MOHAN of University of California, San Diago

Engineers and scientists engaged in making artificially intelligent systems have successfully resolved many challenging technical problems and have demonstrated the practical viability of autonomous driving on test tracks and carefully selected roads. These are major milestones in engineering and a clear harbinger of a transformative new era of moving goods, supplies, and people from point A to point B. Yet, along with these accomplishments come many new challenges that are not only of a technical nature, but also of a broader social, legal, and even “ethical” nature.  Such issues become more urgent and important as collisions and accidents involving self-driving or semi-autonomous vehicles occur more often – injuring and even killing humans in the real world. A key challenge that needs to be addressed is making sure that artificially engineered automobiles and humans cohabit in a harmonious, safe, and secure manner. For researchers, this provides the exciting opportunity to pursue important problems from a broad range of topics in distributed perception, cognition, planning, and control. We will present a “Human-Centered” approach to the development of highly automated vehicle technologies. We will also present a brief sampling of contributions in the development of systems and algorithms to perceive situational criticalities, predict intentions of intelligent agents, and plan/execute actions for safe &  smooth maneuvers and control transitions. We will highlight major research milestones in the area of the autonomous vehicle and discuss issues that require deeper, critical examination and careful resolution to assure the safe, reliable, and robust operation of these highly complex systems in the real world.

Biography:

Mohan Trivedi is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California San Diego and founding director of the Computer Vision and Robotics Research Laboratory (est. 1986), as well as the Laboratory for Intelligent and Safe Automobiles (LISA) (est. 2001). Trivedi and his team are pursuing research in intelligent vehicles, human-centered autonomous driving, machine perception, machine learning, human-robot interactivity, and advanced driver assistance. LISA research outputs have directly impacted a broad range of commercially deployed ADAS, driver monitoring, active safety, and high autonomy systems, including lane departure warning, lane keeps assist, lane/road/vehicle/pedestrian/traffic sign detection/tracking modules, panoramic surround viewing, trajectory prediction and collision avoidance, driver attention, activities, intent and readiness prediction modules. The LISA team has won over 30 “Best/Finalist” paper awards, six best dissertation awards, the IEEE ITS Society’s Outstanding Research Award and LEAD Institution Award, as well as the Meritorious Service and Pioneer Award (Technical Activities) of the IEEE Computer Society. Trivedi has received Distinguished Alumnus awards from BITS-Pilani, India, and Utah State University. He has given over 130 keynote/plenary talks. He regularly serves as a consultant to various industry and government agencies in the US and abroad. He frequently serves on panels dealing with technological, strategic, privacy, and ethical issues surrounding research areas he is involved in.

Dr. Trivedi has served as the Chair of the Robotics Technical Committee of the IEEE Computer Society, Governing Board member of the IEEE Systems, Man & Cybernetics, and IEEE ITSC societies. Trivedi is a Fellow of IEEE (life), SPIE, and IAPR.

Address:San Diago, Colorado, United States