Email: koopman AT cmu DOT edu
Short bio
Prof. Philip Koopman is an internationally recognized expert on Autonomous Vehicle (AV) safety whose work in that area spans over 25 years. He is also actively involved with AV policy and standards as well as more general embedded system design and software quality. He was the principal technical contributor to the UL 4600 standard for autonomous system safety issued in 2020. He is a faculty member of the Carnegie Mellon University ECE department where he teaches software skills for mission-critical systems. In 2018 he was awarded the highly selective IEEE-SSIT Carl Barus Award for outstanding service in the public interest for his work in promoting automotive computer-based system safety. In 2022 he was named to the National Safety Council's Mobility Safety Advisory Group.
The most pressing question regarding autonomous vehicles is: will they be safe enough? The usual metric of "at least as safe as a human driver" is more complex than it might seem. Which human driver, under what conditions? And are fewer total fatalities OK even if it means more pedestrians die? Who gets to decide what safe enough really means when billions of dollars are on the line? And how will anyone really know the outcome will be as safe as it needs to be when the technology initially deploys without a safety driver?
In this talk I discuss the factors involved in measuring and predicting autonomous vehicle (AV) safety. These include what people mean by "safe," risk management vs. safety, setting an acceptable safety goal, measuring safety, safety performance indicators, deciding when to deploy, and ethical AV deployment. A framework for making a responsible deployment decision needs to include not just risk, but also deal with inevitable uncertainty, stakeholder inclusion, and an ethical governance model. The talk is a high level overview of my recently published book: How Safe Is Safe Enough? Measuring and Predicting Autonomous Vehicle Safety.