Nvidia will provide the USPS with AI tech to boost efficiency

[Shawn Knight]

In brief: The USPS is the world’s largest postal service, processing and delivering more than 146 billion pieces of mail annually. It’s no surprise, then, that packages can sometimes get misrouted or lost along the way. With Nvidia’s help, however, the error rate should fall considerably.

The United States Postal Service (USPS) on Tuesday announced plans to adopt artificial intelligence technology from Nvidia to provide a much-needed boost in efficiency.

Nvidia will use servers powered by its V100 Tensor Core GPUs and deep learning software to train multiple AI algorithms. Once fit for the job, the models will be deployed to Nvidia EGX edge computing systems housed at nearly 200 postal service facilities across the country.

Engineering teams from Nvidia and the USPS have been working together for several months now and plan to deploy the first system by the end of the year. It’ll be operational by the spring of 2020, we’re told, and should be able to process package data 10 times faster and with a higher degree of accuracy.

The systems are being purchased by the USPS “under contract with Hewlett Packard Enterprise.”

The USPS has been increasingly turning to technology to modernize its service. Earlier this year, the company awarded a contract to global self-driving trucking company TuSimple to conduct a pilot to gauge the viability of adding self-driving transport trucks to its operations.

Masthead credit: USPS mail box by David Tran Photo

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/82639-nvidia-provide-usps-ai-tech-boost-efficiency.html

 

[ckm88]

Nothing can really help the USPS...

 

[ShagnWagn]

They sure do like to slap the "AI" marketing card on about anything these days.

"gauge the viability of adding self-driving transport trucks"

Like cost-wise, or safety-wise? Because the latter will be an epic fail. An 80 ton delivery truck ramming into vehicles, great.

 

[p51d007]

Mis-routed or lost. You left out ONE other important detail....STOLEN.
How many times do you see where mail bags are found in some current/formal
mail carriers home, in a dumpster etc? People saying they sent money/gift cards
to loved ones, birthday cards etc and the card arrives, but the money is gone.

 

[Raytrace3D]

Now all the need to do is improve customer service and not lose or break-dance on quite so many packages. I have so many deliveries that literally travel half-way around the world only to get lost or destroyed at my local post office and dealing with an unapologetic or simply apathetic staff is daunting to say the least.

 

[Raytrace3D]

Mis-routed or lost. You left out ONE other important detail....STOLEN.
How many times do you see where mail bags are found in some current/formal
mail carriers home, in a dumpster etc? People saying they sent money/gift cards
to loved ones, birthday cards etc and the card arrives, but the money is gone.

My mom had ordered new checks once from her bank that got stolen by a post-office employee who would pocket them while sorting at the post-office. This lady had been writing bad checks for months and been doing this for quite some time. They eventually caught the woman who was apparently working with other post-office employees in some kind of ring. That lady is still serving time for it.

 

[Jules Mark II]

I got a feeling USPS will be seeing Space Invaders soon. Very soon...

 

[Yynxs]

But, oddly enough, I've known about USPS employees stealing or otherwise diverting goods/mail since the 70s because it makes national news. Strange how easy it is to add tracking or other methods to ship stuff at USPS.

Stuff gets delivered now and it's not being stolen off my porch like the 'brown' stuff. Currently there are 497,000 employees (https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/employees-since-1926.pdf). What, exactly, is the percentage of bad employees out of 497,000 people?

I won't go into number of mail items or how many times the for profit companies messed up.

 

[cliffordcooley]

If USPS really wanted to be more proficient. They would stop shipping intown mail 150+ miles to a sorting facility. Just to mail it back to the same post office.

 

[Yynxs]

They used to do that. Then 'automation' hit. Year 2000, postal employees = 787,000, 2010 = 583,000, 2018 = 487,000. Should they stick a 500,000 dollar sorter at rural route zip code with 5 employees.

This is aside from the federal government required them to fund their entire retirement plan for all employees in 5 years while, at the same time, requiring all Federal check payments to be deposited directly to banks. (When I retired from the military, I was told I was "not allowed" to have a check sent to my home._ That's aside from newer "security" measures and blocking mass destruction chemicals in the envelopes.

If you want to complain about the USPS, please read about the USPS.