Finding bugs in autonomous vehicles: My impressions from the second Stuttgart symposium

June 7, 2016

Summary: This trip report describes my impressions from the Second Autonomous Vehicles Test & Design Symposium in Stuttgart. Short version: The design side is moving fast. The verification side has improved, but has a long way to go. Note: In my last post I talked about what automation will do to this planet over the … More Finding bugs in autonomous vehicles: My impressions from the second Stuttgart symposium

Automation and unemployment are coming, but I guess we’ll manage

May 10, 2016

Summary: This post takes a (speculative) look at the general implications of automation over the next 20 years: Employment declines. Democracy does not fold. Universal Basic Income becomes common. Education improves. New-age stuff grows. Quality-of-life inequality grows or shrinks, depending on how you look. And so on. A follow-up post will discuss the verification implications. Note: Title changed … More Automation and unemployment are coming, but I guess we’ll manage

The rise of mostly-autonomous systems

April 23, 2016

Summary: This post discusses the (possible) rise of mostly-autonomous systems, i.e. systems which are normally autonomous, but still have “operators standing by” for the infrequent-but-crucial moments when they are needed. I’ll discuss this trend,  its implications and startup opportunities, and then turn to my favorite topic – the verification implications of all that. Jobs of … More The rise of mostly-autonomous systems

The bigger picture of verifying autonomous robots

January 4, 2016

Summary: This post talks about the “bigger picture” of autonomous robot verification (beyond basic CDV stuff). It mainly discusses the challenges, not the solutions. I am in the process of creating a minimal CDV-based verification framework for autonomous robots. This framework will simply do the usual CDV stuff (constraint-based generation, checking, coverage etc.) with minimal … More The bigger picture of verifying autonomous robots

Misc stuff: Robotics, system simulations, AI

December 8, 2015

Here is another one of those multi-topic summaries: Dipping my toes into autonomous robot verification As I discussed here, I am exploring working with Kerstin Eder et al. (of Bristol U) regarding autonomous robot verification. So I started looking into this. I will not take you into the gory details, gentle reader (especially since I … More Misc stuff: Robotics, system simulations, AI

HVC’2015 trip report

November 26, 2015

I attended HVC’2015 last week. Here is a partial, very subjective trip report. HVC’2015 was good. I attended the tutorial day and the first two conference days, though I was absent from most of the hard-core formal-verification sessions. Here are the main things I learned: The Bristol folks Kerstin Eder, Dejanira Araiza-Illan and David Western … More HVC’2015 trip report

Is a Universal Verification Framework possible?

November 11, 2015

Summary: This post investigates the (slightly crazy) idea of creating “one universal verification framework for everything”, and claims that while the goal itself is probably impossible (for now), some interesting and worthwhile sub-goals are perhaps possible. As many people (including myself) have discussed before, there is no single “verification community”: there are really many verification … More Is a Universal Verification Framework possible?