Hamid Serry

Hamid Serry is a Project Engineer with a specialty in software development. He is currently working with the Verification and Validation team at WMG to expand safety validation of autonomous cars, through the simplification of Flex1889 and other Scenario description languages into a graphical format, for the use of the general public. His experience spans creating and maintaining large database systems, developing and training machine learning models for computer vision and game development, with a background of a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering.

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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.