Omar reaching for the future with driverless cars

Omar Makhlouf (Egypt, MSc Computer Science, Oxford-Weidenfeld- Hoffmann) recently joined Oxford-based start-up, Morpheus Labs, as a research engineer. Omar will be working on ‘Learning from Demonstration’ – using simulation to train computers to learn complex human behaviour by observing video demonstrations. Omar’s team is currently working on getting self-driving cars to learn to model traffic networks, the behaviour of other drivers and pedestrians by observing video footage of traffic. Speaking about his new role, Omar said, “it’s really exciting because it’s something that’s been notoriously difficult to do, and if we can accurately learn to mimic the behaviour of actual traffic, then we can teach cars to drive themselves in a way that’s well adapted to the real world”. According to Omar, this approach is also faster, cheaper and safer as simulations can be done in a lab not on the open road. In the future, Omar is excited about returning home to advance similar work, “I’m very interested in trying to start my own tech start-up in Egypt and I think this will be valuable experience to draw upon”.