The Federal Automated Vehicles Policy - A Roundtable Discussion

NOTE NEW DAY AND TIME: 11/17 at 10:30 am/1:30 pm. A dial-in is posted in the comments section below.

Please join us for another Robotics, AI, and the Law Meetup. This month, we will host a roundtable discussion of the Federal Automated Vehicles Policy issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in September. Our discussant will be Sven Beiker, Ph.D. of McKinsey & Co. Our moderator will be Stephen S. Wu of Silicon Valley Law Group.

Our topic: In September, the National High Traffic Safety Administration issued its Federal Automated Vehicles Policy. You can download a copy of the Policy here: http://www.nhtsa.gov/nhtsa/av/av-policy.html

The Policy is the first step in establishing a national roadmap to deployment of mobility solutions that will revolutionize transportation in a way we haven’t seen since horses and buggies gave way to the automobile.

This roundtable discussion offers an opportunity to discuss our collective feedback on the Policy. Will it be effective to promote the mass-market deployment of automated vehicles? Will it effectively manage the safety risks to drivers, occupants, and the public? What are the implications of deep learning algorithms that are somewhat of a black box even to those who develop them? Our discussant and moderator will kick off the conversation, but this is your opportunity to offer your comments or raise critical questions about the Policy.

Our discussion leaders:

Discussant—Dr. Sven Beiker is a Consultant with McKinsey & Company at the Firm’s Silicon Valley Office. He specializes in product development and strategy, particularly in the automotive and personal mobility sector. Until 2014, he was the Executive Director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford University, an interdisciplinary partnership between academia and industry to address the challenges of personal mobility in the 21st century. Prior, he worked at BMW with responsibilities in technology scouting, innovation management, systems design, and product development. He holds MS and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering / Systems Design. He also is a Lecturer in Management at the Stanford Business School.

Moderator--Stephen Wu is an attorney with Silicon Valley Law Group in San Jose, CA. He advises clients on compliance, liability, security, and privacy matters regarding the latest technologies, including robotics, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and virtual reality. His litigation practice includes resolving IT and intellectual property disputes. He drafts and negotiates service agreements, licenses, marketing agreements, and other technology contracts. Steve served as the 2010-2011 Chair of the American Bar Association Section of Science & Technology Law and 2014-2015 Chair of the High Technology Law Section of the Santa Clara County Bar Association. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1988 and was VeriSign’s second in-house attorney.

The discussant and moderator collaborated on the team supporting Daimler & Benz Foundation’s project to create an interdisciplinary publication on driverless cars: Autonomous Driving – Technical, Legal and Social Aspects (2016). An Open Access free version of the book is available here: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-662-48847-8

A dial-in will be provided in the comment section below no later than the evening before the talk for those who cannot come in person. If you are planning on attending in person, please leave a comment so we can plan refreshments.

Slides: There may or may not be slides for this program. If there are slides, a link to see the slides will appear in the comment section below. This link will expire at the end of the talk, but we will distribute a pdf of any slides by a link to a download afterwards, again in the comment section.

We hope you can attend the program, and thank you for your interest.