Siddartha Khastgir

Siddartha Khastgir is the Head of Verification & Validation for Connected & Autonomous Vehicles (CAV) at WMG, University of Warwick. He leads several collaborative R&D projects with industrial and academic partners nationally and internationally. His research focuses on generating safety evidence and arguments, test scenario generation, simulation-based testing, and safety of AI systems. Leveraging the cross-domain nature of safety, he is also involved in safety research in aviation, marine and healthcare. Siddartha is an active member of various national and international standardisation and regulatory groups, including ISO, SAE and ASAM. Currently, he represents the UK on several ISO technical committees and is the lead author for two new ISO standards for aspects of automated driving systems. He sits on the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) committees on safety of automated driving. Prior to joining WMG, Siddartha was with FEV GmbH in Germany, leading automotive software development and testing for series production projects. He has received numerous national and international awards for his research contributions, including the prestigious UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship in 2019 focused on safety evaluation of CAVs.

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Presentation

Power to the people: democratizing safety for automated driving

Scenario databases have been discussed for a long time by the automated vehicle ecosystem. Most scenario databases cater to the AV test industry only with scenarios stored in programmatic languages. The recent incidents (crashes and recalls) associated with AV deployment have shown that the wider public is an important stakeholder left out of the AV safety discussion. For regulators, the public remains the most important stakeholder. This presentation introduces a novel publicly accessible online platform that enables any member of the public or the AV ecosystem to create a scenario using a graphical interface, like a LEGO-making exercise for scenarios. This would enable the public to share their concerns as well as expectations for safety scenarios in a simple, accessible and inclusive manner, thus, democratizing safety by giving power to the people. The aim of this open online platform tool – Safety PoolTM Studio – is to enable various stakeholders like the general public, road safety advocacy groups, accident investigators, local authorities and insurance companies to describe scenarios for their purposes. Safety PoolTM Studio has been developed in such a way that the graphical scenarios can automatically be converted into programmatic descriptions of scenarios for traditional simulation-based testing of AVs.