DeepScale, Inc. was an American technology company headquartered in

Mountain View, California Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, it has a population of 82,376. Mountain View was integral to the early history and growth of Silicon Valley, and is th ...

, that developed

perceptual system A perceptual system is a computational system (biological or artificial) designed to make inferences about properties of a physical environment based on senses. Other definitions may exist. In this context, a scene is defined as information that c ...

technologies for

automated vehicle Vehicular automation involves the use of mechatronics, artificial intelligence, and multi-agent systems to assist the operator of a vehicle (car, aircraft, watercraft, or otherwise).Hu, J.; Bhowmick, P.; Lanzon, A.,Group Coordinated Control o ...

s. On October 1, 2019, the company was acquired by

Tesla, Inc. Tesla, Inc. ( or ) is an American multinational automotive and clean energy company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Tesla designs and manufactures electric vehicles (electric cars and electric truck, trucks), battery energy storage from ...

History

DeepScale was co-founded in 2015 by

Forrest Iandola Forrest N. Iandola is an American computer scientist. He earned a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2016, advised by Kurt Keutzer. As part of his dissertation he co-authored SqueezeNet, a deep neural network ...

and

Kurt Keutzer Kurt Keutzer (born November 9, 1955) is an American computer scientist. Early life and education Kurt Keutzer grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Maharishi University of Management (formerly Mar ...

. In 2018, DeepScale raised in

Series A funding A series A round (also known as series A financing or series A investment) is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exchan ...

. In 2018, the firm announced strategic partnerships with automotive suppliers including

Visteon Visteon Corporation (VC) is an American global automotive electronics supplier and Fortune 500 company spun off from the Ford Motor Company in 2000. Visteon is composed of multiple businesses that design, engineer, and manufacture vehicle cockpit ...

and Hella Aglaia Mobile Vision GmbH. On October 1, 2019, the firm was purchased by

Tesla Tesla most commonly refers to: * Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), a Serbian-American electrical engineer and inventor * Tesla, Inc., an American electric vehicle and clean energy company, formerly Tesla Motors, Inc. * Tesla (unit) (symbol: T), the SI-d ...

, which works on autonomous vehicle technology.

Technology

Prior to the founding of DeepScale, Forrest Iandola and Kurt Keutzer worked together at

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, on making

deep neural networks Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. ...

(DNNs) more efficient. In 2016, shortly after the founding of DeepScale, Iandola, Keutzer, and their collaborators released

SqueezeNet In computer vision, SqueezeNet is the name of a deep neural network for image classification that was released in 2016. SqueezeNet was developed by researchers at DeepScale, University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University. In designi ...

, which is a small and energy-efficient DNN for

computer vision Computer vision is an Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate t ...

. By developing smaller DNNs, the firm has been able to run deep learning on scaled-down processing hardware such as smartphones and automotive-grade chips. In 2018, the firm said that its engineering team had moved beyond SqueezeNet and that it had developed even faster and more accurate DNNs for use in commercial products.

Neural architecture search

In recent years,

neural architecture search Neural architecture search (NAS) is a technique for automating the design of artificial neural networks (ANN), a widely used model in the field of machine learning. NAS has been used to design networks that are on par or outperform hand-designed a ...

(NAS) has begun to outperform humans at designing DNNs that produce high-accuracy results while running fast. In 2019, DeepScale published a paper called SqueezeNAS, which used supernetwork-based NAS to design a family of fast and accurate DNNs for semantic segmentation of images. The paper claimed that the SqueezeNAS neural networks outperform the speed-accuracy tradeoff curve of Google's MobileNetV3 family of neural network models. While Google used thousands of GPU-days to search for the design of MobileNetV3, DeepScale used just tens of GPU-days to automatically design the DNNs presented in the SqueezeNAS paper.

Product

The firm develops perceptual system software which uses deep neural networks to enable cars to interpret their environment. The software is designed for integration into an open platform, where a wide range of sensors and

processors A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, an ...

can be used. The software is able to run on a variety of processors, ranging from

NVIDIA Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

GPUs A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mob ...

to smaller

ARM In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between t ...

-based processing chips that are designed specifically for the automotive market. In January 2019, the firm launched an automotive perception software product called "Carver" that uses deep neural networks to perform object detection, lane identification, and drivable area identification. To accomplish this, Carver uses three neural networks which run in parallel. While running in real-time, these three networks perform a total of 0.6 trillion operations per second ("tera-ops/sec"). As a point of reference, each of the two redundant chips on the Tesla Full Self-Driving computer system board can perform 36 tera-ops/sec. So 0.6 tera-ops/sec is only 2% of the capacity of each Tesla chip.

Acquisition by Tesla

On October 1, 2019, ''

CNBC CNBC (formerly Consumer News and Business Channel) is an American basic cable business news channel. It provides business news programming on weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., Eastern Time, while broadcasting talk sh ...

'' reported that

had purchased DeepScale. '' Fortune'' stated that "it's apparent that DeepScale's technology will be integrated into Tesla's

Autopilot An autopilot is a system used to control the path of an aircraft, marine craft or spacecraft without requiring constant manual control by a human operator. Autopilots do not replace human operators. Instead, the autopilot assists the operator' ...

, the self-driving technology the company is currently working on." Further, '' CNET'' reported that "DeepScale's approach to autonomy fits the bigger picture that esla CEO Elon

Musk Musk ( Persian: مشک, ''Mushk'') is a class of aromatic substances commonly used as base notes in perfumery. They include glandular secretions from animals such as the musk deer, numerous plants emitting similar fragrances, and artificial s ...

has promoted for a few years now. Rather than relying on

LiDAR Lidar (, also LIDAR, or LiDAR; sometimes LADAR) is a method for determining ranges (variable distance) by targeting an object or a surface with a laser and measuring the time for the reflected light to return to the receiver. It can also be ...

, Musk has consistently believed

camera A camera is an optical instrument that can capture an image. Most cameras can capture 2D images, with some more advanced models being able to capture 3D images. At a basic level, most cameras consist of sealed boxes (the camera body), with a ...

radar Radar is a detection system that uses radio waves to determine the distance ('' ranging''), angle, and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, w ...

and

ultrasonic Ultrasound is sound waves with frequencies higher than the upper audible limit of human hearing. Ultrasound is not different from "normal" (audible) sound in its physical properties, except that humans cannot hear it. This limit varies f ...

sensors will make up a robust system without other hardware."{{Cite web, url=https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-deepscale-autonomous-self-driving-tech/, title=Tesla reportedly buys machine-learning startup DeepScale for self-driving car tech, last=Szymkowski, first=Sean, date=2019-10-02, website=CNET, url-status=live, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191010054339/https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-deepscale-autonomous-self-driving-tech/ , archive-date=2019-10-10 , access-date=2019-11-10

References

Companies based in Mountain View, California Software companies based in California Technology companies of the United States Defunct software companies of the United States 2015 establishments in California