Are Autonomous Vehicles A Grand Challenge for CPS or AI?

ABSTRACT

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have garnered immense interest and investments over the past 14 years, but practical deployments still do not seem viable in the near future. Did anything go wrong? From its very origins in the late 2000’s, the cyber-physical systems community has deemed AVs as a grand challenge. Meanwhile, thanks to remarkable advances in machine learning since the early 2010’s, the AI community has also been targeting AVs as a poster child to measure its progress and considers AV as an AI problem to be solved. This talk will provide a synopsis of the speaker’s work on AVs and the current state of the art. In order to stimulate a larger debate, the talk will then delve into where AI can and does contribute, and where the CPS community must continue to play a significant role. Research questions that can and must be addressed by the CPS community will be posed.

BIO

Prof. Raj Rajkumar is the George Westinghouse Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. At Carnegie Mellon, he directs the Metro21 Smart Cities Institute, Mobility21 – the USDOT National University Transportation Center on Mobility, and the Real-Time and Multimedia Systems Laboratory. Raj has served as the Program Chair and General Chair of six international ACM/IEEE conferences on connected vehicles, real-time systems, wireless sensor networks, cyber-physical systems and multimedia computing/networking. He has authored one book, edited another book, holds multiple US patents, and has more than 200 publications in peer-reviewed forums. Nine of these publications have received Best Paper Awards. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, an IEEE Fellow, a co-recipient of the IEEE Simon Ramo Medal, and an ACM Distinguished Engineer. He has been given an Outstanding Technical Achievement and Leadership Award by the IEEE Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems. He has given several keynotes and distinguished lectures at several international conferences and universities, and has provided testimony thrice at US House Sub-Committee hearings. Prof Rajkumar’s work has influenced many commercial operating systems. He was also the founder and CEO of Ottomatika Inc., a company that delivered the software intelligence for self-driving vehicles. Ottomatika was acquired by Delph (now Aptiv). His research interests include all aspects of cyber-physical systems with a particular emphasis on self-driving vehicles.