AutoSens Europe Speakers

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.

Born in 1980, Austria, studied mechanical engineering and economics on the TU Graz and University of Linköping (degree). Started working in the automotive industry at Continental in Berlin 2007, building up a prototype shop for high voltage Lithium-Ion Batteries, followed by roles in Purchasing and Launch Management.

Moving back to Austria the major step was global program management at Magna, responsible for the eDrive platform development, vehicle integration and acquisition programs for various OEMs. Part of the team that established the Magna JV with Hasco in Shanghai.

Launched Kontrol in 2017, building an end to end complience platform for products with the focus on the automotive industry.

Leading projects and people across the automotive world of driver assistance for more than 15 years, Torsten holds a Master’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering from Technische Universität Braunschweig. He began work for Volkswagen AG in 2015 and relocated to China to join VW AnHui in 2019.

Adrian is the Senior Vice President Autosense at Tobii – the company’s business segment focused on interior sensing.

Adrian has two decades of experience in the space of computer vision and edge AI.

He led global technology development, product management and customer engineering teams and developed a track record of deploying edge computer vision applications on consumer products such as smart cameras, smartphones, and smart cars.Adrian has over 40 granted and published US patents in computer vision and computational imaging.

He earned his Bachelor of Science in Imaging & Artificial Intelligence and his Master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from the Politehnica University of Bucharest.

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

Dr Kirsten Matheus is engineer and economist. Since 2003, she worked in the automotive industry; since 2009 at BMW. At BMW she is responsible for the strategy for the in-vehicle networking technologies. This entails ensuring the availability of suitable in-vehicle networking technologies ahead of time. In this context she successfully introduced Ethernet as a networking technology into the automotive industry. She and her former colleague Thomas Königseder describe their experiences, background and technical concepts behind the use of Ethernet in the automotive industry in a book titled “Automotive Ethernet”. Her new book, co-authored by her colleague Michael Kaindl, “Automotive High Speed Communication Technologies, SerDes and Ethernet for Sensor and Display Applications”, will appear in Autumn 2022.

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.

Adriano Palao has 9 years of experience in Automotive Engineering, within the Testing and Validation domain. After completing his Bachelor and Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering by Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, he worked for Nissan Motor Corporation, Applus+ IDIADA, Punch Powertrain, and Mitsubishi Electric. In January 2022 took the role of Technical Manager ADAS/AD at Euro NCAP.

Dr. Boyd Fowler joined OmniVision in December 2015 as the Vice President of Marketing and was appointed Chief Technology Officer in July 2017. Prior to joining OmniVision, he was co-founder and VP of Engineering at Pixel Devices, where he focused on developing high-performance CMOS image sensors. After Pixel Devices was acquired by Agilent Technologies, Dr. Fowler was responsible for advanced development of commercial CMOS image sensor products. In 2005, Dr. Fowler joined Fairchild Imaging as the CTO and VP of Technology, where he developed SCMOS image sensors for high-performance scientific applications. After Fairchild Imaging was acquired by BAE Systems, Dr. Fowler was appointed the technology director of the CCD/CMOS image sensor business. He has authored numerous technical papers, book chapters, and patents. Dr. Fowler received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1990 and 1995 respectively.

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.

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.

Dr. Andras Palffy, MSc from Cranfield, UK, is a machine perception expert from Hungary.

He worked at a computer vision startup acquired by Verizon before pursuing a PhD at TU Delft, specialising in Radar-Based perception for Intelligent Vehicles.

During his PhD, he recognized that while radars have been used for years in the automotive industry for functions like cruise control and emergency braking, their full potential remained unexplored, and can only be achieved through dedicated radar-focused AI solutions.

That is why with two fellow scholars (Balazs Szekeres and Srimannarayana Baratam), he founded Perciv AI, a machine perception software company providing next-generation, AI-driven perception solutions for radars and sensor fusion.

Michele is a Principal Research Analyst at S&P Global Mobility, leading the research for Autonomy in Europe.

Michele specializes in the areas of automated driving. He works as analyst researching mobility and automotive technologies with a focus on advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), sensors and related industry trends. Complementary research includes technical topics from standards to safety protocols, mandates and regulations, cost, pricing and consumer adoption.

Before joining S&P, He worked for +12 years in the ADAS design field for the industry: at Stellantis as Global Technical Leader, Performance Manager for Maserati, Functional Integrator for FCA and Research & Development for Marelli since 2010. He has extensive experience facilitating dialogue between international carmakers (OEM), major automotive suppliers and tech companies, converging to the most scalable technical solutions and developing autonomous driving strategies.

Key Expertise: ADAS Functional Integration design (OEM perspective), ADAS performance benchmarking and target definition in compliance with EuroNCAP objective & mandated regulations (such as GSR), technical project management and Automated driving legislation, strategies and sensors roadmap.

Previously Michele graduated with honours as Electronic Engineer from Politecnico di Torino. He is based in Torino (Italy) and speaks fluently English, Portugues and of course Italian.

Nicolas du LAC, graduated in 2000 in engineering major Robotics, he joined Intempora in 2001 as software engineer, then CTO of the company. In 2012 he was appointed CEO of Intempora. Today he manages the company and the software development engineering team.

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.

Roger is CEO and founder of StrategiaNow Consulting, President of the Mobile Satellite User Association, and is an advisor to the International Telecommunications Union.  Roger draws on 25+ years’ experience in the technology industry as an analyst, journalist and consultant. Roger is a graduate of Dartmouth College.

Robert is a programme manager with InnovateUK, supporting the challenge definition and overseeing the delivery of the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles project portfolio. His role involves supporting research & development projects to help shape the future and prosper businesses in the mobility sector. InnovateUK Connected and Autonomous Vehicles work brings together consortia of academia, technology start-ups, medium and large enterprises to help solve the main challenges of our future mobility systems, infrastructure and services. He is passionate about seeing technology grow from idea, through prototype to product which result in having a positive impact on people’s lives.

More than 20 years of experience as Project Manager, Team Manager and Executive in the area of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and Telematics for passenger cars and commercial vehicles. Familiar with all technologies involved such as vehicle control, environment perception, digital maps, positioning and vehicular communication technology. Experienced in strategy development. Very well networked within worldwide ADAS and ITS community. Long lasting contacts to R&D departments of all major European and Japanese OEMs, suppliers and electronics companies and to research institutes and universities.

Long record of collaboration with European Commission, German Federal Ministries of Economics and Technology and of Education and Research, Ministry of Land Infrastructure and Transport in Japan and US DoT. Well experienced in representing own company or interests of consortia in associations such as ACEA (European Automobile Manufacturers´ Association), EUCAR (European Council for Automotive R&D) or VDA (Verband der Automobilindustrie).

Peter Vastag received his diploma (2012) and Ph.D. (2017) in physics from Eberhard-Karls University in Tübingen, Germany. He joined Robert Bosch GmbH in 2017, since then working in the hardware development of driver assistance cameras, focussing on image quality topics, esp. related to image sensors.

Benjamin Lyon is senior vice president and chief technology officer of Aptiv, a position he has held since December 2022.

In this role, Mr. Lyon is responsible for ensuring that Aptiv remains at the forefront of emerging and disruptive technology trends and prioritizing longer-term technology and business model opportunities in mobility and adjacent markets. In addition, Mr. Lyon is responsible for the technology leadership of the global engineering organization, which includes more than 19,000 technologists located in 12 major technical centers across the globe.

Mr. Lyon has over two decades of experience in senior engineering, developing technology, commercializing products and executing program launches at leading technology companies.

Most recently, Benjamin served as Chief Engineer and Executive Vice President of Engineering and Operations of Astra Space, Inc. since 2021. In this role, he successfully deployed 22 satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO) and launched the Astra Space Engine Hall-Effect thruster product line.

Before that, Benjamin served at Apple Inc. for over two decades, developing and productized sensors, displays, high-performance compute, and safety / security critical technology for scale. While at Apple, he also cofounded their autonomous systems effort.

Mr. Lyon received a Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

 Expert in automotive camera and perception systems, image quality, sensors, optics, image processing, and computer vision. 11 years of industry experience at Valeo Vision systems, developing first-to-market automotive camera systems, including rearview, surround view, mirror replacement and machine vision camera systems. Co-author of IEEE P2020 Automotive Image Quality Standard. Broad experience in camera module manufacturing, including industrial vision system development, production test specification, production automation optimisation and quality control. 

Alex supports market expansion at Simulytic, an insurtech startup and member of PAVE Europe that provides autonomous vehicle deployment risk scores to the insurance industry. In his 25 years of experience, he has led technical and commercial teams across Europe and North America, focussing on modelling the mobility of people and goods for various B2B technology startups.

Andreas Augsten holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from Technical University Darmstadt (Germany). In the early days of in-car navigation systems, Andreas was engaged in launching one of the first systems in European market while he also has many years of experience in car audio products. Since 2010 he is working at Mobis Technical Center Europe in multiple roles covering Infotainment, ADAS, Autonomous Driving and required sensors. Currently, Andreas is leading product planning and technology strategy topics in Europe focusing on realizing innovations for vehicle automation and future mobility.

Holding a Master’s degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
Experienced engineer and leader, with a demonstrated history of solving complex problems in various fields including Image Processing and Computer Vision, utilizing all the available techniques- from classic to Deep Learning.

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).

Richard Seoane is an accomplished leader with more than 30 years in the automotive industry, currently serving as Vice President of Business Development, Thermal Sensing, Magna Electronics. In his role, he leads the Thermal Business Unit, working collaboratively with various organizations to highlight the importance of thermal sensing in reducing traffic accidents and pedestrian fatalities.

Over the course of his career, Seoane has held different roles in Engineering, Operations, and General Management for vision cameras and driver monitoring systems at several companies in various countries. In these roles, he was responsible for quality, process optimization and core engineering.

Seoane holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Orleans, USA. Seoane currently resides in Santa Barbara, California.

Ian has nearly 40 years of experience in the Electronics Industry, initially as an IC Design Engineer, then moving into roles in Applications Engineering, Product Marketing, Sales and Business Development. Between 2002 and 2012 he was responsible for OmniVision Technologies European CMOS Image Sensor business, from the very start of the camera phone and automotive camera businesses. Between 2012 and 2022, Ian worked in global sales and business development for Valeo, the world’s 4th-largest ADAS automotive supplier. Since the end of 2022, Ian has been running INET Europe, a consultancy and rep company.

Lionel Bennes, PhD, serves as Senior Product Manager for AVxcelerate products at Ansys. Lionel has more than 10 years of experience in Optical and Real Time simulation, mainly in the Automotive and A&D fields. He has overseen the design and development of Headlamp and Sensors products, leveraging a unique combination of real time rendering techniques combined with physics based optical simulations.

ADAS product innovation professional with 15+ years background in the sensing space.
Experience leading both engineering teams and business strategy, and managing growth initiatives from the Bay Area for L4 players as well as from Germany for L2-L3 solutions with established OEMs.

Pier Paolo Porta is responsible for Ambarella’s Automotive European Business Unit as well as stereovision-related product marketing. In July 2005, he received the Dr. Ing. (Master) degree in Electronic Engineering from Università di Parma, Italy. In 2005 he also joined VisLab, the Artificial Vision research group at the Università di Parma, where he earned a PhD in Information Technology in 2010. In 2009, Porta was one of the founding associates of VisLab srl, and from 2010 he was part of the Board of Governors of the company until it was acquired by Ambarella in 2015. Porta’s background is in autonomous driving and ADAS, and he is focused on stereovision, sensor fusion, and traffic sign recognition.

Simulation Performance Engineer at rFpro, focusing on the verification and validation of simulation and sensing software.

PhD in Telecommunications Engineering from the Politecnico di Torino, along with an MSc by Research in Laser Physics and BSc in Physics from Swansea University.

Previously, I worked as a Fibre Laser Engineer at SPI Lasers UK, where I contributed to the testing and development of high-power CW fibre laser systems.

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.

I pursued my MsC in telecommunications in Sevilla (Spain). After finishing an european holded PhD in computer vision, I started my contact with LiDAR technologies and shortly after joined started at VALEO within the LiDAR 1st generation SW team, where I worked as algorithm developer and algorithm architect. I am VALEO expert in LiDAR technology since 2020 and currently team lead for SCALA3 LiDAR perception algorithms.

Anas Chalak is Technology & Market analyst, Imaging, at Yole Group. He is a member of the Imaging & Display team, within the More than Moore activities. Anas contributes on a day-to-day basis to follow imaging technology activity to provide market and technology analysis, as well as contributing to the production of relevant reports and projects. Previously, Anas carried out research focusing on integrated mid-infrared photonics. Later, he worked as a research engineer on the optical optimization of a 3D FMCW lidar system in CEA-Leti, France. Anas obtained a Master’s in Nanoscale Engineering from École Centrale de Lyon, France.

Pierrick Boulay is Senior Technology & Market Analyst, Automotive Semiconductor at Yole Group.
He works in the fields of solid-state lighting and lighting systems, carrying out technical, economic, and marketing analyses. In addition, he leads the automotive activities within the company.
Pierrick has authored several reports and custom analyses on topics such as automotive lighting, LiDAR, sensing for ADAS vehicles, and VCSELs.

Norman Koren became interested in photography while growing up near the George Eastman House photographic museum in Rochester, NY. He received his BA in physics from Brown University (1965) and his Masters in physics from Wayne State University (1969). He worked in the computer storage industry simulating digital magnetic recording systems and channels for disk and tape drives from 1967-2001. He founded Imatest LLC in 2003 to develop software and test charts to measure the quality of digital imaging systems.

Co-founder and CEO of Obsidian Sensors. John is an electrical engineer with expertise in optics, semiconductors, microwave to terahertz systems and systems engineering and has held leadership posts at Qualcomm, Jet Propulsion Labs (NASA) and Rockwell. John also served as adjunct professor at Caltech and UCSD. John graduated from MIT with a BS and Caltech with a PhD, both in electrical engineering.

Christian Weber is a seasoned automotive industry professional with over three decades of experience in engineering and leadership roles. He is currently Project House Director for Continental’s Autonomous Mobility business area, leading innovative projects in autonomous driving technologies. Previously, as Global Director, he led Continental’s Advanced Engineering ADAS activities, enhancing vehicle safety and automation. Before joining Continental in 2017, he held engineering and program management roles at Magna Electronics and Harman/Becker Automotive Systems. His entire professional career has focused on laying the groundwork for future autonomous driving functionalities and realizing automotive engineering projects on a global scale.

Josh has a BSc in Electronic Engineering and an MSc in Space Engineering from the University of Surrey. During his last year of studies Josh joined the universities Formula Student team and quickly developed interest in the automotive sector. This lead to a job working at McLaren automotive as a gearbox control engineer. Simulation became an integral part of his job as it allowed him to rapidly develop and test the control software in the most efficient way. Driven by his passion for simulation, he joined rFpro and is now the Product Manager for AV Elevate, a fully integrated simulation solution designed for ADAS and AV development.

James Hodgson, Research Director at ABI Research, conducts research related to the field of autonomous driving and smart mobility, with a focus primarily on quantitative forecasting and analysis in the areas of Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS), autonomous driving, cooperative mobility and connected infotainment.

Gulwinder Randhawa is a Member of Technical Staff at onsemi based in UK, covering field applications of automotive Tier-1s & OEMs for supporting and developing cuttings edge CMOS imaging systems to facilitate autonomous driving at different levels.

He has B.Eng. degree in Electronics & Communications from the University of Nagpur, India and an MTech. degree in Digital Electronics from University of Hertfordshire in the UK.

Gulwinder has over seventeen years of experience working on camera systems, including CMOS image sensors, HDR, optics, image/video signal processing pipelines, architectures, characterization and camera drivers in R&D and Applications roles at onsemi, Aptina Imaging, Access-IS & Nokia.

Leandro Di Bella is a 1st year PhD student at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium, as part of the ETRO group. His research is centered on smart mobility. More specifically, he is focusing on AI algorithm and computer vision, including vehicle pose estimation, tracking and vision graph-based traffic understanding for Distributed Intelligent transportation systems.

Paul Schouten is a UX designer passionate about making new technologies intuitive to understand & experience by humans. His aim is to develop natural user experiences that make technology integrate into the lives of humans, so that they become invisible while at the same time enriching people’s lives.

At TomTom, Paul leads the UX concepts team, which focuses on future user interactions & technologies and make them tangible by building many prototypes in order to validate assumptions and set out north stars for future products.

Paul holds a Master degree in Industrial Design from Delft University of Technology with a specialisation in Automotive Design. Throughout his career he worked with many global automotive OEMs.

Lu Ren, Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Toronto, is the lead of the systems engineering team at ASMPT AEi. With specialization in ADAS camera alignment and testing, Dr. Ren has actively led critical customer projects and spearheaded the design and development of optical target module designs for the past decade. His expertise extends to visible-NIR and long-wave infrared (LWIR)target projectors. Notably, Dr. Ren holds a patent for his exceptional optical target module design.

Gabriel joined Mobileye in 2018 where leads both the image path development and the planning of future image sensors at Mobileye. He holds a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from the University of Victoria (2001) and an MBA from the University of Santa Clara (2012).

Felix Heide is an Assistant Professor at Princeton University, Head of AI at Torc Robotics, and Founder self-driving vehicle startup Algolux (now part of Diamler Trucks and Torc Robotics). He is researching the theory and application of computational imaging and computer vision systems. Exploring imaging, vision, and display systems end-to-end, Felix’s work lies at the intersection of optics, machine learning, optimization, computer graphics, and computer vision. He received his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia.

Agish has spent the last couple of decades in various challenging engineering and leadership roles in Automotive and Robotics. The first 14 years of his career in various engineering roles across various global locations at Bosch. He has worked on various interesting projects including autonomous driving, over the air updates, home robotics etc. He has contributed to the development of various safety standards like UL 3300 and UL 4600 and has been a speaker at SAE and IEEE. In his current role he is responsible for the engineering of functionally safe HW and SW for ADAS platforms.

Dr. Ariel Sobelman is a 25 year veteran of the semiconductor industry with vast experience in standardization. He  Is a senior VP at Valens semiconductor as well as a Senior Researcher at Tel Aviv University, focusing on international technology policy. Dr. sobelman served as president of the HDBaseT Alliance for 10 years and has been a leading contributor to the MIPI APhy standards development.  In 2024 he published a book on technology and semiconductor strategy.

Experienced Product Manager and Group Lead with a focus on testing and validation of environment sensors for autonomous driving (Camera, Radar, Lidar) and FPGA technology. Background in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with a Ph.D. in chip design from Bielefeld University.

Eugene Wang has more than 10 years of semiconductor experience from Silicon Valley. He has been responsible for product line management and global business development in both F500 and unicorn startup . He has profound insight into the semiconductor ecosystem. Eugene Wang is now responsible for global business and product strategy for SemiDrive.

Yuanjun Liang, Co-founder and CTO of Rsemi, graduated with a Ph.D. from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and subsequently worked for Huawei and Pango Microsystems Limited. He has been engaged in the development of high-speed Serdes for many years and has overseen the mass production of numerous chips.

Marius Dupuis holds a diploma in aerospace engineering. He became co-founder and general manager of VIRES Simulationstechnologie GmbH in 1998 and grew the company to a leading provider of environment simulation solutions for ADAS and autonomous driving systems. Marius left VIRES in 2020 and started to work as an independent consultant. During that phase, he also founded Sim|Cert and co-founded GEONATIVES. Marius is one of the initiators and original authors of the simulation data standards OpenDRIVE, OpenCRG and OpenSCENARIO. In 2018, he supervised their transfer to ASAM e.V.. Following these standards and his personal interest in dynamic organizations, Marius joined ASAM e.V. in May 2022 as CEO.

Bill Parrish is perhaps one of the most well-known luminaries in thermal imaging having pioneered the technology for multiple industries, including military, industrial, consumer and more, since the early 1980s. Bill’s first company, Amber Engineering, was acquired by Raytheon (RTN) in 1992, and focused on commercializing advanced military infrared technology by applying novel engineering and business practices to dramatically reduce the cost.

In the mid-90s, Bill then launched and became the first CEO of Indigo Systems, another industry leader in thermal image technologies and products, and took the company through extraordinary growth (> $75 m Revenue in just six years) to an acquisition by FLIR in 2004. Seek Thermal is Bill’s third company in the infrared thermal imaging space and perhaps the most unique. With a vision to bring the smallest, most affordable infrared sensor and thermal imaging technology to market, Seek is opening a new world of thermal applications useful in solving everyday problems. Bill’s numerous papers, patents and awards (including MSS Fellow, The Levenstein Award for Infrared Technology Leadership and Management, South Coast Business and Technology Entrepreneur of the Year in 2002, and UCSB’s Narayanamurti Entrepreneurial Leadership Co-Award in 2004) attest to his enduring impact on infrared technology and business.
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Bill received his engineering education at UCSB graduating BSEE ’73, MSEE ’74, and PhD EE ’76 emphasizing integrated circuit design and fabrication.

Matt Daley is Technical Director at rFpro – the leading simulation environment for the development and testing of ADAS, autonomous vehicles, vehicle dynamics and human factor studies. Matt’s career began in world championship-winning F1 teams where he honed his skill for applying fundamental engineering principles to solving important technology challenges. As part of rFpro’s expert team, he is enabling companies to use simulation in a wide variety of applications, from OEM vehicle dynamics to Tier1 sensor and system developments. Matt’s passion is to push the boundaries of simulation, ensuring rFpro is at the leading edge of modelling the real world.

Paola Iacomussi is a senior researcher at INRIM, the Italian National Metrological Institute, in the Department of Applied Metrology and Engineering, and a lecturer at the University of Turin.

She started her research activity at the Research Centre of FCA (Fiat Chrysler Automobiles) and then moved to the National Metrological Institute, where she worked on photometry and colorimetry of materials and sources (also for road applications), performance characterisation of road lighting and digital camera. She has developed measurement instruments for third parties, such as a mobile laboratory for the characterisation of road lighting systems.

She has successfully coordinated several international and national research projects, including the EU-funded SURFACE (Road Surface Characterisation for Smart Lighting) project. She is currently coordinating the CIE group for the development of a non-biological reference observer for road and automotive applications.

Farzad Inanlou leads the Automotive ADAS, In-Vehicle Networking, and Connectivity business at GlobalFoundries. Farzad has 15+ years of experience in business and technology at GF, PARC, NASA JPL, Qualcomm. Dr. Inanlou holds a PhD from Georgia Institute of Technology and is a National Science Foundation Fellowship alumni.

Mihai Ilie is a Data Science Manager within the DSW Product Line at Valeo, providing solutions in the driving assistance and vision segments. Prior to this position, Mihai has been working for Wind River as a Member of the Technical Staff, developing products for industries like automotive, mobile, medical and aerospace and defence. He is currently managing the Data Science, Training Framework and MLOps components of the BEV algorithms implemented as part of the Computer Vision platform. Mihai holds a Doctorate degree in Content Based Image Retrieval, as well as a Master’s degree in Intelligent Systems.

Anto Michael is a software architect at Valeo, with a masters degree from University of Stuttgart. He specializes in the implementation of complex mathematical algorithms in embedded software. He is also a system expert in Driving Assistance Systems with special focus on sensor data fusion. He has about 15 years of relevant industry experience.

As Director of Business Development and System Solutions at Valens Semiconductor, Daniel brings more than 30 years of engineering experience to this role, working with OEMs and Tier-1s worldwide to bring innovative next-gen E/E architectures and solutions to market. Prior to Valens, Daniel was Director of Marketing at TranSwitch, and has also held positions in project management and engineering at Mindspeed Technologies, Comverse Network Systems and Ford Motor Company. Daniel holds a Master’s degree in Engineering and a Bachelor’s Degree with Honors in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom.

Master of Science (Georgia Institute of Technology) 2004 – 2008: Research on organic electronics / printable sensors @TU Braunschweig 2008 – now: Volkswagen AG, R&D Fields of expertise: optical metrology in combustion engines, accoustics incl. AVAS, metrology in automotive glazing, brake systems, flow, accoustics, enabling autonomous driving (interaction of ADAS and glazing)

Conhas Thakkar is a Technical Solution Architect at Siemens EDA, focusing on Digital Twin implementation and innovation for automotive customers through the PAVE360 program – applying transformative technologies to the challenges of autonomous and connected vehicles. His focus areas are – Functional safety, and bringing safety into mixed-fidelity modeling techniques.

Faez Ba-Tis received a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Toronto in 2017 . He is specialized in the filed of MEMS actuators for camera applications such autofocus and OIS. As a young visionary entrepreneur, Faez has been leading Sheba as CEO since founded in 2016. He demonstrated his leadership skills by effectively managing Sheba team and establishing crucial partnerships with key clients across diverse markets. With his profound technical knowledge on MEMS, he possesses an in-depth understanding of the competitive landscape of the MEMS actuator market, enabling him to formulate effective and innovative strategies for Sheba’s future in actuation technology. He has over 30 international patents and patent applications.