Keynotes at DATE 2018
Keynote 1  |
Keynote 2 |
Keynote 3 |
Keynote 4 |
| Keynote 1 | The Responsibility Sensitive Safety (RSS) Formal Model toward Safety Guarantees for Autonomous Vehicles |
| Speaker | Prof. Amnon Shashua CEO& CTO, Mobileye, an Intel company, US | and Senior Vice President, Intel Corporation |
Abstract
In recent years, car makers and tech companies are racing toward self-driving cars. A critical component in getting society acceptance to the technology is to find a way to guarantee safety. The prevailing common wisdom is a data-driven empirical approach for safety validation where the more mileage driven the better the maturity of the system must be. I will describe a model in which the sources of errors due to Planning (the actions and decisions for negotiating motion in traffic) can be fenced out from the data driven approach through a formal model of the common sense behind human judgment of what it means to cause an accident and how to define actions that will guarantee that the AV will never cause an accident due to Planning. The model creates a clear distinction of what can be certified by regulators and what should be left to the judgment of AV manufacturers. The RSS model also puts in context the conversation of "ethical dilemmas" by providing a formal framework for the discussion.
Biography
Prof. Amnon Shashua holds the Sachs chair in computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His field of expertise is computer vision and machine learning. For his academic achievements he received the MARR prize Honorable Mention in 2001, the Kaye innovation award in 2004, and the Landau award in exact sciences in 2005. In 1999 Prof. Shashua co-founded Mobileye, an Israeli company developing a system-on-chip and computer vision algorithms for a driving assistance system, providing a full range of active safety features using a single camera. Today, approximately 20 million cars from 25 automobile manufacturers rely on Mobileye technology to make their vehicles safer to drive. In August 2014, Mobileye claimed the title for largest Israeli IPO ever, by raising $1B at a market cap of $5.3B. In addition, Mobileye is developing autonomous driving technology with more than a dozen car manufacturers. The introduction of autonomous driving capabilities is of a transformative nature and has the potential of changing the way cars are built, driven and own in the future. In August 2017, Mobileye became an Intel company in the largest Israeli acquisition deal ever of $15.3B. Today, Prof. Shashua is the CEO and CTO of Mobileye and a Senior Vice President of Intel Corporation leading Intel's Autonomous Driving Group. In 2010 Prof. Shashua co-founded OrCam which harnesses computer vision and artificial intelligence to assist people who are visually impaired or blind. The OrCam MyEye device is unique in its ability to provide visual aid to hundreds of millions of people, through a discreet wearable platform. Within its wide-ranging scope of capabilities, OrCam's device can read most texts (both indoors and outdoors) and learn to recognize thousands of new items and faces.
| Keynote 2 | Programming Living Cells: Design automation to map circuits to DNA |
| Speaker | Christopher Voigt Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT, US |
Abstract
Platforms are being established to facilitate large genetic engineering projects. A desired cellular function is divided into systems that can be developed independently and then combined. Genetic sensors allow cells to receive environmental and cell state information. Sensory information is integrated by genetic circuits, which control the conditions and timing of a response. The circuit outputs are connected to actuators that control what the cell is doing, from building molecules to moving and communicating. Design automation tools from the electronics industry are applied to map a circuit design to a DNA sequence. Collectively, this enables a wide range of applications, for example cells that communicate to build a material, navigate the human body to treat a disease, or protect plants by responding to the environment.
Biography
Christopher Voigt, PhD is a Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT. He is the Co-Director of the Synthetic Biology Center and co-founder of the MIT-Broad Foundry. He is the Editor-in-Chief of ACS Synthetic Biology. He holds joint appointments at the Broad Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), University of California - San Francisco, and Imperial College. He received his BSE in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan (1998) and PhD in Biophysics from Caltech (2002). He is a founder of Pivot Bio (microbial agricultural products) and Asimov (genetic circuit design automation). He has served on the science advisory boards of DSM, Bolt Threads, Pivot Bio, SynLogic, Amyris Biotechnologies, Zymergen, Biomillenia, and Twist Bioscience. He has been honored with a National Security Science & Engineering Faculty Fellowship (NSSEFF), Sloan Fellow, Pew Fellow, Packard Fellow, NSF Career Award, Vaughan Lecturer, MIT TR35, and SynBiobeta Entrepreneurial Leadership Award.
| Keynote 3 | From inverse design to implementation of robust and efficient photonics for computing |
| Speaker | Jelena Vuckovic Stanford University, US |
Abstract
It is estimated that nearly 10% of the world electricity is consumed in information processing and computing, including data centers [D.A.B. Miller, Journal of Lightwave Technology, 2017]. It is clear that the exponential growth in use of these technologies is not sustainable unless dramatic changes are made to computing hardware, in order to increase its speed and energy efficiency. Optical interconnects are considered a solution to these obstacles, with potential to reduce energy consumption in on-chip optical interconnects to atto-Joule per bit (aJ/bit), while increasing operating speed beyond 20GHz. However, the state of the art photonics is bulky, inefficient, sensitive to environment, lossy, and its performance is severely degraded in real-world environment as opposed to ideal laboratory conditions, which has prevented from using it in many practical applications, including interconnects. Therefore, it is clear that new approaches for implementing photonics are crucial.
We have recently developed a computational approach to inverse-design photonics based on desired performance, with fabrication constraints and structure robustness incorporated in design process. Our approach performs physics guided search through the full parameter space until the optimal solution is reached. Resulting device designs are non-intuitive, but are fabricable using standard techniques, resistant to temperature variations of hundreds of degrees, typical fabrication errors, and they outperform state of the art counterparts by many orders of magnitide in footprint, efficiency and stability. This is completely different from conventional approach to design photonics, which is almost always performed by brute-force or intuition-guided tuning of a few parameters of known structures, until satisfactory performance is achieved, and which almost always leads to sub-optimal designs.
Apart from integrated photonics, our approach is also applicable to any other optical and quantum optical devices and systems.
Biography
Jelena Vuckovic (PhD Caltech 2002) has been a faculty member at Stanford since 2003, where she is currently a Professor of Electrical Engineering and by courtesy of Applied Physics, and leads the Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics Lab. She has received numerous awards, including the Humboldt Prize, the Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship (from the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Technical University in Munich), the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), DARPA and ONR Young Faculty Awards. Vuckovic is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and of the Optical Society of America (OSA).
| Keynote 4 | Autonomous driving : ready to market? Which are the remaining top challenges? |
| Speaker | Thomas Form Director of Software Engineering for Merck Serono, US |
Abstract
During the last years a lot of prototypes for automated/autonomous driving vehicles have been presented to the public. Depending on the use case car manufacturers or tech companies have used an evolutionary or a revolutionary approach. While the evolutionary way should be more reasonable applied for owned cars due to cost restraints and the need for the functionality to work more or less by "something everywhere", the revolutionary approach following the strategy "everything somewhere" seems to be the better solution for fleets of autonomous cabs or shuttles.
Although we have seen a lot of functional concepts for both approaches to automation, there are still some big challenges to be solved. On one hand the whole automation function has to be designed redundantly to ensure a sufficient functional safety level. In this context the use of Artificial Intelligence based networks could be a solution in particular neuronal networks based on deep learning.
On the other hand there is still the question "how good is good enough" having in mind that perfectly working systems cannot be realized and how can the necessary verification/validation process be implemented. The public funded project PEGASUS is working to provide first answers.
However: do we have considered all impacts of automated mobility?
Biography
Born 1959, Thomas Form studied Electrical Engineering at the University of Braunschweig, Germany, joined the Institute for Communication Engineering as research fellow in 1987 and received his Ph.D. in 1992.
Up to 2002 he worked as a senior engineer in the Centre for Electromagnetic Compatibility of Volkswagen AG. In 2002 Dr. Form was appointed as the head of Telephone-/Telematics and Antenna systems development.
He became a professor for "Electronic Vehicle Systems" in the Institute of Control Engineering at the Technical University Braunschweig in 2005 and participated with the CAROLO-Team in the finals of the DARPA URBAN Challenge 2007.
From 2007 to 2009 he was responsible for concept development, module- and project management in the VW Electric/Electronic development.
In 2009 he was appointed as head of the "Electronics and Vehicle Research" within Volkswagen Group research. Major achievements were the presentation of AUDI "Jack" vehicle driving in L3 automatic mode with Journalists from San Francisco to CES 2015 in Las Vegas and the presentation of the autonomous driving pod “SEDRIC” in 2017.
Since 2016 he is the coordinator of the German national funded project PEGASUS which wants to answer the question "L3 Highway Chauffeur - how safe is safe enough and how to prove it".
He got the Uni-DAS e.V. ADAS Award for significant influence on the development and introduction of driver assistance systems in 2017.
Memberships: IEEE Member, VDI FVT and VDE GMM (both in advisory board)
