Panel discussion: Connected and automated vehicles
Sam Lucero, Senior Principal Analyst, IHS Markit moderates a panel of experts including Richard Soja, Senior Principal Engineer, NXP Automotive,
Dave Sparks, Senior Research Scientist, Transportation Operations Group, Texas A&M Transportation Institute and Steven Shladover, California PATH Manager, Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology, Institute for Transportation to discuss connected and automated vehicles at the Enterprise IoT Summit in Austin, Texas.
Sam Lucero is a seasoned industry analyst with over 15 years of experience analyzing telecommunications and networking technology markets. For over a decade, he has researched the markets for machine-to-machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Sam has established leading M2M market research programs and managed international teams of industry analysts. He has authored numerous reports, forecast databases, and topical articles covering various aspects of the M2M/IoT market opportunity and has been widely quoted in news and trade journals, from the New York Times and the Economist to CNET and Wireless Week. Furthermore, Sam has moderated, presented, and judged at a number of industry events, including CTIA and Connected World. In 2014 Sam was named one of six “Augural Analysts” for M2M by Connected World Magazine.
Richard Soja was born and educated in Scotland, graduating from Aberdeen University with a degree in Engineering Science. He has spent the last 22 years in Austin, Texas working in the same building, first for Motorola, then Freescale and now NXP. His primary role is the definition of microcontrollers and processors for automotive systems and their security architectures. He is widely published in the US and Europe, has written two text books on 32 bit microcontrollers, holds 5 patents and has 6 pending.
Dave Sparks, is a senior research scientist with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, helping lead activities involving connected and automated vehicles and related transportation infrastructure technology. He has extensive leadership experience in the transportation industry, most notably as Executive Vice President and Managing Director of TransCore where he was responsible for the company’s worldwide intelligent transportation systems business. Dave also served as a Board Member, Executive Committee Member and Chairman of the Strategic Planning Committee of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS America), the leading advocate for the $48 billion US market for deployment of technology solutions to improve the nation’s surface transportation network. Previously he was a co-founder and managing director of a predecessor to TransCore and has worked for private investors involved in energy, real estate, manufacturing, distribution and technology services businesses. In 2008, Dave and his wife, Liz, founded a 501c3 private operating foundation to assist disadvantaged communities in rural Guatemala. Their foundation partners with government schools, teachers and parent groups, to improve opportunities for local children through education. Currently the Foundation is partnering with 4 school communities in Santiago, Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. Dave earned his MBA and BBA degrees at Texas A&M University. He and Liz have two grown children, one grandchild, and live in Jackson, Wyoming.
Dr. Steven Shladover was one of the pioneers in the creation of the ITS program in the U.S., beginning with work on founding the California PATH Program in the mid 1980s. He received his bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, where he also satisfied all the course requirements for a doctorate in Transportation Systems. He began working on applications of information technology to improving surface transportation as a graduate student in 1973, and has worked since then on a wide variety of research projects. He combines hard-core engineering expertise in dynamic systems and control with knowledge of transportation system policy, planning and economics, which enables him to effectively apply rigorous analysis methods to complicated transportation problems. He was one of the first researchers to do in-depth investigations of probe vehicle data sampling in the days of the “vehicle infrastructure integration” initiative, identifying limitations in the existing probe sampling protocols and recommending modifications.
Dr. Shladover has been managing a wide range of ITS research projects at PATH, with a particular emphasis on cooperativesystems and vehicle automation. He was the site program manager for PATH’s participation in the National Automated HighwaySystems Consortium (1994-8) and subsequent to that he led PATH’s development of bus and truck platoon systems andcooperative ACC systems. He pioneered the study of cooperative ACC in the U.S., beginning with computer simulations of thepossible effects on traffic flow, which were sufficiently encouraging to lead to the creation of an experimental program. He ledthe development and evaluation of the performance of two generations of CACC systems at PATH, producing the only sustainedbody of research on this subject (and the only implementations on real vehicles) in the U.S.
Dr. Shladover’s work is widely recognized internationally, and he has held many leadership positions in professional organizations. He chaired the TRB ITS Committee from 2004-2010 and will be chairing the TRB Committee on Vehicle-HighwayAutomation starting in 2013. He chaired the ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Division (DSCD) in 1995-6 and has been leading the U.S. delegation to ISO TC204/WG14, developing international standards for vehicle-roadway warning and control systems for the past twenty years. He is on the editorial advisory boards of the leading journals in intelligent transportation systems, Transportation Research Part C, Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems and IET Intelligent Transport Systems.Dr. Shladover was honored with the ASME DSCD’s Charles Stark Draper Award for Innovative Practice in 2008 and theAmerican Automatic Control Council’s Control Engineering Practice Award in 2011.
