Report title: Why is it so hard to make self driving cars?

Report time: Tuesday, June 22nd, 16:00-17:00

Online report link: 620674435

Offline meeting address: B211, Science Building

Abstract:

Why is self-driving so hard? Despite the enthusiastic involvement of big technological companies and the massive investment of many billions of dollars, all the optimistic predictions about self-driving cars “being around the corner” went utterly wrong. 

I argue that these difficulties emblematically illustrate the challenges raised by the vision for trustworthy autonomous systems. These are critical systems intended to replace human operators in complex organizations, very different from other intelligent systems such as game-playing robots or intelligent personal assistants.

I discuss complexity limitations inherent to autonomic behavior but also to integration in complex cyber-physical and human environments. I argue that existing critical systems engineering techniques fall short of meeting the complexity challenge. I also argue that emerging end-to-end AI-enabled solutions currently developed by industry, fail to provide the required strong trustworthiness guarantees.

I advocate a hybrid design approach combining model-based and data-based techniques and seeking tradeoffs between performance and trustworthiness. I also discuss the validation problem emphasizing the need for rigorous simulation and testing techniques allowing technically sound safety evaluation.

I conclude that building trustworthy autonomous systems goes far beyond the current AI vision. To reach this vision, we need a new scientific foundation enriching and extending traditional systems engineering with data-based techniques.

Introduction of Lectuer:

Professor Joseph Sifakis is Emeritus Research Director at Verimag. His current research interests cover fundamental and applied aspects of autonomous system design with focus on self-driving cars. 

Joseph Sifakis has been a full professor at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) for the period 2011-2016. He is the founder of the Verimag laboratory in Grenoble, a leading laboratory in the area of safety critical systems that he directed for 13 years. 

In 2007, Joseph Sifakis received the Turing Award, recognized as the "highest distinction in computer science", for his contribution to the theory and application of model checking, the most widely used system verification technique.

Joseph Sifakis is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, a member of the French National Academy of Engineering, a member of Academia Europea, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is a Grand Officer of the French National Order of Merit, a Commander of the French Legion of Honor. He is a Commander of the Order of the Phoenix. He received the Leonardo da Vinci Medal in 2012.