7 May UNLH Community LAB - Driverless cars - Driven by AI

Join UNLH for its second interactive community lab session, this time we are exploring artificial intelligence and driverless cars.

Our community lab is an inviting space for community members to learn about emerging technologies that will affect their lives and discuss what they can do in response. No prior knowledge or experience in the topic is needed, just bring your own perspective and curiosity.

This session will feature a talk and Q&A from Dr Lars Kunze from the Robotics team at Oxford University, followed by an interactive discussion on how you can take action at home, and what you want to see from institutions, technology makers, and government. Free food and refreshments will be provided.

Doors open: 2:00pm

Event start time: 2:30pm - 4.30pm

Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult. Suitable for people age 14 plus

This event will also be available  as an online event, please specify at checkout 

AI (artificial intelligence) and driverless cars

What is a self-driving car? A self-driving car (sometimes called an autonomous car or driverless car) is a vehicle that uses a combination of sensors, cameras, radar and artificial intelligence (AI) to travel between destinations without a human operator.

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) will offer significant societal benefits in the future. These include an improved safety, optimised transport networks, and an increased mobility. However, at the same time, the large-scale deployment of AVs will also create new challenges, for example, new types of incidents. The ability to access, explain and understand AV data related to failure or accidents will be a fundamental requirement for ensuring safety, liability and public trust. Regulations and standards are being developed for endowing autonomous vehicles with data recorders, also known as black boxes. These devices can log different types of parameters related to the vehicle status and collect great volumes of data relating to the vehicle and the surrounding environment. Although data retrieval is vital to understanding the causes of an accident, there might be ethical risks as well as legal, social and political implications related to the collection, storage, processing, access and use of data. In our work, we took a responsible innovation (RI) approach to these implications, seeking to establish current practice, evaluate the usefulness of present regulations for defining safety-critical scenarios, and identify gaps that could have significant consequences further down the line.

In this presentation, Lars will firstly give an overview of AV technology and research. Secondly, Lars will focus on AV accidents and discuss major ethical, legal, and practical challenges related to the collection, access, and use of AV data.

Biography of speaker

Lars Kunze is a Departmental Lecturer in Robotics in the Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI) and the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, and a Stipendiary Lecturer in Computer Science at Keble College. He is a Programme Fellow of the Assuring Autonomy International Programme (AAIP) and a Co-Editor of the German Journal of Artificial Intelligence (KI Journal, Springer). At ORI, Lars leads the Cognitive Robotics Group (CRG).

Lars studied Cognitive Science (BSc, 2006) and Computer Science (MSc, 2008) at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, and partly at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

He received his PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, in 2014.

In May 2013, Lars was appointed as a Research Fellow in the Intelligent Robotics Lab at the School of Computer Science at Birmingham University.

In March 2017, he joined the Oxford Robotics Institute at Oxford University.

The UNLH Community Lab is designed to support community decision-making, offering community members a chance to better understand and shape the emerging technologies that will be a part of their daily lives. The Lab will host five sessions across the year on various topics related to AI and its impact on society. The Lab is in partnership with the Responsible Technology Institute at Oxford University and Orbit - RRI Ltd, funded by the Minderoo programme. For more information visit: https://www.rti.ox.ac.uk/2022/11/07/minderoo-unlocking-the-potential-for-community-decision-making-on-technology-future/