Friday Interactive Day of the Special Initiative on Autonomous Systems Design (ASD) at DATE’21

Start: Friday, 5 February 2021 08:30

End: Friday, 5 February 2021 18:10

The Friday Interactive Day of the DATE Special Initiative on Autonomous Systems Design (ASD) features keynotes from industry leaders as well as interactive discussions initiated by short presentations on several hot topics. Presentations from General Motors and BMW on predictable perception, as well as a session on dynamic risk assessment will fuel the discussion on how to maximize safety in a technically feasible manner. Speakers from TTTech and APEX.AI will present insights into Motionwise and ROS2 as platforms for automated vehicles. Further sessions will highlight topics such as explainable machine learning, self-adaptation for robustness and self-awareness for autonomy, as well as cybersecurity for connected vehicles.

Registration

Program

ASDW05-01 Opening & Introduction

Session Start Fri, 08:30 Session End Fri, 09:00

Welcome and Introduction by ASD Organizers
“Argo AI’s mission and technology at a glance” by Alexandre Haag, Managing Director, Argo AI GmbH

ASDW05-02 Dynamic Risk Assessment in Autonomous Systems

Session Start Fri, 09:00 Session End Fri, 09:55

Organizers / Chairs:
- Peter Liggesmeyer, Fraunhofer IESE
- Rasmus Adler, Fraunhofer IESE
- Richard Hawkins, University of York
Session Abstract: An autonomous system is capable of independently achieving a predefined goal in accordance with the demands of the current situation. In safety-critical applications, the operational situations may demand some actions from the system in order to keep risks at an acceptable level. This motivates the implementation of algorithms that estimate, assess and control risks during operation. In particular, the risk assessment at runtime is challenging as it implies moral decision making about acceptability of risks: “How safe is safe enough?”. However, it is also challenging to find a suitable notion of risk. IEC and IEC standards define the term “risk” differently following two “root” definitions: “combination of the probability of occurrence of harm, and the severity of that harm” and “effect of uncertainty on objectives”. The first definition is related to the way how integrity levels like SIL and ASIL are determined at design-time. In the session, we will discuss in how far existing design-time approaches can be adopted to implement an autonomous risk management at runtime. For instance, is it reasonable to implement algorithms that determine integrity levels at runtime?
Speakers:
- Detlev Richter, TüV SüD: Digital twin-based hazard analysis at runtime for resilient production
- Simon Burton, Fraunhofer IKS: Prerequisites for dynamic risk management
- Patrik Feth, Sick AG: Sensors for Dynamic Risk Assessment
- Michael Woon, retrospect: Being Certain of Uncertainty in Risk

ASDW05-03 Cybersecurity for Connected Autonomous Vehicles

Session Start Fri, 10:00 Session End Fri, 10:55

Organizers / Chairs:
- Sebastian Steinhorst, Technical University of Munich, Germany
- Mohammad Hamad, Technical University of Munich, Germany
Session Abstract: Today’s vehicles are increasingly connected and tomorrow’s vehicles will be automated, autonomous, capable of sensing their environment and navigating through cities without human input. This comes at the cost of a new set of threats and cyber-attacks that can yield high recall costs, property loss, and even jeopardize human safety. In this session, three partners of the nIoVe H2020 EU project will present security challenges and solutions to improve future autonomous vehicles’ security. The session starts with a short presentation about insights on the challenges and limitations of providing cyberthreat protections for public transport autonomous shuttles. The second talk discusses the need to make autonomous vehicles proactively able to react to intrusions and the challenges to achieving such a capability. The last talk addresses further cyber-security challenges that nIoVe aims to solve for autonomous vehicles. The session will continue with an open discussion to discuss all the introduced challenges and other related aspects.
Talks:
- Niels Nijdam, University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland The Perils of Cybersecurity in Connected Automated Vehicles
- Mohammad Hamad, Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany Toward a Multi-layer Intrusion Response System for Autonomous Vehicles
- Konstantinos Votis, Institute/Centre for Research and Technologies Hellas (CERTH/ITI), Greece Cyber-security Solutions for Autonomous Vehicles

ASDW05-04 Self-adaptive safety- and mission-critical CPS: wishful thinking or absolute necessity?

Session Start Fri, 11:00 Session End Fri, 11:55

Organizers / Chairs:
- Andy Pimentel (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
- Martina Maggio (University of Saarland, Germany)
Session Abstract: Due to the increasing performance demands of mission- and safety-critical Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), these systems exhibit a rapidly growing complexity, manifested by an increasing number of (distributed) computational cores and application components connected via complex networks. However, with the growing complexity and interconnectivity of these systems, the chances of hardware failures as well as disruptions due to cyber-attacks will also quickly increase. System adaptivity, for example in the form of dynamically remapping of application components to processing cores, represents a promising technique to handle this challenging scenario. In this session, we address the (consequences of the) idea of deploying runtime adaptivity to mission- and safety-critical CPS, yielding dynamically morphing systems, to establish robustness against computational hurdles, component failures, and cyber-attacks.
Speakers:
- Clemens Grelck (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) The TeamPlay Coordination Language for Dependable Systems
- Sasa Misailovic (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA) Programming Systems for Helping Developers Cope with Uncertainty
- Stefanos Skalistis (Raytheon Technologies, Ireland) Certification challenges of adaptive avionics systems

ASDW05-05 Predictable Perception

Session Start Fri, 14:00 Session End Fri, 14:55

Organizers / Chairs:
- Samarjit Chakraborty (U North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA)
- Petru Eles (Linköping University, SE)
Session Abstract: Modern autonomous systems – such as autonomous vehicles or robots – consist of two major components: (a) the decision making unit, which is often made up of one or more feedback control loops, and (b) a perception unit that feeds the environmental state to the control unit and is made up of camera, radar and lidar sensors and their associated processing algorithms and infrastructure. While there has been a lot of work on the formal verification of the decision making (or the control) unit, the ultimate correctness of the autonomous system also heavily relies on the behavior of the perception unit. The verification of the correctness of the perception unit is however significantly more challenging and not much progress has been made here. This is because the algorithms used by perception units now increasingly rely on machine learning techniques (like deep neural networks) that run on a complex hardware made up CPU+accelerator platforms. The accelerators are made up of GPUs, TPUs and FPGAs. This combination of algorithmic + implementation platform complexity and heterogeneity currently makes it very difficult to provide either functional or timing correctness guarantees of the perception unit, while both of these guarantees are needed to ensure the correct functioning of the control loop and the overall autonomous system. This is a part of the overall challenge of verifying the correctness of autonomous systems.
Speakers:
- Qing Rao (BMW, Munich, Germany) New Era in Autonomous Driving and the Role of IT – Will Traditional Carmakers Keep Pace?
- Soheil Samii (General Motors R&D, USA) Dependable sensing system architecture for predictable perception in autonomous vehicles
- Deepak Shankar (Mirabilis Design, USA) Design Tools for Predictable Hw/Sw Architectures for Autonomous Vehicles
- Cong Liu (UT Dallas, USA) Towards Timing-Predictable & Robust Autonomy in Autonomous Embedded Systems
- Hamed Tabkhi (University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA) Toward AI-in-the-Loop Autonomous Safety System – Algorithmic and Timing Challenges

ASDW05-06 Perspicuous Computing

Session Start Fri, 15:00 Session End Fri, 15:55

Organizers:
- M. Christakis (MPI SWS)
- H. Hermanns (U Saarland, Germany)
Session Abstract: From autonomous vehicles to Industry 4.0, from smart homes to smart cities – cyber-physical technology increasingly participates in actions and decisions that affect humans. However, our understanding of how these applications interact and what is the cause of a specific automated decision is lagging far behind. This comes with a gradual loss in understanding. The root cause of this problem is that contemporary systems do not have any built-in concepts to explicate their behaviour. They calculate and propagate outcomes of computations, but are not designed to provide explanations. They are not perspicuous. The key to enable comprehension in a cyber-physical world is a science of perspicuous computing. This session will discuss the foundational, the industrial and the societal dimensions of the perspicuous computing challenge. It is organized by the Center for Perspicuous Computing – TRR 248 – a Collaborative Research Center funded by the German Research Foundation DFG.
Session Structure:
- Introduction: “Enabling comprehension in a cyber-physical world with the human in the loop”
  Holger Hermanns, Universität des Saarlandes
- Panel: “Is industry or society in need for perspicuous computing? Both? Or neither?”
  - Panel Moderator: Christel Baier, Technische Universität Dresden
  - Panelists:
    - Bernd Finkbeiner CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
    - Christof Fetzer Technische Universität Dresden
    - Raimund Dachselt Technische Universität Dresden
    - Prof. Rupak Majumdar Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
    - Dr. Lena Kästner Universität des Saarlandes, representing EIS
More details: https://www.perspicuous-computing.science/date-2021-session-perspicuous-computing/

ASDW05-07 Production Architectures & Platforms for Automated Vehicles

Session Start Fri, 16:00 Session End Fri, 16:55

Organizer / Chair: Rolf Ernst, TU Braunschweig, Germany
Session Abstract: Highly automated vehicles need high performance HW/SW platforms to execute complex software systems for safety critical functions. This is a usually underestimated challenge when automation comes to production vehicles. The session starts with two short presentations of platform architectures that approach the resulting design quality and safety challenge with different methods. The session will continue with an open discussion of these and possibly other approaches.
Speakers:
- W. Steiner, TTTech, Austria MotionWise – A Brief Introduction and Outlook
- D. Pangercic, APEX.AI, USA Open-source and Developer Centric SW Platform for the New Breed of Vehicles

ASDW05-08 Self-Awareness for Autonomy

Session Start Fri, 17:00 Session End Fri, 17:55

Organizer / Chair: Nikil Dutt (UC Irvine, USA)
Session Abstract: Self-awareness principles promise to endow autonomous systems with high degrees of adaptivity and resilience, borrowing from an abundance of examples in biology and nature. However, the engineering of dependable and predictable autonomous systems pose significant challenges for explainability, testing, and bounding safe behaviors. This session begins with short presentations by academic and industry speakers on these topics, and is followed by an interactive discussion with the audience. The first presentation by Prof. Andreas Herkersdorf (TU Munich) discusses how transparent machine learning techniques can be coupled with self-awareness to improve dependability in autonomous systems. The second presentation by Dr. Ahmed Nassar (Nvidia) addresses issues in training and testing of self-aware autonomous agents. The third presentation by Dr. Prakash Sarathy (Northrup Grumman) describes how to bound the emergent behavior of autonomous systems using a self-aware dataflow computing paradigm. The session is then followed by an open discussion between the audience and the speakers on research challenges and future directions at the intersection of self-awareness and autonomy.
Speakers:
- A. Herkersdorf, TU Munich, Germany. Transparent ML as a means of enhancing dependable autonomy
- A. Nassar, Nvidia, USA. Continuous Training and Testing of Autonomous Agents: The Road to Self-Awareness
- P. Sarathy, Northrop Grumman, USA. Self-aware dataflow computing for Bounded Behavior Assurance

ASDW05-09 ASD Closing

Session Start Fri, 18:00 Session End Fri, 18:10

Closing address by the ASD organizers.