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				Cars That Think Part 1 - Watch the Road Alan rides in a vehicle that recognizes road signs and hazards -- and warns the driver to slow down.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: ALDA: We're starting with a quick trip into the past, to a moment I remember vividly even though it was ten years ago. I was driving a van on a German autobahn, or rather-- and this was the point-- not driving. MAN: We're now speeding up. Right. ALDA: The road was the test track for what was then Daimler-Benz, and the van was a prototype of what Daimler researchers hoped would become a vehicle that could drive itself. In the windshield were cameras watching the lane markings in the road. So back here is the control area for the system. ALDA: While in the back was a huge rack of computers tracking those markings and steering the van. With these ten windows here we can actually follow the road: We know the radius of the road, where we are in the lane, and that lets us drive automatically. ALDA: A self-driving car would obviously have to do more than just track the road. I'll activate the system now by hitting the green button here. ALDA: It would also have to keep an eye on the other vehicles sharing it. Once we're up to speed I'll have Christoph pass us. Okay, Christoph, tu peux nous doubler. He will enter the road ahead of us here, the lane. We'll detect him. If he slows down, we'll slow down. If he speeds up, we'll speed up. What if there was an accident-- that we turn this corner and suddenly came upon an accident, there was a truck across both lanes? At the moment, we would probably not stop. We have work going on now. You could reach that control, the yellow, and you're in control. Yellow, okay. We have work going on where we look for more general, uh... obstacles, not only the back of vehicles, but also sides. So you're really going step by step with this now, aren't you? And as you get... as you solve those problems, then you get on to more complicated issues? Exactly, we're working our way up in complexity here, and we really have to be able to find all the obstacles on the road and there's an awful lot that could be out there, so it'll take a while. ALDA: We jump forward ten years until today and the company-- now DaimlerChrysler-- is still working on trying to identify all those things out there on the road, from errant balls... to preoccupied pedestrians. But today the goal of the research program has shifted radically. No longer do company engineers dream of cars that drive themselves. Just imagine the law suits if you could blame your car instead of yourself for an accident. Now with the knowledge that some 90% of accidents could be avoided if the driver had been warned in time of danger, DaimlerChrysler has turned its technology to spotting things the driver shouldn't miss, like stop signs. Do you think the car will recognize that stop sign? WOMAN: Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure. Well, let's go for it. Okay. ALDA: Driving the car on an empty airfield near Stuttgart in Germany is DaimlerChrysler engineer Gabi Breuel. BREUEL: The system itself brakes. ALDA: And you didn't put the brake on. I didn't... You kept your foot on the accelerator. Yeah, yeah. But we were sort of well into the intersection by the time the car stopped. No, it's just a tactile warning for the driver that he has to react. So if you feel the car stopping by itself, it's a good idea to take your foot off the accelerator. That's right. How does it see the stop sign? How does it see? We have stereo cameras because they allow us to determine the distance and the size of objects in front. How does the car recognize that what it sees is a stop sign? Ah, it's, uh... it's the shape. Yeah. And after it's got the shape of the sign, then the system is searching for the word "stop." What if it didn't have the word "stop" on there? Nothing happens. If you turned the stop sign around? Nothing will happen. Nothing will happen. We'll just go straight through? Hmm. It's not a gimmick. It could see the shape. But it couldn't... it didn't see the word. So it's got to get both the word and the shape? Both is necessary for... So if you were coming up to a billboard that said "stop smoking," it wouldn't stop the car? No. Okay. ALDA: In the first demonstration, the car had warned Gabi she'd missed the sign by braking briefly. But the system could also be set to do the stopping all by itself. ( car horn honking rapidly ) ALDA: So at a certain distance from the stop sign if you're going too fast... Too fast. And it says, "If this person hasn't stopped yet, they're not going to stop." That's when the car automatically stops. Mm-hmm. ALDA: But again, DaimlerChrysler doesn't want to be sued if your car, and not you, could be blamed for missing a stop sign. ( car horn gives long blast ) So cars you may one day be able to buy will alert you to your errors, not try to correct them. This will not be a system for the street, because our philosophy is that the ultimate responsibility for operating the car remains with the driver. ALDA: Stop signs aren't the only things DaimlerChrysler's engineers don't want you to miss. Aided by the sort of digital map you can download into your car's navigation system today, this car knows where traffic lights are located and keeps its eyes out for them. You want to know the status of the traffic light at all times, because you don't want to run a red light-- it's expensive, it's dangerous. So we're able to actually issue a warning to the driver when he's about to run a red light. So these cameras are turning now to see the light? Now that... it picks up a picture of the light from some distance, so they're pointed straight ahead, and then it just keeps tracking the lights. It's very similar to a human head basically. With a head, you look to the right when there's some stuff coming up. You look to the left, you look up. That makes it sure that we have green at that intersection. Now, what about if you're turning right? Do these cameras... can they look over there and see what you're turning into? Yeah, you can use prior knowledge from a digital map again, and you know there's an intersection coming up. The guys from the right side have the right of way so you just turn your camera already ahead of time. Because that's where you're expecting the danger from. Now, this is kind of... these cameras are kind of big and clumsy; it's kind of hard to see over them. What will you do when you're in a real car? In a real car we would actually take a much smaller active camera. You would put it up here so it's next to the rearview mirror and you would be able to hide it. ALDA: So ten years after I cavalierly took my hands off the wheel, a car that will drive itself remains an engineer's dream unlikely to become reality. But at least one of the technologies being pioneered back then has met the road: the lane-tracking assistant, already installed on many trucks in Germany to warn drivers that their rigs are straying, and now becoming available on some luxury car models in the United States. What makes drivers stray out of their lanes and what a thinking car might do about it is the subject of our next story.

				Cars That Think Part 2 - Hold the Phone! Alan 'drives' the Ford VIRTTEX simulator that researchers use to investigate how distractions like cell phone calls or drowsiness affect driver safety.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: All right, come on in. ALDA: I'm about to take a drive on a busy highway, a highway that's notorious, I'm told, for drivers straying out of their lanes. Come on around. And we have our model-T, flat-black Taurus. And you can go ahead and have a seat. It's set up as close to a normal Taurus as we can make it, so it has normal seat controls for your seat and adjustable pedals right here. So get yourself settled, buckle your seat belt and close your door when you're ready. Should I put on my glasses? And put on your glasses, just as you would normally drive. This feels okay. ALDA: My passenger on the drive is Jeff Greenberg, a researcher for the Ford Motor Company, who'll be passing judgment on my driving skills. The next thing we're going to have you do is have you put on the eye-tracker. This is basically a baseball cap. It's got just a Velcro adjustment here for your head. Slip that on-- it should slip on right over your glasses. And what we'd like you to do is try to adjust it so that your left eye is looking directly through that tilted piece of glass. ALDA: The eye-tracking device will allow Jeff to see where I'm looking as I drive along, not on an actual highway, of course, but on a virtual highway inside Ford's VIRTEXX driving simulator. Cameras monitor my every move as my virtual car speeds on its virtual way inside an enormous dome on stilts. GREENBERG: Just do a normal lane change to the left, just a normal, gentle lane change. ALDA: As I steer to the left I feel the car move to the left because while the road is virtual, the movement is not. And then when you're ready, just do a lane change back to the right. ALDA: Added to the realistic noise and vibration, the movement quickly convinces my brain that I'm driving for real, which is just what Jeff wants me to feel. GREENBERG: So go ahead and look at the rearview mirror for a moment and see if you can see what that car does. Yeah... yeah, it's erratic. When you see him stray out of his lane to the right, flash your turn signal to the right, If you see him go off to the left, flash your turn signal to the left. I would speed up and get out of his way. We're going to ask you to stay with him because there's more that's going to happen. Look at the Explorer in front of you and you'll see that there's an erratic driver in front of the Explorer. Right, you want me to... Yeah, same thing. When you're not doing anything else-- you're just driving like this, and you get used to it-- when we measure adults, we find that 97% of the time they identify those events if they are just driving. Three percent of the time they don't see them. Those numbers change if they become involved in doing other things. ALDA: No prize for guessing which other thing is the most likely one to make the numbers change. Go ahead and pick up your phone. Yeah... and make a call? Yeah. ALDA: I make the call, doing my best not to misdial while at the same time keeping an eye on what's happening in front... as well as behind. ( numbers beeping on keypad ) GREENBERG: That kind of a task takes a lot of visual attention. Yeah, it sure does. You did see quite a few of the events that were in front of you. There were things that were happening behind you that were very, very difficult to track. When we do that, for adults, for example, instead of missing three percent of the things that happen directly in front of them, they start to miss about 12% to 13% of the things in front of them, about a factor of four increase. ALDA: It sounds bad enough that adults missed four times as many potentially dangerous events when dialing a cell phone, but the real shocker came when the Ford researchers tested teenage drivers. GREENBERG: Some people have speculated that because of video games and familiarity with computers that young people are just better at multitasking than adults are. Is that what you found? Well, in fact, no. What we found was that when we did that same task that you just did, and where on average the miss rate for adults rises from three percent to 13%, for the teenagers it rose from three percent to 53%. Fifty... 53%? Half the time... half the time that that happened, they didn't see it. It comes down, as you might expect, to experience. If you look at the way that adults will do a task, they do much as you do-- they take the phone and they brought it to where they minimized the amount that they had to look away from it. They also break the task up into short bits-- no more than a second long-- so they're not looking away from the road. The teenagers dialed the phone much more quickly, sometimes almost twice as fast as this group of adults... Uh-huh, yeah. But they tend to do it without looking back to the road, and they do it because they seem to have an implicit assumption that the cars around them will behave themselves while they're off doing something else. Nothing will happen, don't worry. Nothing will happen-- that's right. That's the phrase that guides them. That's right, that's right. Whoa, the guy behind me's getting crazy. Yeah, he is. If you've ever been in traffic and you've had something like that happen in front of you, and you get that feeling that, "I don't think I'm going to be able to stop the car," and you get that knot in your stomach-- you don't have to have that experience very many times before you change the way that you behave in vehicles. And new drivers haven't had that experience, and they are very, very trusting of other... of other traffic. ALDA: American drivers spend something like a billion minutes a year talking on their cell phones. That's about 40% of all cell phone use. Research like Jeff Greenberg's has led several states to require drivers to use headsets or other hands-free devices in an attempt to minimize the driver distraction cell phones cause. But the Ford experiments, as well as several other studies, suggest that just taking the phone out of the driver's hand doesn't make the problem go away. When people used the hands-free system, they were generally better in being able to pay attention to what was happening, but there was an important exception, and that was incoming calls. When a call comes in, whether it comes in on a hands-free phone or a handheld phone, in our experiments, the drivers were just not able to answer the phone, find out who was calling them and why, and still pay attention to the things that were happening around them. Just before the call started, or as the call was starting, they didn't see the car veering out of the lane? The place where they seemed to be the most vulnerable was actually the point where they were conversing with the person to find out who it was that called. So the first thing that you might say, and the best thing that you might say to drivers right now is turn your cell phone off while you're in the car. Mm-hmm. But in the future it may be that cars are smart enough to know when the situation that you're driving in is demanding. We may know, for example, from sensors that are on the car, when you're in heavy traffic. We may know when you're approaching an intersection or in an intersection, or when you're in a curve, and if a call comes in during a time like that, we may decide, this is really a time it's most appropriate to send that call to voicemail and alert the driver later. ALDA: The Ford researchers have also used their VIRTEXX simulator to see how tiredness affects drivers. Volunteers were deprived of sleep and stimulants, then asked to drive on the virtual highway at night for three long, boring hours. Meanwhile, the eye-tracker watched out for droopy eyelids. Many of the drivers experienced long micro-sleeps. They averaged about two and a half seconds, which is a long way. At 70 miles an hour on the highway, that's close to the length of a football field with your eyes closed. ALDA: If the driver strayed out of his lane, the simulator was rigged to give him a warning-- the sound of a rumble strip... ( simulated rumbling ) or a horn and flashing lights... ( horn honks ) or a vibrating steering wheel. ( simulated dull vibration ) GREENBERG: We found a lot of feedback from our test participants that if they're not drowsy, they don't want a warning-- it's not helpful to them, it's really not going to provide them any benefit at all. On the other hand, when they were drowsy and it was really helping them, they were enormously grateful that it was there. So the key for us is to develop technology that's smart-- that adapts to the driver, that provides you the information when you need it and doesn't bother you when you don't. ALDA: This question of how best to keep a tired driver alert is one of the biggest challenges facing designers of cars that think, as we'll see in our next story. Meanwhile... ( groans ) I'm glad to be back on Earth.

				Cars That Think Part 3 - Smart Passenger A virtual smart passenger named Sally listens in to the driver's speech at all times and responds appropriately.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: ALDA: We're about to take a drive with Mahesh Viswanathan and his frequent traveling companion, Sally. Since this is an IBM parking lot, it should come as no surprise that Sally isn't a person but a computer-- or to use a favorite engineer's term, a system. Today most of the systems that you have in the car are what we call "command and control." You give an instruction, it performs an action. What we are trying to do is to build the next generation, the next to next generation, where the interaction is more pleasant and the system is much more helpful than it is today. So when... when I talk to the car now, the car will know what I mean, what I want? When you talk to the car, it will not only know what you want, it will also try to anticipate your needs. Oh. Good morning, Sally. SALLY: How are you today, Mahesh? I'm fine. She identified me as soon as I said "Good morning, Sally." And we use that not only to greet me-- which is nice-- by name. In addition to that, she sets all my personal profiles, so she knows the address book that I have of interest, she knows my favorite restaurants, she knows my favorite routes. I need to go to JFK for a 3:30 flight. SALLY: Would you like me to find the quickest route to the airport? Yes, please. SALLY: It should take about 90 minutes to get there, allowing you 30 minutes for check-in. You don't have to speak politely to Sally, right? You don't have to say "please." No, I don't, I don't. I think I'd feel uncomfortable begging my car. ALDA: Sally is actually listening in all the time through a microphone above Mahesh's head, but she responds only to words she's been programmed to recognize, like "traffic." VISWANATHAN: Sally, is there any traffic on the route? ( computer beeps ) SALLY: Currently all looks clear, but I will continue to update you. Turn right onto Pines Bridge Road. What about if you were getting drowsy now? ALDA: Sally's not only listening. The idea is that eventually the system will be watching, too. A camera will look for signs of drowsiness, like drooping eyelids. Then, like a real passenger, she'll try to wake you up. SALLY: Would you like to play a game to fill the time? What game? SALLY: How about Name That Tune? Here's the first one. WOMAN: You borrowed my favorite dress... You put these songs in, so you know what they are, right? That's how I know what they are. ( both laughing ) I've lived in New York a long time. What do I know about country music? My guess is "Out of Your Shoes." SALLY: Good job. VISWANATHAN: You notice that slight massage where she says "Good job?" To keep me occupied in the conversation. Yes, yes, to help keep you alert. Right-- instead of just playing the songsback to back and having me answer, which I could get bored, it's nice to give a little feedback to the user, a pat on the back, and I'm there. When you think of what games you want to put in there... Mm-hmm. do you go to the psychologists and say, "What do you think we should do?" Or do you come up with ideas yourselves? At this point, we just come up with ideas ourselves, because what we want to show is the power of interaction in keeping you alert. SALLY: Now try this one. MAN: Well, my first love was a little Corvette... ALDA: Sally will eventually be wirelessly plugged in to real-time information about weather, traffic and your schedule. SALLY: Correct again. Correct again. SALLY: Sorry to interrupt, but I just heard that your flight has been delayed by one hour. Wow. Maybe I can stop for a bite to eat. SALLY: I know you prefer German restaurants, but there aren't any within three miles. How about Italian? Good. ALDA: Sally is currently only a demonstration model-- Mahesh's questions and remarks are triggering prepared responses. VISWANATHAN: Let's make it Italian. ALDA: That is, if she hears them. Italian sounds good. ALDA: Computer speech recognition remains a thorny problem. especially in the noisy environment of a car. Voliamo mangiare pasta. ALDA: Which is why something called the McGurk Effect is so fascinating to IBM researcher Stephen Chu. Da, da. Da, da. MAN: What do you hear? I hear "da, da." Yeah. I hear it clear as a bell. Okay. And that's not what you're saying, is it? Right, so try to close your eyes and listen to the same thing again. Okay, okay, here I am. Okay, play that. Ba, ba. Ba, ba. I hear "ba, ba" really clearly, just as clearly as I heard "da, da." Exactly. That's amazing-- it's the same recording. Yeah, the same thing. And what are you doing with your lips? Yeah-- "ga, ga," actually. So visually, I'm "ga, ga," but acoustically, it's "ba, ba," but your mind is playing a trick on you, so you're hearing neither "ga, ga" nor "ba, ba", but rather "da, da." This is wonderful! Yeah. This is so great. ALDA: Try it for yourself. Listen while you watch. Da, da. Da, da. ALDA: Now listen again as we cover Stephen's mouth. Ba, ba. Ba, ba ALDA: The McGurk Effect beautifully demonstrates how much we rely on what we see as well as what we hear in interpreting speech. Ba, ba. Ba, ba. And McGurk figured this out? Yes. Who's McGurk? McGurk is... Is his name really McGurk or is his name McDurk? ( both laughing ) ALDA: 1-1-7-8-8-8- 9-3-9... ALDA: IBM is now developing a speech recognition system that reads lips as well as listens in to what we say. When I tested it, accuracy improved from about 80% with audio alone to close to 100%. So the plan is that the camera in the car that watches for droopy eyelids will also watch your mouth, making Sally a better listener. Back in her car, Sally has one more trick up her virtual sleeve. SALLY: You just received an urgent email. Shall I read it to you now? Let me hear it. MAN ( through computer ): Mahesh, this is Peter. I know your flight is delayed. Let's meet in the terminal lounge. See you then. Sally, take an email for Peter. SALLY: I'm ready. Peter, I received your message. I'll see you at 3:00. End. SALLY: Your email reads: "Peter, I received your message. I'll see you at 3:00." Shall I send it? Send it. Okay, right now I'll give you $50 for this. ( laughing ) You don't have to make it any better. I'll take it. Fifty dollars? That's... cash-- cash.