The Road to Autonomous Vehicles: Vision and Sensors

People say that autonomous driving is already here, that by 2021 we will be using (SAE) L4/L5 vehicles. But the road to full autonomy is longer and at times, some tend to overlook just how complex the challenge we face really is. For our inaugural Meetups @ HARMAN event, we'll be deep-diving into the concept of autonomous vehicles, looking into various aspects of this revolution, the challenges it presents but also the opportunities.

Agenda (lectures will be held in Hebrew):
17:30-18:00 Gathering and Networking
18:00-18:05 Welcome remarks, Eyal Mike, R&D Director, OTA, HARMAN
18:05-18:30 Oren Buskila, VP R&D and Co- Founder, Innoviz: What LiDAR Does it Take to Build an Autonomous Car?
18:35-19:00 Ohad Akiva, Director, Computer Vision, HARMAN: “To See is
to Believe” - How Augmented Reality (AR) will Lead to Better
Autonomous Cars.
19:00-19:30 Beer and Pizza

There's free parking on the surrounding streets. Please bring business cards to maximize your networking opportunities.

Abstracts and bios:
Oren Buskila, Co-Founder & VP R&D, Innoviz
Summery: Autonomous cars are changing before our eyes from sci-fi to reality, a revolution that will transform our society and disrupt world economy. However, before we can grab a self-driving cab to work, there is a serious engineering challenge to overcome. To be able to drive itself safely, the car must have much better eyes than today: it needs to see the world in 3D. This super-power can be achieved with lidar, a laser-based 3D sensor, that delivers excellent vision where cameras and radars come short. However not all lidar technologies have the potential to meet the automotive market’s stringent requirements of performance, size, cost and reliability. In this talk, we’ll explore different concepts for building a lidar, and present what we at Innoviz believe is the winning path.

Oren Buskila has spent 15 years designing complex systems and managing large scale R&D projects. As the Co-founder and VP R&D of Innoviz Technologies, a leading provider of LiDAR sensing solutions, Mr. Buskila is heading the R&D group comprised of 150 employees and dozens of multidisciplinary R&D teams, tasked with enabling the mass commercialization of autonomous vehicles by providing high-performance LiDAR at mass market prices. Oren served 7 years in the elite technological unit of the Intelligence Corps of the Israel Defense Forces, where he carried out positions of project manager, system engineer and hardware engineer. His service earned him the prestigious Head of Military Intelligence Directorate Award. Oren holds a BSc in Physics, a BSc in Electrical Engineering, an MSc in Electro-optical Engineering and an MBA, all from Tel Aviv University and all summa cum laude.

Ohad Akiva, Director, Computer Vision, HARMAN:
Summery: AR is now a mega trend which goes across industries.
In 2018 Daimler shipped the first AR navigation application in the world that was built by the Israeli team in HARMAN. In this talk we will explore what it takes to build AR for cars and how it’s different from similar technologies for the smartphone. We will also review how this affect related applications such as navigation, positioning, calibration processes and maybe some hints on what we will see in the future.

Ohad Akiva started his journey in 2006 as Co-Founder of “PicItUp” - a computer vision start-up for image classification that helped big companies filter, cluster and find similar images with cloud services. In 2011 PicItUp pivoted to automotive with iOnRoad, to alert driver in dangerous situations. HARMAN acquired iOnRoad in 2013. For the last 3 years, Ohad is leading the development of augmented reality for HARMAN, with the first system deployed as part of Daimler's MBUX, commercially available on selected models (2018 A-Class, GLE and others). Ohad holds a BSc in Physics from Ben Gurion university, loves math, algorithms, riddles and acts as part time magician.