Wednesday, July 21, 3 p.m. GMT (11 a.m. ET)

"Safety Assessment of the Waymo Driver"

This talk discussed Waymo's approach to safety assessment of the Waymo Driver. Foremost, it gave an overview of three recent papers: framework for safe driving, road safety performance data, and the Waymo Driver's performance in simulated high severity fatal crashes. The safety framework paper describes how Waymo develops, evaluates, rolls out, and manages their vehicles in the real world. The road performance data paper describes every collision and minor contact experienced in Waymo's operations, and every simulated contact they predict would have happened if the operator had not disengaged automated driving. The third paper uses simulations of reconstructed fatal crashes to assess the Waymo Driver's performance in simulated high severity fatal crashes. Additionally, this keynote discussed the identified research needs for driving assessment of autonomous vehicles.

Dr. Trent Victor
Director of Safety Research and Best Practices
Waymo

Thursday, July 22, 3 p.m. GMT (11 a.m. ET)

"Automated vehicles and road safety: So what about ethics?"

In her presentation, Marieke focused on a relatively new topic of AVs: Ethics. She presented part of the outcomes of the Expert Ethics Report written for the European Commission, and she discussed questions such as: Is there more to ethics than the trolley problem? How do ethics relate to road safety? Are AVs allowed to break the traffic rules? Why will AI not automatically solve the ethics issues involved in automated vehicles? What are the new roles for operators, deployers, researchers, and developers, and who should be in the lead for defining what is safe? What about other ethical issues such as privacy, and how do they play a role? She also identified some research needs.

Professor Doctor Marieke Martens
Automated Driving & Human Interaction Professor
Eindhoven University of Technology