Connected and autonomous vehicles as a grand challenge for middleware in cyber-physical systems

There has been immense interest and investments over the past 15 years on building autonomous vehicles, but practical deployments of AVs still do not seem viable in the near future. What if anything went wrong? From its origins in the first decade of the new millennium, the cyber-physical systems community has deemed AVs as a grand challenge. Meanwhile, thanks to remarkable advances in machine learning since the early 2010's, the AI community has targeted AVs as a poster child to measure its progress and considers AV as purely an AI problem to be solved. This talk will provide a synopsis of the speaker's work on AVs and the current state of the art. In order to stimulate a larger debate, the talk will then delve into where AI can and does contribute, and where the CPS community in general and the CPS middleware community in particular must continue to play a significant role. Research questions that can and must be addressed by the CPS and middleware communities will be posed. An active exchange during and after the presentation is encouraged.