Apple has not formally announced its automotive plans, but the company has just hired Jonathan Cohen. The move could be part of Apple’s growing ambitions in the development of autonomous cars, observers speculate.
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Before he joined Nvidia Cohen worked in the Hollywood feature film special effects industry, where he developed software for films including “The Cat in the Hat” and “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”. He received an Academy award for his efforts. Prior to his time at Nvidia, Cohen had a stint at Sony Pictures, working on simulation technology.
The deep learning research is centred on Nvidia’s CUDA Deep Neural Network (cuDNN), a GPU-accelerated library of primitives for deep neural networks. While many only associate Nvidia with phone and computer chips, the company has recently been entering the auto market, specifically in the form of autonomous vehicles.
Apple has hired the former director of deep learning for Nvidia, seemingly to work on the company’s self-driving auto project. That makes GPUs great for neural nets, which sort unstructured data like images. “Nvidia’s GPUs are being used to power auto-pilot systems in cars, so the implications are pretty clear”, Chris Nicholson, co-founder of deep learning startup Skymind.io, told Re/code.
Do you think Apple is really building an electric auto? Over the past year or so, Apple has shown other signs indicating that it’s aiming to grow its talent pool in the area of autonomous vehicles.
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Apple did not respond to our request for information about Cohen’s new role at the company.
