Keynote Lectures

Abstract
Intelligent Vehicle (IV) technologies have in the last couple of decades greatly improved the perception of the road environment. However, their effect on road safety still demands appropriate methods and tools, especially considering the continued, gradual integration of mobile environment applications for the vehicular context, which compete with other systems already available in the car. Whereas the feasibility of incorporating new technology-driven functionality to vehicles has played a central role in automotive design, safety issues related to usability and human capabilities and which affect a system’s operation have not always been taken into consideration. This presentation gives an overview of the impact of IV technologies, including automation, on driving performance and safety.

Abstract
The most cost-effective solution to acquire massive amounts of actionable urban data and expand wireless coverage for everyone in the city may be to rapidly connect as many vehicles moving around the city as possible. In fact, vehicles are everywhere, have large batteries, come with dozens of sensors and benefit from a dedicated frequency band (DSRC 5.9 GHz). Once we turn vehicles into mobile Wi-Fi hotspots, they can connect to many other things – inside and outside of the vehicle – serving as the perfect data couriers for the Internet of Things. Last but not last, they can easily connect with each other over high-speed wireless links, building mesh networks that can span an entire city.
 
After our company Veniam connected hundreds vehicles with multi-purpose, multi-network onboard units in September 2014, this real-world mesh has served more than 5 million Internet sessions and has since proven to be a real asset as Porto strives to overcome the digital divide, increase safety, reduce pollution, and control traffic. Singapore and New York City are now following suit.
 
Since roughly 26% of the world’s 1.2 billion vehicles belong to enterprise fleets that generally travel many miles every day, starting with commercial vehicles like buses, taxis and shared vehicles appears to be the best strategy to scale the number of connected vehicles. Add to that the current trend towards mobility as an on-demand service – which will probably be provided in the near future by fleets of shared autonomous vehicles. Soon this strategy may actually be the only one we need to create vibrant connected cities with exciting new mobility services worldwide.

Abstract
In one aspect of our life or another, today we all live with AI. For example, the mechanisms behind the search engines operating on the Internet do not just retrieve information, but also constantly learn how to respond more rapidly and usefully to our requests. Basically, AI depends on our ability to efficiently transfer knowledge to software-intensive systems. A computerized machine can be considered as one exhibiting AI when it has the basic capabilities to transfer data into context-relevant information and then that information into conclusions exhibiting knowledge.

Closely related to AI, autonomous systems not only exhibit knowledge but also autonomously interact with their operational environment and perceive important structural and dynamic aspects of the same. The underlying mechanism for this autonomy helps such systems monitor, draw inferences and react. The integration and promotion of autonomy in software-intensive systems is an extremely challenging task. Among the many challenges software engineers must overcome are those related to elicitation and expression of autonomy requirements.

In this talk, the speaker will draw upon his experience with the Autonomy Requirements Engineering (ARE) approach to present how ARE handles autonomy requirements for smart vehicles. The emphasis will be put on using ARE to extend upstream control software with special self-managing objectives (self-* objectives) intended to provide an ability to autonomously and automatically discover, diagnose, and cope with various problems that need to be overcome during car operation.