Trust, But Verify: Towards Self-Aware, Safe, Autonomous Self-Driving Systems

Abstract

Mobile autonomous devices use sophisticated algorithms to automatically navigate diverse physical environments in a safe manner. Guaranteeing system safety while optimizing resource-usage of an autonomous device’s computer is an outstanding challenge. Runtime verification helps provide robustness by monitoring application execution at runtime. These systems operate in dynamic environments, requiring self-aware runtime management to maximize lifetime while enforcing safe execution. Safe execution and lifetime management require consideration of performance and efficiency, two conflicting objectives. Existing research has explored algorithmic safety guarantees, software offloading, and energy-efficient hardware, but no work has coordinated all of the approaches to maximize resource-efficiency within safety bounds. We present past and current work undergone in this domain as part of the Information Processing Factory Project, a partnership between UCI, Tech. U. Munich, and Tech. U. Braunschweig under joint funding by the US NSF and the German DFG agencies.

Brief Biography

Fadi Kurdahi received his PhD from the University of Southern   California in 1987. Since then, he has been a faculty at the   Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at UCI, where he   conducts research in the areas of Computer Aided Design and design methodology of large scale   systems. He served as the Associate Dean for Graduate and Professional Studies of the Samueli School of Engineering 2017-2022, and since 2012 as the Director of the Center for   Embedded & Cyber-physical Systems (CECS), comprised of world-class researchers in the general area of Embedded and Cyber-physical Systems. He served on numerous editorial boards, and was program chair or general chair on program committees of several workshops,  symposia and conferences in the area of CAD, VLSI, and system design.   He received the best paper awards for the IEEE Transactions on VLSI in  2002, ISQED in  2006 and ASP-DAC in 2016, and other   distinguished paper awards at DAC, EuroDAC, ASP- DAC and ISQED. He also received the Distinguished Alumnus award from his Alma Mater, the   American University of Beirut in 2008. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the AAAS.