Kurt Stolle

Humans have the amazing capacity to continuously learn new skills and generalize this knowledge from one domain to the other. For example, we can safely drive a car in all the different weather conditions the world presents us with. While driving, our mind makes life-and-death decisions based on the information that our senses have been evolved to provide us with. At the same time, we are functioning in a larger system of other drivers while constantly being distracted by various other thoughts and impulses.

By contrast, the future of sustainable mobility is characterized by (semi-)autonomous driving, where driving decisions are proposed by a computer program. For all practical implementations of such systems, the orchestrating computer has to construct a virtual model of the environment around it and the agents that influence it. This requires intelligent sensors that interprets reality in a way that maximizes systems’ abilities to make meaningful decisions. I believe that exploring innovative avenues in which we can improve machine perception will lead to a safer and more robust future for mobility. The emergent capabilities have the potential to make a lasting impact on the ways in which we interact with our vehicles.