Hear from Aurora, Nvidia and Waymo about the two roads to autonomous driving at TC Sessions: Mobility

There are two paths to the commercialization of self-driving vehicle technology.

In one camp, developers like Aurora, Cruise, Motional, and Zoox want to make a system that can handle all driving within certain conditions and with no expectation for a human to take over. The passenger can fall asleep or use their phone.

There are some autos that are taking an approach to autonomy that will improve over time. In these cases, an advanced driver-assistance system may offer limited features with the plan that over time a greater level of autonomy may be achieved.

Billions of dollars have been invested in different paths, each with its own set of true believers. In the middle is the chipmaking giant that develops and supplies the tools to deploy the technology.

We are excited to announce that three experts from Aurora, Nvidia and Waymo who are working on AV technology will join us onstage at the conference to help demystify the challenges and opportunities of each approach and weigh in on which approach might deliver first at scale.

The speakers are a senior VP of engineering at Aurora, a vice president of strategy, product management and data science at Waymo, and a VP of self driving software at Nvidia.

They have decades of experience in the field.

Li leads all software development for Aurora. She was the VP of product and engineering for the enterprise services platform at the time.

She worked for Synopsys in various research, development and engineering leadership roles and led product development, engineering and go-to-market strategy at VMware. She has degrees from Cornell University and Tsinghua University in electrical engineering and computer engineering.

Panigrahi manages the engineering and commercial roadmaps for the business lines of ride hailing, long-haul trucking and local delivery. He was the senior product manager at the time.

He was a software developer, product manager, and line manager in Canada, China, and Sweden. He was a research engineer at the university. Panigrahi received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, his master's degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Montreal and his master's degree in business administration from the IMD.

Tariq helps lead the creation and development of the Nvidia Drive platform. The core software pieces of this platform are provided by her team.

At Zoox, where she worked on the perception stack, she was the leader of the vision and perception teams. She spent a decade working in several areas, including real-time simulation and rendering, performance maximization for high- performance computing and computer vision.

The hype surrounding the merging of technology and transportation will affect a broad swath of industries, cities and the people who work and live in them.