Summary—In the first of two parts (continued in the Industry Sessions after the coffee break), leading figures from a range of industries present on applications of connected and autonomous vehicles in their sectors. The panel continues within the Industry Sessions in an open Q&A format to give attendees an opportunity to address issues important to them.

Biographies

Biography for Hani Mahmassani to follow.

Logan Jones is Senior Director of the New Business Horizons group in a newly formed strategic ventures group called HorizonX. In this position, Jones leads a team of professionals in developing new businesses to extend Boeing’s core capabilities into adjacent markets.

Prior to his current role, Jones was the strategy leader for Boeing Military Aircraft (BMA) where he oversaw the portfolio of investments and strategies to extend core products and capabilities in the rotorcraft, commercial derivative, global strike, and autonomous systems divisions. He was also responsible for leading a new business venture within BMA called Boeing Secure Computing Solutions—a leading provider of tamper-resistant commercial processors.

Before moving to St. Louis, Jones was a contracts representative in Ridley Park, PA where he was responsible for proposing, negotiating, and executing contracts for both global and domestic customers on the Chinook and Osprey programs. He began his career with The Boeing Company in finance as a part of the Business Career Foundations Program (BCFP) in Mesa, AZ.

Jones is a graduate of Montana State University, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing and a Master of Science in Program Management from Boston University. He also graduated with an Executive MBA from Washington University in St. Louis.

Biography for Thomas Kaminski to follow.

As VP of Engineering and Chief Technology Officer at AM General, Regis Luther oversees the ideation, development, and prototyping of vehicles for military and commercial applications. Additionally, he has been instrumental in developing a corporate technology road map that considers current and future automotive and technology trends, such as advanced powertrain options, alternative fuels, and autonomous technologies.

Previously, Mr. Luther served in a dual role as Vice President of Portfolio Planning & Program Management and Vice President of Defense Engineering at Navistar. Luther holds a BS in Chemical Engineering from Youngstown State University, a Master’s of Engineering in Chemical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University, and an Executive MBA from University of Houston. He is also a Certified CM Configuration Manager and an Automotive Services Excellence (ASE) re-certified Truck Technician with a Commercial Driver’s License.

AM General designs, engineers, manufactures, supplies and supports specialized vehicles for military and commercial customers worldwide. Through its military business, the company is widely recognized as the world leader in design, engineering, manufacturing and logistics support of Tactical Vehicles, having produced and sustained more than 300,000 vehicles in over 60 countries. AM General has more than five decades of experience meeting the changing needs of the defense and automotive industries, supported by its employees at major facilities in Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio, and a strong supplier base that stretches across 43 states. Please see more information about AM General at www.amgeneral.com.

Biography of Michael Murphy to follow.

Dr. John Reid came to Deere and Company in January 2001 after a 14-year career at the University of Illinois where he was recognized internationally for his contributions in automation and control for off-road equipment. Reid’s expertise includes machine vision perception, controls, and hardware-in-the-loop design. Previously, Reid served as a consultant to agricultural and food industries in their effort to deploy advanced technologies into precision agriculture and systems automation.

Dr. Reid has been a deep technical expert and transformational leader in many off-road technology areas. His work began in the 1980’s with his PhD work on the development of computer vision algorithms for agricultural vehicle guidance, and continued into the 1990’s with the research development of the first large-scale autonomous systems in agriculture. After arriving at Deere in 2001, Dr. Reid led Field Robotics for the Enterprise, and during this early period the Enterprise Field Robotics community developed an Enterprise team that capabilities in perception engineering, path and mission planning, and autonomous vehicle architecture. Reid and his teams supported several incubation projects for autonomous operations.

In 2006 Dr. Reid moved into a new Enterprise position, Director, Product Technology and Innovation, in which he provided transformational Innovation Delivery Leadership. He has led the establishment a global network of technology innovation centers that support strategic capability development and deliver game-changing innovation through the activities of these global technology innovation centers. In 2018, Dr. Reid also took responsibility to lead John Deere’s effort in Automation towards Autonomy. Dr. Reid, a 2017 John Fellow, is currently a Board Member of Fraunhofer USA. And he is the current Chairman of the Board for the Innovation Research Interchange.

Dr. David Thurston has been involved in systems engineering, emphasizing design, construction and operations of railroad and transit systems for over 38 years. He received a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Clemson University, a MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering, George Mason University, and a PhD in the School of Engineering at Temple University. He is currently Chief Engineer – Train Control for Canadian Pacific Railway.

In addition, he is a Registered Professional Engineer in eight states, an Honorary Fellow and Chairman of the North American Section in the Institution of Railway Signal Engineers, and Elected Board Member and Vice President – Land Transportation Division of the Vehicular Technology Society, Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.

Summary—Organized by Bret Johnson, Associate Director (NUTC) and Randy Berry, Professor (Northwestern University), the Plenary Panel from before the coffee break continues within the Industry Sessions in an open Q&A format to give attendees further opportunity to address issues important to them.

Biographies

Biography for Bret Johnson to follow. See above for Randy Berry's biography.

Summary—This panel was organized by Alvin Chin, Senior Researcher, Machine Learning (BMW Technology Corporation).

Full title: Challenges and Opportunities in Building Autonomous, Connected and Electric Vehicles from an Application and Service Perspective: Data Collection, Processing, Storage, Machine Learning, Intelligence, AI, Security, Blockchain

Autonomous, connected and electric vehicles are being mentioned everywhere these days. Every car manufacturer is all in in this vision of creating an autonomous, connected and electric vehicle. The building blocks are there, however, there still remain gaps in order to provide a trustful, secure, personal, and an awesome customer experience in the vehicle. What are the challenges and opportunities in order to achieve this vision? In this panel, industry experts will address topics of data collection, data processing, data storage, machine learning, intelligence and AI, services and applications, security, blockchain and UX for autonomous, connected and electric vehicles.

Biographies

Dr. Alvin Chin is a Senior Researcher in Machine Learning at BMW Technology Corporation, Chicago. His research interests include connected car, machine learning, big data, mobile social networking, and ubiquitous computing. Dr. Chin has authored more than 30 publications and 10 patents, including pending. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto and previously worked for Nokia Research Center, Nokia and Microsoft in Beijing, China.

Oliver Rumpf-Steppat is Head of Product Requirements, Development and Connected Drive for BMW in US and is based in NJ. Prior to that, he held roles as Head of Technical Product Management for Electronics and Driver Environment, Head of Electronic Architecture, and Head of Mid Platform Information and Communication. At BMW, he has covered the complete development process from early phases and concept work for vehicle projects (Chief Engineer Interior and E/E for MINI/small vehicle product line) over series development of components and features (Head-Up display, Cluster, Head unit-platform) up to System integration and validation on vehicle level. Oliver joined BMW in 1992 as a PhD candidate in the field of Systems Engineering and Use of CASE tools for E/E system development.

Leo leads user experience research at Toyota Research Institute (TRI), conducting studies to understand and design for current and future ways people and autonomous vehicles interact, including the psychology of how people experience and might integrate self-driving cars into daily life.

Before TRI, Leo led research at Waymo, Google Analytics, established the UX research team at Vine (acquired by Twitter), designed mixed human-robot interfaces at NASA for life support systems on the International Space Station, and ran the largest ever quantitative study of Firefox users at Mozilla.

Leo received his PhD in Communication at Stanford, focusing on the psychological effects of media multitasking. He is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Enterprise Technology and is also involved in a multi-institutional effort at Stanford University studying the fragmentation of life experience.

Joe Renz co-founded New Mobility Consulting & New Mobility World with his brother Alexander (Alex).

“We understand the car as an important building block in the future of multi-modal mobility. However, much of disruptive innovation happens in the form of solutions around the car and in the broader mobility ecosystem.
Alex and I go far beyond the car itself and take a holistic view of the emerging smart mobility and transportation space aka New Mobility World.”

“Simply put, cars and IT are in our blood. I am an Electronics Engineer from Stuttgart, Germany (Home of Mercedes, Bosch, Porsche, etc), and now, after a 20-year corporate IT career, reside in Chicago, USA.”

Jerry Quandt is Executive Director of the Illinois Autonomous Vehicles Association.

The Illinois Autonomous Vehicles Association is a privately-funded, not-for-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of autonomous vehicle technologies within the State of Illinois. The organization's focus is to establish Illinois as the leader in the development, design, and application of the system-of-systems that will transform mobility as we know it.

Jerry has worked most of his career in marketing and business transformation in a variety of verticals. His passion is to continue to create consumer-centric solutions leveraging bleeding-edge technologies to increase people's quality of life.

Jürgen Willis is the Senior Director of Product Management for Microsoft Azure Storage, Azure’s hyper-scale storage platform for unstructured, semi-structured and analytics data. Jürgen also leads Azure’s Autonomous Driving initiative. Previously at Microsoft, Jürgen led the Azure Fabric Controller team that manages the deployment, health and maintenance of Azure Virtual Machines. Jürgen has also led Product Management for a number of .NET components. Prior to Microsoft, Jürgen was a Senior Manager with Accenture, advising Enterprise clients in the Telecommunications and Financial Services industries and leading the implementation of both custom and packaged solutions.

Summary—Globally, efforts are underway to integrate Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) into the civilian airspace. This integration is necessary and important before the industry develops and deploys real-world commercial applications such as transportation of people and package delivery using UASs. Traditionally, communication support to air traffic management (ATM) comes from satellite communications (SATCOM) operating at the geostationary orbit level. Recently, two additional alternative paradigms are being investigated for UAS Traffic Management (UTM): 4G/5G cellular communications operating on the ground, and aerial networks and communications operating in the mid-air. The three levels of communication paradigms differ in terms of performance factors such as latency and data-rates that they can support. SATCOM has been enhanced to support global tracking after the incidents involving the missing aircraft such as the Malaysian Aircraft MH380.

Today, with the support of a constellation of communication satellites, minute-by-minute global tracking of an aircraft, is possible. ATM-like infrastructure is being envisioned for UTM as well by the industry. Telecommunications industry is working towards cellular communication-supported services for UTM. Cellular networks offer wide area, high speed, and secure connectivity for Beyond Radio Line-of-Sight (BRLOS) use cases. In recent years, there have been many field trials involving using terrestrial LTE networks to provide connectivity to UASs. Going forward, 5G would be a natural choice for supporting UAS traffic management. Aerial networks offer a solution to sharing information in the mid-air among the UASs with low latency and high data rates. However, establishing connectivity among the UASs without any supporting infrastructure is extremely challenging. Aerial ad hoc networks can complement satellite and cellular-network supported UAS navigation, command, and control. The panel will discuss the state of the art, challenges, standards, and regulatory aspects in providing communication support to UTM will be discussed.

This panel was organized by Kamesh Namuduri, Professor (University of North Texas).

Biographies

Kamesh Namuduri received his B.S. degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Osmania University, India, in 1984, M.S. degree in Computer Science from University of Hyderabad in 1986, and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from University of South Florida in 1992. Over the past ten years, his research is focused on aerial networking and communications. He co-organized a series of workshops on “Airborne Networking and Communications” in conjunction with IEEE, AIAA, AUVSI, and ACM Conferences.

He currently serves as Chair of the IEEE Standards Working Group (IEEE 1920.1: Aerial Communications and Networking Standards). He is a co-editor for the book titled “UAV Networks and Communications” published by the Cambridge University Press in 2017. He published over one hundred research articles to date.

He leads the Smart and Connected Community project on “Deployable Communication Systems” in collaboration with the government, public, and private organizations. This living laboratory project was demonstrated thrice during the Global City Teams Challenge hosted jointly by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and US Ignite in 2015, 2016, and 2017. He contributed to the development of research agenda, requirements and blueprints highly deployable communications systems led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and National Public Safety Telecommunications Council.

Joel Roberson is a Washington, DC Partner at Holland & Knight and a member of the firm’s Public Policy & Regulation Practice Group. Mr. Roberson’s practice focuses on public policy development, legislative advocacy and regulatory compliance with an emphasis in vehicle technology policy. He has significant experience in bipartisan coalition building, strategy development and high-stakes negotiation on behalf of Fortune 500 companies, not-for-profit organizations, educational institutions and trade associations.

Mr. Roberson advises high-tech clients on emerging public policy and regulatory issues, including self-driving cars, unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards, cybersecurity, privacy, and data breach response. Mr. Roberson has extensive experience working with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to develop policy to support the integration of drones into the national airspace. He assists clients to establish drone programs that are compliant with federal regulations and to request waivers or exemptions from the FAA where necessary to accomplish the goals of his clients. He is well-versed in preparing clients to testify before Congress, including congressional investigations into data breaches. Before joining Holland & Knight, Mr. Roberson served as a law clerk for the House Judiciary Committee where he prepared members of Congress to debate the first reauthorization of the Patriot Act.

Prior to entering private practice, Mr. Roberson worked within the elected leadership offices of the U.S. House of Representatives for former Congressman J.C. Watts (R-Okla.) and former Congresswoman Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio). In this role with Congress, he prepared major legislation for floor debate, including development of debate strategy, creation of key messages, and distribution of floor briefings for members of Congress and congressional staff. In the immediate wake of Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Roberson led three groups of volunteer law students to both Mississippi and Louisiana to provide volunteer legal services. The students worked on various legal issues including home owner’s insurance, foreclosure, succession, criminal, immigration and administrative law issues as well as providing basic services to those in need.

Helka-Liina Määttänen has been working with 3GPP technologies since 2006. Her research interests include downlink MIMO systems, small cells, LTE-WLAN interworking, 5G mobility and Aerials. She has been active in 3GPP WG1 and 3GPP WG2. She is co-author of several drone related publications and has been active for both LTE Rel-15 SI and WI on Aerials. She was rapporteur of LTE Rel-15 WI on Aerials.

She joined Ericsson in 2014 and worked before that at Broadcom, Renesas Mobile and subcontracting for Nokia while working on her doctoral thesis. She received her M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree in communications engineering from Helsinki University of Technology in 2004 and 2012, respectively. Her other interests include playing viola and motorcycles.

Matthew Satterley is AirMap’s Senior Federal Public Policy Manager. He manages the federal affairs portfolio with a focus on legislative analysis and development, as well as regulatory advocacy. He has served on multiple federal advisory committees and has significant experience in coalition building and management.

Matthew’s work with AirMap is helping to shape Unmanned Traffic Management in the United States of America and abroad. He manages AirMap’s participation in the Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability program, as well as the UAS Integration Pilot Program, and the Unmanned Traffic Management Pilot Program, initiatives providing industry feedback which will inform future unmanned traffic lawmaking and regulation.

Prior to joining AirMap, Matthew served the Office of Congressman Frank A. LoBiondo (NJ-02) as Deputy Chief of Staff and Legislative Director where he interpreted and drafted legislative proposals in support of Congressman LoBiondo’s Chairmanship of the Aviation Subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives. He worked with the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in developing the Aviation Innovation, Reform, and Reauthorization Act of 2016. Additionally, he supported the Congressman’s work on the House Armed Services Committee and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Matthew has also served the Offices of Congresswoman Buerkle (NY-25), Congressmen Mack (FL-14), and McHugh (NY-23) contributing to their respective legislative agendas. Away from Congress, he spent time with Axiom Resource Management, Inc. establishing Congressional and industry stakeholder strategy for the Department of Defense’s Defense Healthcare Management Systems. He is a graduate of St. Lawrence University, with a degree in government.

Dr. Jae H. Kim is responsible for providing Enterprise-wide integrated system solutions and products to meet Boeing’s needs in the Cyber Security, Communications and Network Technology Domain, while supporting a long range business strategy for the products and services.

Dr. Kim has been a PI/PM for a number of U.S. Department of Defense programs from DARPA, Army CERDEC, Air Force AFRL, Navy ONR and NASA. He has been also serving as an Affiliate Professor and Graduate Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Washington, Seattle, WA since 2000 and IEEE Associate Editor for the Communications Letters (Monthly Technical Journal) for a decade since 2001. Prior to joining Boeing in 1991, he has been a Senior Research Scientist and Project Manager at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 1987.

Dr. Kim has served as an IEEE Associate Editor for the Communications Letters (Monthly Technical Journal) for a decade since 2001. He had served various Technical Conferences and Workshops as reviewer and organizers. He was a Technical Program Chair of IEEE MILCOM 2011 (Baltimore, MD) on November 2011. Dr. Kim received his B.S. and M.S. from Seoul National University, and Ph.D. from University of Florida, Gainesville, all from Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Dr. Kim is an author/co-author of 100+ publications, two books as Editors, 8 U.S. Patents (2 U.S. and 1 International Patent pending), 10 NASA Technical Innovation Awards, and 25+ Boeing Technology Awards for outstanding technical performances. Dr. Kim co-edited a book, “Green IT: Technologies and Applications” published by Springer-Verlag (August 2011), that has been listed as a top 25% most downloaded eBooks in the relevant Springer eBook Collection in 2012, and co-edited a book, “UAV Networks and Communications,” published by Cambridge University Press (January 2018).

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