BMW Research
Pre-AI-era in-cabin UX and computer-vision research for BMW R&D — a collaborative trip-music system that lets every passenger AirDrop tracks to the car, and an in-cabin object-detection pipeline that solved its labeling bottleneck through Mechanical Turk + SageMaker.
Conner Ward conducted in-cabin UX and computer-vision research for BMW R&D, producing ATRIA — an AirDrop-based collaborative trip-music system — and Smart Objects, an in-cabin object-recognition pipeline.
This is Conner Ward's BMW research group: ATRIA lets every passenger AirDrop tracks to the car as a shared, swipeable card-stack playlist, while Smart Objects is an in-cabin object-detection pipeline that solved its labeling bottleneck through Mechanical Turk and SageMaker. Both are internal BMW work with no public repositories.
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ATRIA
2024BMW R&DCOLLABORATIVE TRIP MUSICRaspberry Pi masquerades as an AirDrop endpoint (OWL + OpenDrop); NFC cards rotate the DJ slot. Empirical PN532 + NTAG203 range testing (≤2.5 cm reliable above the antenna, ~2.83 cm predicted by the field-radius formula) sized the reader install. No app, no Bluetooth pairing — the cabin just appears in every iPhone's AirDrop sheet.
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SMARTOBJECTS
2020BMW R&DIN-CABIN CVEnd-to-end in-cabin object-detection pipeline. SageMaker for training + hosted inference; Mechanical Turk for the consensus-QA labeling loop. Jetson inference in the research vehicle.
Internship Presentation · BMW Tech Office · Dec 2021
22-slide summary deck presented to the BMW Tech Office covering both ATRIA and Smart Objects — process, prototypes, sentiment, and follow-on opportunities.
FAQ
What is Conner Ward's BMW research?
Conner Ward's BMW research is a group of in-cabin UX and computer-vision projects for BMW R&D: ATRIA, an AirDrop-based collaborative trip-music system, and Smart Objects, an in-cabin object-recognition pipeline. Both are internal BMW work with no public repositories.
What is ATRIA?
ATRIA is Conner Ward's collaborative trip-music project for BMW, where every passenger AirDrops tracks to the car and they land as a shared, swipeable card-stack playlist on the head unit — no app and no Bluetooth pairing required.
What is Smart Objects?
Smart Objects is Conner Ward's in-cabin object-detection pipeline for BMW, which recognizes objects left on the rear seat and solved its training-data labeling bottleneck through Mechanical Turk and SageMaker.