google's autonomous vehicle project (later known as Waymo) from 2009 to 2016. As a graduate student, he also led the Carnegie Mellon University team for the DARPA Grand and Urban Challenge as the Director of Technology, winning second and third place in 2005, and first place in 2007. Chris received his BEng in Computer Engineering from the University of Manitoba, and his Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon. Episode Chapters (00:00) Introduction (01:44) Chris Urmson's Early Work (04:43) Founding Aurora Innovation (06:25) Aurora's Focus on Freight and Trucking (09:32) The Challenges in Trucking (17:08) Advancements in Autonomous Vehicle Technology (25:01) Using AI to Enhance Safety in Autonomous Vehicles (27:06) Handling Complex Driving Scenarios (31:40) Addressing Maintenance and Fueling for an Autonomous Vehicle (36:36) Regulatory Considerations (45:47) Predictions for the Future of Autonomous Vehicles (48:57) Conclusion and Final Thoughts Stay in touch: www.lsvp.com X: https://twitter.com/lightspeedvp LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lightspeed-venture-partners/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lightspeedventurepartners/ Subscribe on your favorite podcast app: generativenow.co Email: generativenow@lsvp.com The content here does not constitute tax, legal, business or investment advice or an offer to provide such advice, should not be construed as advocating the purchase or sale of any security or investment or a recommendation of any company, and is not an offer, or solicitation of an offer, for the purchase or sale of any security or investment product. For more details please see lsvp.com/legal.

Join us as Dr. Nai Jia Lee, a Real Estate Futurist, and Stephen Oehme, a Sustainability Advocate, delve into the challenges and solutions for making cities more liveable in the face of growing urbanization and climate change. Discover the intricacies of urban liveability indexes and the future of city living.

In September 2015, leaders from around the world gathered in New York at the United Nations General Assembly and committed to an ambitious global agenda, setting forth seventeen “Sustainable Development Goals”, or SDGs, to be achieved by 2030. These goals, if accomplished, would mark incredible feats of human history. Unfortunately, the most recent report from the UN Economic and Social Council shows that the world is not on track to meet these targets by the 2030 deadline. This episode of the Oxford Policy Pod will dive into the progress and delays on the SDGs, and understand what it will take to reach these goals. We also explore how policymakers are using these voluntary international commitments to guide and prioritize work in practice, specifically in the context of developing urban areas.  https://www.sdglab.ch/en-team/edward-mishaud (Edward Mishaud), is a Senior Advisor and current acting Director with the https://www.sdglab.ch/ (SDG Lab) at UN Geneva. He has over 15 years of expertise across policy, donor relations, governance, advocacy, and communications, and has worked with several UN and other international organizations, such as the UN Development Programme, the World Health Organization, the Joint UN Programme on HIV and the Green Climate Fund.  https://www.ucl.ac.uk/urban-lab/research/research-projects/making-africa-urban/people/sylvia-croese (Dr. Sylvia Croese) is an urban sociologist who is a Senior Researcher at the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning at the School of Architecture and Planning of the University of the Witwatersrand and Research Associate with the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. She has conducted extensive research on urban planning, politics and governance through the lens of housing, land, urban infrastructure and mobility, with a particular focus on the localization of global urban development goals in African cities. She has published widely on this work in major international journals, as well as three co-edited books: Refractions of the National, the Popular and the Global in African Cities (African Minds, 2021), Reframing the Urban Challenge in Africa: Knowledge Co-production from the South (Routledge, 2021) and Localizing the Sustainable Development Goals in African cities (Springer, in press). Currently, her research examines the transcalar workings of developmental policy circuits as part of the ERC funded comparative research project Making Africa Urban: the transcalar politics of large-scale urban development. This episode was produced and hosted by Livey Beha, with support from Read Leask. Season 4 of the Oxford Policy Pod is executive produced by Livey Beha and Read Leask.  To learn more about the Sustainable Development Goals, check out: The SDG Lab: https://www.sdglab.ch/ (https://www.sdglab.ch/) Sustainable Development Goals and 2030 Agenda: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/ (https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/) UN SDG Progress Report https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/29858SG_SDG_Progress_Report_2022.pdf (https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/29858SG_SDG_Progress_Report_2022.pdf)  

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.This week, I spoke to Alex Davies, the author of the brand new book Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car. It's just out as of last week and is an enthralling read about the events that led us to the present-day state of the art of autonomous vehicles.I've been looking forward to this book since it was announced, and it doesn't disappoint: from the iconic if shambolic 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge to the legal battles that threatened to tear the industry apart, the creation of this tech could change the world. It's a great story.For the first time, I recorded one of these to be podcast-quality so you can actually listen to the interview up top. Let me know if you enjoy that, and maybe I'll do more of them!The book is Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car and can be found wherever books are sold, and Alex is on Twitter at @adavies47. This interview has been condensed and edited. Unless otherwise indicated, images are from DARPA. Podcast theme by J.T. Fales.Alex, you are the author of the brand new book, Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car. You cover all about transportation, you cover all about vehicles and you've also covered a lot about the technology that goes into them. There's been a lot of talk about driverless cars recently, you were talking about how this is a really long journey. How far back have we been working on driverless cars?I think the people first started talking about the driverless car right around the time people came up with the car itself. The car was a great invention for all sorts of reasons but one thing people noticed very quickly was that when you got rid of the horse, you got rid of the sentient being that would stop you from driving off a cliff or into a wall if you, the human driver, stopped paying attention. You see these stories from the ‘20s and ‘30s of people coming up with ways of remote-controlling cars using radio waves. And in the ‘50s, you start seeing programs from General Motors and RCA working on embedding electric strips into the road, which obviously didn't work for various reasons, that would help guide a car along the highway. You see examples from the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs in New York where GM is talking about, "oh, cars that will drive themselves and you'll have these things like air traffic controllers saying, okay, your car is clear to go into self-driving mode," or back then they would have used the word autonomous.Ford Pavilion, 1939 World's Fair, via Library of CongressSo, the idea itself is really old but technologically, I think you've got to date this work from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. That's when you first start seeing the technology that undergirds the way we think about building self-driving cars today, which is not by following any kind of radio path, nothing built into the infrastructure and the system, but the basic idea of giving the car the tools it needs to drive itself the way a human operates a car. You've got three basic buckets: one is you have to recreate a human's senses, so that's where you see things like cameras, radars, LiDAR sensors, giving the car the ability to see the world around it. You have to replace what a human's arms and legs do or hands and feet, really, and those are just kind of servo motors built into the car that give the car the ability to turn the steering wheel or pump the gas and brakes. And, actually, in today's cars, that's all done purely over software, it's not even really mechanical in there anymore. And then the last, the really tricky thing is how do you replace the human's brain? The step between the senses and actually carrying out the decisions you need to make.I start my story with the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge. I give a little bit of the history of the robotics and artificial intelligence research that happened before it. But for me, the Grand Challenge is really the starting point. DARPA is that really kooky arm of the Pentagon that is basically charged with making sure the U.S. government is never surprised on the technological front. It came out of the Soviets launching Sputnik, which really shocked the Americans to hell, and they're like, “okay, we need an arm of the military that's just going to do the kooky kind of far out stuff.” So DARPA, a lot of big hits — the internet, GPS, stealth bombers. Some not so great moments — DARPA was instrumental to the creation of Agent Orange. Whoops.Oops, yeah no, don't want to do that one.That one, not so nice.Look, they're not all hits, they're not all hits and that's okay. We are friends, we have been friends for a while now. I feel like you have told me the story of the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge many times, as this deeply formative event, not only for self-driving cars but also robotics and Silicon Valley and how government can work together on different things. Do you want to go into what went into creating this event and kind of what happened at it? Which I feel like is a very, very cool story that I imagine is a solid chunk of the book.It is a solid chunk of the book. It's also, personally, my favorite part of the book. To me, this is really the heart of the story. DARPA was tasked with helping the U.S. military develop autonomous vehicles and the basic thinking there was that vehicles were a way a lot of soldiers got hurt, especially in the early 2000s, as we were starting to get mired down in these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We wanted autonomous vehicles so soldiers didn't have to be in vehicles that were being hit by IEDs, so you could send cars by themselves on convoys and dangerous missions, and basically, it was to save the lives of the troops. DARPA had been funding all sorts of research into autonomous driving for decades by this point and the guy running it, DARPA director Tony Tether, was frustrated that he just wasn't seeing the kind of progress he wanted to see, it just felt like one internal research project after another.So, he said, “do you know what?” DARPA had, at the time, a relatively new power to give out prize money and he could give out up to a million dollars without needing congressional approval. So, he created a thing called the DARPA Grand Challenge with a $1 million first prize. It was a race for autonomous vehicles across the Mojave Desert in California. You would go from this real dusty little town called Barstow in the California Mojave Desert to just across the line to Primm, Nevada, which is a pretty sad town because it's the least driving you have to do from California to legally gamble in a casino. If you're like, “I don't have the energy to drive the extra 45 minutes to Las Vegas,” you go to Primm.Oh no.And so, Tether's original idea, very briefly, it was we're going to have the cars go from Los Angeles to the Las Vegas Strip and they'll go on the freeway. And the guy at DARPA who was actually in charge of putting on this race was like that is completely insane, you can't do any of that. These robots don't work, we don't even know what they're going to look like. So, they ended up doing it in the desert, which made more sense for the military application anyway when you think about what your driving in the Middle East would be like. But the key part of the challenge was that it was open to anybody, this was not just Lockheed Martin and Boeing and Carnegie Mellon University, the big contractors who had been doing this kind of work. Tony Tether just said, “anybody who can build a self-driving car, we'll bring them all to the desert and we'll do this big race.” And so, you see this wide range of characters who come into this.I think, foremost among them, interestingly, is Anthony Levandowski, who at the time is just about 23 years old. He's an graduate student at UC Berkeley and he decides he really wants to be in this because he loves robotics, even though he doesn't have a ton of robotics training. He's like, “I'm going to build a self-driving motorcycle.” So, that's his idea. You've got the big players like Carnegie Mellon and that's where Chris Urmson, who becomes Anthony Levandowski's great rival once they're both at Google years later, comes in. Chris Urmson is a big player, Carnegie Mellon is the robotics powerhouse in the world, probably the best roboticists in the world and have been doing tons and tons of self-driving research over the decades. They field this team as a powerhouse of a team and you've got this guy, Red Whittaker, who's the old roboticist there.This is amazing.I have been yelled at by Red Whittaker more times than I care to remember. Really!He's just very cantankerous, he's an ex Marine, he's now 70 years old, he's well over six feet, he's 250 pounds, the guy is built like a redwood and he's just always yelling. And he builds robots, someone pointed this out to me once, he builds robots that look like him, in a sense. They're always these enormous, hulking things and for the Grand Challenge, they built this Humvee. And Red Whittaker, someone told me, he has this penchant for saying really bombastic things that sound crazy and don't actually make any sense. So, he once told someone, this project, it's like a freight train, you've just got to grab on and it'll rip your arms off.It sounds terrible.When he told me this, it's like, what does that even mean? But he has this incredible talent for really developing young engineers. And Chris Urmson is among his many proteges who are now pushing this technology into the world.And so, you have this collection of wacky racers, gathering to win a million dollars from the Defense Department in the desert. And the first one is 2004, what happens at the first one?It is a disaster. The 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge is supposed to be a 142 mile race through the desert, 15 teams get out of a qualifying round and make it to the final round. If you looked at the qualifying round, vehicles were smoking and shaking or they couldn't even start at all or they were just driving into every last thing. And then the race in the desert itself, wasn't all that much better. It got off to a great start, Carnegie Mellon's Humvee, Sand Storm, was first off the line, it shoots off into the desert. So, it's doing okay, the first couple of vehicles get off the line okay. And then you get through the bottom half of the field and it becomes a comedy of errors. You've got one little bathtub shaped thing that goes up onto the tiny ridge just on the side of the trail where it's raised and flips over and lands upside down.You've got one that drives 50 yards out, does an inexplicable U-turn and drives back to the starting line. We've got one, one just veers off-road into barbed wire and then can't find it's way back. You've got this thing from OshKosh that's a 14 ton military truck, a six wheeled thing, it's lime green and it's got a tumbleweed, like a bush thing in front of it. And its detection system says, this is an unmovable obstacle, but then another tumbleweed shows up behind it and so, it just starts going forward and backward and forward and backward like Austin Powers, trying to turn around. And then, even Carnegie Mellon's vehicle, which is doing well and is seven miles into the race, it's going around a hairpin turn, it goes off the edge of the road a little bit and it gets hung up on this rock. It gets, basically, stranded like a whale on a beach. It's raised up to the point where its wheels can't get any traction anymore. The robot brain doesn't know this and it's just spinning its wheels, spinning its wheels at full speed until the rubber is on fire and smoke pouring off this thing. And DARPA has to show up from a helicopter. They hop out of the helicopter with the fire extinguishers, and it's a complete disaster.And the thing that DARPA had really hyped up, they're like, “this is the new innovation, we're going to save the lives of all these troops.” And so then, reporters come after Tony Tether and he meets them, he meets the reporters who are waiting at the end line, at the finish line, which is roughly — it's 142 mile race — 130 miles away from the closest car. The Outcome.Carnegie Mellon did the best, it went 7.4 miles. Anthony Levandowski's motorcycle makes it into the final round, mostly as a stunt. It did horribly in qualifying, but the DARPA guys are like, “this thing is so crazy, it really embodies the spirit of what we're trying to do, so let's just bring it to the race anyway.” It's not like it can win, its gas tank doesn't hold enough gas for it to go all the way to the finish line.So, Anthony brings it up to the starting line, hands it off to a DARPA guy who kind of holds his hand on it until it goes, motorcycles starts going, he takes his hand off and motorcycle instantly falls to the ground. Anthony had forgotten to turn on the stabilizing software system before it started.That will get you.And so, one of his lessons for the next year was make a checklist.The cool thing about this is that it's an utter fiasco, it's how you always tell it. But then everybody who was there for this fiasco, they stuck around and they went, in many ways, to kind of form the current self-driving industry. Do you want to talk about that seed, what it has turned into since?Yeah. So, very quickly, what's great about the Grand Challenge is that it brings all these people together, and it pits them against this problem that everyone had kind of dismissed as impossible. So, what happens is DARPA does the 2005 Grand Challenge 18 months later, and the 18 months really prove to be the difference in that teams that weren't ready at all for the Grand Challenge, for the original one, are ready 18 months later. They've learned much more about how this works. And so, the 2005 race is a huge success. Stanford, led by Sebastian Thrun, comes in first place, Carnegie Mellon second, five teams finish this big race through the desert. Then DARPA follows it up with the 2007 Urban Challenge, which pits the vehicles against a little mock city, where they have people driving around and all of a sudden they have to deal with traffic and stop signs and parking lots and all of this stuff.What you really get from the Urban Challenge is the sense that this technology seems, suddenly, very possible. And by 2007, this is a big media event, it's hosted by the guys who did MythBusters and Larry Page is there, and he shows up in his private plane full of Google execs, and it's like, look at this future of technology. About a year later, Larry Page wants to build self-driving cars. This is actually something he'd looked at as an undergraduate or a graduate student and then his thesis advisor said, “well, how about you focus on internet search instead?” And it worked out pretty well.It worked out okay, I think, right?I think he did fine, that's what I thought. He decided I want to get back to self-driving cars. He'd been at the Urban Challenge and been like, “I can see how far this technology has come,” so what he did was he went to Sebastian Thrun, who had led Stanford's team through the challenges and he was already working at Google, he was a big part of making Street View happen. Along with Anthony Levandowski, who Thrun had met through the challenges and he's like, “oh, this guy's nuts but he's really talented and he's a real go-getter.” So, he brings him on to help them do Street View and then Larry Page says, “okay, now build me a self-driving car.” Sebastian Thrun says, "okay, well I happen to know the 12 best people on the world at this technology, I met basically all of them through the DARPA challenges."He has this meeting at his chalet in Lake Tahoe, at the end of 2008. And he brings together a dozen people and it's Anthony Levandowski and it's Chris Urmson and then people like Bryan Salesky — names that are now really the top tier in self-driving cars. And he says, “Google is going to build a self-driving car, we're going to have something that looks a whole lot like a blank check and I want this team to be the one to do it.” And that becomes Project Chauffeur. They become this really secretive project within Google, they go forth over the next couple of years, and they make this incredible progress in self-driving cars. And this is the story of the second half of the book: how this team it comes together and then how they ultimately come apart because as soon as they have to start thinking about how to make a product, how to commercialize this technology and the reality of money and power within the team become real wedge issues.Within them, you see rivalries, especially between Urmson and Levandowski, who are fighting for control and fighting for the direction of the team. Ultimately, things kind of break apart and what you see over time is as people leave and as this technology starts to look a lot more real, everyone splinters off to do their own thing, and this was what I call Google self-driving diaspora. Chris Urmson leaves to start Aurora. Bryan Salesky leaves to start Argo. Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu leave to start Nuro, Don Burnette leaves to start Kodiak, and Anthony Levandowski, of course, leaves to start Otto, which is acquired by Uber, which is the genesis of the Uber-Waymo huge self-driving lawsuit.Considerable amount of litigation that I believe is ongoing to this day, yes.So, the litigation did end, fortunately for everyone but the lawyers, I think. Uber and Waymo ultimately settled and then, weirdly, about a year after that, the Department of Justice charged Levandowski with criminal trade secret theft to which he ultimately pled guilty, and a few months ago he was sentenced to 18 months in prison, but he will not start his sentence until the pandemic is over.So, it definitely seems that this is still very much seen as the start of something, and you have covered a lot of this industry. What's kind of the state of the art now and where are things kind of moving forward?Well, fortunately for the industry, all of these personal rivalries, I think, have largely cooled off. And I think the book is really a history of how this got started and how these people pulled this technology forward, and then kind of came apart at the seams. But now what you've got is something that looks a little bit like a mature industry. You have Waymo with its program in the Arizona suburbs of Phoenix, and it's starting to really take the safety drivers out of its cars in earnest. Cruise, which is also a focus of the book, which is part of GM and also backed by Honda, is moving to take the safety drivers out of its cars in San Francisco, a much more dynamic environment, as it moves to start a self-driving system there. Self-driving trucks are looking much more serious than ever before. Argo AI, which has partnered with Ford and Volkswagen, is moving towards starting a taxi service, a robo-taxi service in Miami.I talk about the Gartner hype cycle where, I think, from 2014 to 2017 or so, we were really at peak hype, totally inflated expectations where everyone said, “your kids will never have to learn how to drive.” Chris Urmson is saying, "my 12 year old son will never have to learn to drive a car," and I'm pretty sure the kid's got his learner's permit by now. Those inflated expectations burst a little bit as people realize just how hard this technology is. But I think where we are now, on that Gartner hype cycle, is on what's called the slope of enlightenment, where people are getting more serious. Even if they haven't cracked the problem yet, I think they have a really good sense of what it takes to crack the problem, which, it turns out, is a lot of time, an incredible amount of money and at least 1,000 very talented engineers.Whole lot of lasers, a very sympathetic governmental oversight structure in a suburb of Phoenix. We have the ingredients for the solution, right?We could make it work. And so, I'm still optimistic about it, I still think the technology can do a lot of good. I think what people are figuring out is how to right-size this technology. People are figuring out how to actually apply self-driving cars in a realistic way, and I think the cooler projects out there are companies that are working on making self-driving shuttle cars for senior living communities, these big areas in Arizona and Florida, they cover 1,000 acres and people need to get around but can't necessarily drive anymore. And where the driving environment is pretty calm, that's a great use case. The trick right now is to figure out where you can make the technology work, and then the next question will be where can you actually make money off of this? That one I'm less bullish on because the economics of this, I think, are going to be pretty tough to crack.I mean, we're closing in on the end of this one, but DARPA seeded a little bit of the initial funds, it seems, for a lot of this research. Is that still an application that people are looking into or getting folks off the road in places that are dangerous?The army is still working on that, and I think those projects are still ongoing. But the initial push for DARPA was a line in a congressional funding bill from the end of 2000, it was one of the last things Clinton signed into law. And it mandated that by 2015, one-third of all ground vehicles, I think it was military, be unmanned, which was completely insane.How did we do? What's the number?I mean, maybe we've got three vehicles. That stuff hasn't panned out so much. But my favorite thing, one of the first people I managed to track down for this book was the guy, the congressional staffer who got that line into the bill. And I told him, I was like, "oh, I'm researching this and I would just want to ask you about why you put that in there and what your thinking was." And he goes, "Oh, did something come of that?"That's amazing.I was like, “yeah, I don't know, an industry that's predicted to be worth $7 trillion.”And what also came of it is Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car by Alex Davies. Alex, where can people find the book? You can find this book, basically, anywhere online, it's available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, your regular booksellers. It's out in hardcover January 5. You can also get the audiobook, you can get it on Kindle. Get it however you like, I just hope you enjoy it.My Twitter handle is @adavies47. You can find some of my work on Business Insider, where I'm the senior editor for our transportation desk.Ah, excellent website, very, very good website. If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips, or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Get full access to Numlock News at www.numlock.com/subscribe

For the last thirty-four years, Allen Roth has lived in Brooklyn, New York. He shares his vision for living in the city as a strategic help to evangelism. Allen says, “You can’t catch fish if there ain’t none; you gotta go where they are.” Find “No Little Places: The Untapped Potential of the Small-Town Church”: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1005440.No_Little_Places Visit Sattler College’s website: https://www.sattlercollege.org/ This is the 82nd episode of Anabaptist Perspectives, a podcast, blog, and YouTube channel that examines various aspects of conservative Anabaptist life and thought. Read the blog: https://www.anabaptistperspectives.org/ Visit our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/anabaptistperspectives/ Connect with us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/anabaptistperspectives/ Support us: https://www.patreon.com/anabaptistperspectives Music: "The Basket" and “Warm Fingers” by Blue Dot Sessions The views expressed by our guests are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Anabaptist Perspectives or Wellspring Mennonite Church.

If you know anything about autonomous drive technology, you probably know the name Chris Urmson. From Carnegie Mellon's DARPA Grand and Urban Challenge teams to head of Google's Chauffeur program (now Waymo) and now as co-founder and CEO of Aurora, Urmson has been in the thick of AV development since its earliest days. He joins The Autonocast for the first time, recorded live as the annual CES party gathered steam, to discuss what he's learned at the forefront of this new technology and where he sees it going.

Has technology revolutionized our education system and job market for the good? Inspired by season 1 of The Strategerist podcast, The Strategerist After Hours brings together Bush Institute experts to discuss technology's influential role in our everyday lives. The Fast and Slow Worlds are Colliding- and We Need Leaders Lifelong Learning is the Way to Overcome Disruptive Economic Forces America's Urban Challenge  

In the wake of the 2007 Urban Challenge, several companies began to pour some serious money and effort into developing driverless car technology that could roll out onto real-world roads. From Google to Uber, we take a look at some of those projects. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

How did the 2007 Urban Challenge differ from the two earlier DARPA Grand Challenges? And how did that set the stage for where autonomous cars would go next? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

In this episode, Jim and Jan talk about the Urban Team Challenge: What it is, how it came about, how it’s different from other team builders, and the special type of people behind it. The goal is to sharpen your team’s ability to communicate, delegate appropriately, overcome adversity, and leverage strengths.     Key Takeaways [2:34] In our business and personal lives, most of us are on multiple teams, and several outlets where we are working both together and independently towards a common goal. The Urban Team Challenge targets skills that may be applied in any situation, whether it’s a manager leading employees, or CEO in charge of dozens of managers. [3:15] Jan recalls a podcast episode he listened to recently where a Jayne Poynter recalls her challenges from Living in Biosphere 2. First was running out of oxygen, but a close second was the interpersonal dynamics surrounding her. This demonstrates how important it is for those to work together efficiently in team dynamic. [6:11] At a recent Urban Team Challenge in Atlanta, they saw first hand how it can shift team members from an individual mindset, to one team working together for a common goal. [11:25] Both Jim and Jan recap their takeaways from the recent Urban Challenge. They feel the most important were the experience of effective communication in a time of chaos, reducing stress with good planning and adapting, cohesion between the front facing and behind the scenes parts within a team, and fully understanding standard operating procedures and expectations up front. [15:14] When team members get fatigued and taxed, it is important for them to speak up so another in the group can take the lead. It’s also important for the group to examine the implicit assumptions they make. For example, if there are two men in their 50’s standing outside a college bookstore, instead of going for the assumption that they should stand away from each other and act engaged in their cell phone, it actually might be better for their appearance of fitting in and acting “normal”, to stand and have a conversation together. [17:17] For a strong team dynamic and successful collaboration, trust is key.   Instagram: @WeStudyLeaders Facebook: @westudyleaders Twitter: @westudyleaders Website:  The Urban Team Challenge YouTube:  Urban Team Challenge Email:  info@theleadershippodcast.com   Quotable Quotes “In a chaotic situation, you need to depend on effective communication.” “It’s hard to create alignment, and most of us are conflict avoiders, and this is an exercise to bring that all out in a hurry.” “We create an understanding of what it is like to work as a team.” No one ever says, “We over communicated.” “Every team benefits from ground rules that can be adjusted along the mission.” “In order to have good communication, you need trust and open dialogue.”  

London’s housing market is under relentless pressure and homes are becoming ever more unaffordable, pricing out some of the key demographics that the city so desperately needs to keep growing.

Pastor Carol ministers in the Watts community of Los Angeles. She serves as senior pastor at Bethel Unspeakable Joy Church with a passion for winning souls and empowering disciples in the Kingdom of God. Pastor Carol received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Denver. Her postgraduate studies include Health Education, Recreation, Gerontology, Education Administration, and Speech Communication. She studied Missiology at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA. Pastor Carol serves as a trustee of Westmont College and Helping Hands, Inc. in Garden Grove, CA. Pastor Carol has served in various areas of ministry and taught in secondary schools. She has traveled extensively throughout the world sharing the love of Christ. Her life commitment is to win souls to God through Jesus Christ, empower disciples of Jesus, and send them to do likewise

Robot cars at the defense department's urban challenge. What goes into one, and how did they do?

Robot cars at the defense department's urban challenge. What goes into one, and how did they do?

In dieser Ausgabe gibt es Veranstaltungstipps, Links zu netten Webtools, ein bisschen Kurzweil, ein besseres PAINT und einen Erlebnisbericht von der Vorausscheidung zur Urban Challenge 07.