Robocars - Autonomous Drive, Self-driving, Driver-less cars

You work for a government agency then. It's OK t just say it.

Not everything to do with recognition, knowledge discovery, etc. is security or defense related-- even if the agencies do indeed have their interests and fund research (most R&D these days in ML, however, are being payrolled by companies like Alibaba, Google, Facebook, Baidu, Microsoft etc. albeit sometimes with transfers from defense)-- and not everything those agencies do with these technologies is related to surveillance-- while said companies are indeed keyed to such activities but with different goals (ultimately beyond just "improving" their products, economic hedgenomy either through "controlling the wires" or through market perception leading to a higher valuation and more cash to go shopping to thwart rival threats). It is a "very hot" area right now and a lot of interest is quite mainstream. Go to any university and all the relevant lectures will be filled to overflow. And all the conferences are filled with companies looking to hire talent. Everyone from pharmaceuticals to retailing, banking, insurrance, manufacturing, etc. feels the need to get into the show fearing the potential of being left behind.. The return right now, however, is some areas is quite good. Speech recognition is a parade example. End-to-end speech recognition networks deliver amazingly good results but without the need to design and build difficult models (acoustic, phonemes, language etc.) . Its really leveled the field-- some really good results are even comming from groups that don't have the kind of data that Google or Microsoft have as techniques are emerging for data synthesis.