Summary: This short post does not talk about autonomous vehicles. It talks about a new paper describing new ways in which complex socio-technical systems could go bad. I then talk about the verification implications of that. Bruce Schneier is a well-known security researcher: I have been following his blog for years. I don’t mention him … More About “The coming AI hackers” paper
Summary: This post discusses the influence of the Uber accident on Autonomous Vehicle (AV) deployment. It claims that AVs should eventually be deployed, and yet that we should expect many fatal AV accidents. It then suggests that a comprehensive, transparent verification system could help solve this inevitable tension. That tragic Uber accident has brought AV … More The Uber accident and the bigger picture
Summary: There are several approaches for verifying that Autonomous Vehicles are safe enough. The Pegasus project is one interesting, thoughtful attempt to do that (focusing initially on highly automated driving, not AVs). In this post I’ll summarizes a recent Pegasus symposium, and describe what I like about the approach and what is perhaps still missing. … More How to write AV scenarios (and some notes about Pegasus)
Summary: This is another “What’s new in verification land” post. It describes a video and a paper from Mobileye, and takes that opportunity to revisit four topics: How Autonomous Vehicles should handle unstructured human interaction, how to balance Reinforcement Learning and safety, why simulation is the main way to validate safety in these unstructured environments, … More Misc stuff: Mobileye, simulations and test tracks
Summary: This is another one of those “What’s new in verification land” posts. It talks about the verification aspects of the recent Oscars fiasco. I was on vacation, and thus (mostly) missed this earth-shaking event. Luckily my spies are everywhere, and my friend Elliot Cohen sent me the following email with all the gory details: … More Misc stuff: The Oscars bug
Summary: The interactions between Autonomous Vehicles and people can be complex, which complicates AV deployment. This post summarizes some recent related publications, and then tries to predict the verification implications of all that. For instance, it suggests that verification teams will try to track total-accidents, AV-specific-accidents and AV-specific-annoyances. There were several interesting publications lately about “bumps on … More Verifying interactions between AVs and people
Summary: This post discusses one of the verification implications of the next 20 years of automation on verification: The problem of trying to predict how people will react to change. A previous post (and another one) discussed the next 20 years of automation and their general implications. This follow-up post discusses one of the … More Future of verification: Better ways to predict behavior
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?
I had a breakfast discussion about this simulation-for-transportation-policies with two friends of mine who have been looking into similar topics for years: Nadav Levy and Itzhak Benenson of Tel Aviv Univ. This was triggered by my post about a related topic. Here are the main things I learned during breakfast: They are interested in policies like: … More A breakfast discussion about simulations for transportation policy decision making
This somewhat-unexpected topic came up in several offline conversations during the Stuttgart symposium On day 1, I had a discussion with a guy who gave the lecture “Impact of driverless mobility on vehicle development and testing” (Thomas delos Santos, CEO, Innovative Mobility Automobile GmbH, Germany). His is a small consultancy house which consults e.g. cities … More Also from Stuttgart: Using simulation for public policy decision making