AutoSens Advisory Board

Dr Valentina Donzella received her BSc (2003) and MSc (2005) in Electronics Engineering from University of Pisa and Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies (Pisa, Italy), and her PhD (2010) in Innovative Technologies for Information, Communication and Perception Engineering from Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies. In 2009, she was a visiting graduate student at McMasterUniversity (Hamilton, ON, Canada) in the Engineering Physics department. She is currently Associated Professor, Head of the Sensors area in the Intelligent Vehicles group at WMG, University of Warwick, UK. She has been awarded a Royal Academy ofEngineering Industrial Fellowship on camera sensors and she is the lead of the workpackage on sensor modelling in the EU project ROADVIEW; Before joining WMG, she was a MITACS and SiEPIC postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC, Canada), in the Silicon Photonics group. She is first author, co-author, and last author of several journal papers on top tier optics and sensors journals. Her research interests are: LiDAR, Intelligent Vehicles, integrated optical sensors, noise factors, sensor fusion, and silicon photonics. Dr Donzella is Full College member of EPSRC and Senior Fellow of Higher Education Academy.

Srinivasa S Guntur is Currently working for Rivian Automotive as a Sr Staff Functional Safety engineer. He has been part of Electrical Architecture group at Rivian. His professional interests are into electrification & smart sensor technologies especially in the field of safety of electrical design for Autonomous vehicle & sensor technologies.
Prior to Rivian, He worked for Honeywell international for more than 14 years and most recently he worked at their headquarter location Charlotte, NC. His Core expertise at Honeywell was designing safety critical products for Honeywell’s Life safety & Industrial safety business.
He Holds a master’s degree in Control systems & Instrumentation from JNTU Hyderabad, India.

Frank Schirrmeister is the Executive Director, System Solutions at Synopsys. Prior to this role, he was vice president of solutions and business development at Arteris IP, where he lead activities in the automotive, enterprise & computing, communications, consumer, and industry verticals and the technology horizontals artificial intelligence, machine learning, safety, and hardware/software. Before Arteris IP, Frank held various senior leadership positions at Cadence Design Systems, Synopsys, and Imperas, focusing on product marketing and management, solutions, strategic ecosystem partner initiatives, and customer engagement.

Berveleen Mashonga holds a masters in engineering from the University of Portsmouth, in England. Specialising in automotive advanced technology, Berveleen prides herself in being a STEM advocate and mentor for girls and women around the world

Joel Lopes, a Staff Software Engineer at Cruise LLC, specializes in creating cloud services for autonomous vehicle maps and routing, with a strong emphasis on scalability, reliability, and availability. He holds esteemed positions as a senior member of IEEE and a fellow of IETE, and has been honored with the ‘Titan Business Award’ for his significant contributions to the industry. Before joining Cruise, Joel accrued over a decade of experience architecting robust and secure software at major cloud providers like Microsoft and Google. He holds a Master’s degree in computer science from the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Mumbai.

Egil has over 40 years’ experience in the high-tech and automotive industries. He is currently a senior partner and principal analyst at VSI Labs. VSI is unique with its applied research and technical insights derived through its own test vehicles and provide perspectives, insights and analysis of ADAS/AD technologies via its portal service. Egil is also a contributor to EE Times and has written nearly 100 articles since June 2020. Egil’s recent research has been focused on autonomous driving technologies and use-cases, software-fined vehicle segments and BEVs. He has extensive experience in technology forecasting, market forecasting and competitive analysis. Egil was co-founder of Telematics Research Group, which was acquired by iSuppli in 2008. IHS acquired iSuppli in 2010. He worked for IHS Market until mid-2020 as research director of automotive technology. Egil was Chairman and co-founder of Future Computing, an information service company that was the leading market research and product testing company for the PC industry. Future Computing was sold to McGraw-Hill. He remained president of the company’s StoreBoard unit for several years following a private placement. StoreBoard tracked the sales of PC products and was later sold to Ziff-Davis. Previously, he was with Texas Instruments where he was a strategic and product planner for microprocessors, minicomputers and PCs. He has written columns and papers for technology publications and has made presentations, seminars and lectures in the USA, Asia and Europe. Egil has made over 750 papers, reports and conference presentations in the last 35 years. He received B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Purdue University. Egil is a life member of IEEE.

Clément Nouvel is LiDAR CTO at Valeo Group, leading supplier in the field of Safety and Automated Driving, and market leader in automotive grade LiDAR sensors.

Prior to this position, Clément has been acting as Active Safety Business Development Director from 2016 to 2019 and held several positions at Renault-Nissan Alliance from 2003 focused on innovation engineering and project management, based in France and Asia.

He is currently in charge of leading Valeo LiDAR product development, a global team including functions ranging from Business Development to Engineering and Technology Partnerships.

Clément holds a Master’s degree from both Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole Supérieure d’Electricité, as well as an Executive MBA from INSEAD.

Juergen has an extensive success record in Application, Sales, Product Definition, Business Management and Product Marketing including set-up and management of offices around the world. He is a Strategic Advisor and Executive Management Consultant to international OEM, Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers with special focus in Asia. He has a strategic Focus on Sensors technology (Radar, Ultrasonic, Camera and Lidar) and Sensor Fusion technology (Domain Controllers) for Autonomous Drive Level 2 to Level 5. Juergen’s key Application focus is: Driver Assistance Systems (Ultra Sonic Park Assist, Radar, Camera Systems), Infotainment, Autonomous Valet Parking, Cyber Security.

Robin Jenkin works at NVIDIA Corporation where he models image quality for autonomous vehicle applications. Robin received, BSc(Hons) Photographic and Electronic Imaging Science (1995) and his PhD (2001) in the field of image science from University of Westminster. He also holds a M.Res Computer Vision and Image Processing from University College London (1996). Robin is a Fellow of The Royal Photographic Society, UK, and a Senior Member SPIE. He is a Visiting Professor at University of Westminster within the Computer Vision and Imaging Technology Research Group.

For over 25 years, Rudy Burger has worked with computer vision, digital imaging and embedded camera technologies as a founder, operating executive and advisor. He has developed both a deep technical expertise and an awareness of market opportunity dynamics in these sectors that he leverages to guide his clients towards strategic successes. He currently focuses on the Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) sector and has written several industry research reports to profile the leading and emerging technologies and outline the market landscape. Rudy is the Managing Partner of Woodside Capital Partners and works with growth stage technology companies to execute local and cross-border M&A transactions and private placements. Prior to founding WCP, he led Scipher plc through a corporate restructuring as CEO. His professional experience also includes executive roles with NEC, Visioneer and Xerox as well as founding the MIT Media Lab Europe joint venture with the Irish government. He currently serves on the boards of two UK companies, Bango plc (AIM:BGO) and Seeing Machines plc (AIM: SEE). Rudy holds degrees from Yale (BSc and MSc in EE) and Cambridge (PhD in Digital Imaging).

Dr. Duong-Van Nguyen is the Deputy CEO in charge of ADAS/AD at Vinfast, and was formerly Head of ADAS at Panasonic Automotive Systems Europe (PASEU) based in Germany. He is recognized as the Senior IEEE, and a member of IEEE standard P2020.

Dr. Nguyen has been a pioneer and leading scientist in the fields of ADAS, Autonomous Driving, Robotics & Machine Learning, where he has published 1 book, 9 patents and a number of journals and conference papers. His research group at Panasonic demonstrated the world-first level 4-autonomous parking at ITS World Congress 2021, and the state-of-the art of 3D Sensing and Parking in CES 2020, CES 2021, and CES 2022.

Dr. Nguyen and his PASEU team received three Research and Innovation Grants CARAMEL (2019), CPSoSAware (2020), and TRUSTEE(2022) by the European Research Council.

Before, he worked as R&D Manager at Hyundai Mobis (Germany), and as Research Engineer at Valeo (Ireland), after his Ph.D graduation in Robotics from University of Siegen (Germany, 2009-2013).

Coming soon.

Dr. Kevin Lu is VP of Product Lines and General Manager of Zongmu Technology. He is a veteran of automotive ADAS technologies with 17 years of direct experience in automotive camera systems and 35+ years of R&D and industrialization of cameras, optical imaging and machine vision applications. A prolific innovator with 110+ issued patents and awards including 2018 Automotive PACE Award, he is instrumental in designing and introducing to mass market some of the industry-first ADAS products.

Professor of Physics and Optics. Expert in automotive image quality. 25 years of experience with optical technologies of all flavours, from fundamental quantum optics research to optical quality questions arising during assembly of 100.000 cameras per year. I also research explainable AI methods to further investigate the link between optical quality, image quality and the impact on AI explainability.

Patrick has in excess of 25 years experience in scientific and technological development internationally, 19 of these at a senior level, designing, leading, innovating and consulting on new technologies with multimillion Euro project budgets.

Doctor Håkan Sivencrona has worked with safety related automotive applications for over 25 years for various suppliers and roles, including safety manager. He has also been involved in many research projects within AD/ADAS. Dr Sivencrona is one of the originators of the ISO 26262 SEooC concept as well as the SOTIF standard, ISO 21448.
After working at Volvo cars daughter company Zenseact for a few years, Hakan was offered to transfer to Volvo cars where he will continue to work on the mission to make every mile safer.

“Wilfried Philips is a senior full professor at Ghent University, where he leads the Image on Processing and Interpretation (IPI) research group and the research consortium iKnow, which has realized 9 spin off companies. At imec, he is scientific lead of the Center of Excellence on Image Processing and Sensor Fusion. He is co-founder of the IoT company Senso2Me. He is senior member of IEEE and fellow of the Belgian-American Educational Foundation.

Wilfried Philips’s and IPI’s research interests relate to image real-time computer vision and fusion of “rich” sensor data (radar/video/LiDaR/thermal/hyperspectral), with a strong focus on industrial applications. IPI has founded three spin off companies. It has also created “”Quasar,”” a brand new high-performance GPU-programming solution that offers greatly reduced development time.”

Shashank is a seasoned industry leader with 21+ years of experience in the Semiconductor and Automotive industry.  His career spans a broad range of topics including all aspects of product design from automotive OEM platform architecture to algorithm development, silicon IP architecture (targeting Image processing, computer vision and AI applications), as well as software development and applications. He has over 35 patents and has published multiple papers in international conferences and is on the advisory board of the Auto-Sens conference. In his current role, Shashank is the director of product management for Qualcomm’s ADAS SoCs and is responsible for the roadmap and execution of these devices. Prior to joining Qualcomm he was working as ADAS Platform Architect with Rivian Inc. where he was responsible for leading the architecture and sensor suite definition for multiple generation of Rivian ECU(s). Shashank also has a long career history working with TI focusing on Automotive Silicon and Systems with a keen interest on Image processing.

Dr. Martin Punke is leading the Camera Product Technology group at Continental. His team is working on concepting, engineering and productization of camera systems for ADAS applications with a focus on optics, image sensors and image quality. Additionally, camera sensor modelling is a recent work product of his group. In his previous positions at Nokia he was responsible of camera, flashlight and illumination technologies in mobile phones. Martin received the Dipl.-Ing. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and information technology from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, in 2003 and 2007, respectively. In his Ph.D. thesis he worked on organic semiconductor devices for microoptical applications.

Albert Theuwissen is author or coauthor of 200+ technical papers in the solid-state imaging field and issued several patents. He was co-editor of IEEE Micro special issue on Digital Imaging Nov./Dec. 1998 and of the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices special issues on Solid-State Image Sensors, May 1991, October 1997 and January 2003. For the latest special issue IEEE-ED on image sensors, published in January 2016, he acted as the guest editor-in-chief. He was general chairman of the International Image Sensor Workshop in 1997, 2003, 2009 and 2015. He is member of the Steering Committee of the aforementioned workshop and founder of the Walter Kosonocky Award, which highlights the best paper in the field of solid-state image sensors. Together with his peers, Eric Fossum and Nobukazu Teranishi, he founded the International Image Sensor Society, a non-profit organization to stimulate sharing of technical knowledge in the field of digital image capturing.