Distinguished Lecture Series with Matthias Althoff, Ph.D.

Speaker(s): Matthias Althoff, Ph.D., Professor of Computer Science — Technical University of Munich

Presentation Title: Certifiable Autonomous Systems Through Online Verification

Date/Time: Thursday, July 21st | 1:00 PM ET

Professional Development Hours (PDH): 1

Abstract: Engineers and computer scientists are currently developing autonomous systems whose entire set of behaviors in future, untested situations is unknown. For instance, how can a designer foresee all situations that an autonomous vehicle will face? Keeping in mind that many autonomous systems are safety-critical or operation-critical, it is irresponsible to deploy such systems without testing all possible situations—this, however, seems impossible since even the most important possible situations are often unmanageably many. This presentation proposes a paradigm shift that will make it possible to guarantee safety in unforeseeable situations (under mild model assumptions): Instead of verifying the correctness of a system before deployment, we propose online verification, a new verification paradigm where a system continuously checks the correctness of its next action by itself in its current environment (and only in it) in a just-in-time manner. The usefulness of this method will be demonstrated primarily for autonomous driving and robotics.

Speaker Bio:

Matthias Althoff received a diploma in Mechatronics and Information Technology from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, in 2005. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the same university under the supervision of Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing./Univ. Tokio Martin Buss in 2010. From 2010 – 2012 he was a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, USA, with a joint appointment in electrical engineering and the Robotics Institute. He joined the Computer Science Department at Ilmenau University of Technology, Germany, in 2012 as Assistant Professor for Automation Systems. Since 2013 Matthias Althoff is a Professor in Computer Science at the Technical University of Munich.

His research interests include the design and analysis of cyber-physical systems, formal verification of continuous and hybrid systems, reachability analysis, planning algorithms, and robust and fault-tolerant control. The main applications of his research are automated vehicles, robotics, and power systems.