Expertise

Topics:  Software Engineering, Autonomous Vehicle Safety, Embedded Systems, Safety-Critical Computer Systems, Automotive Computing

Industries: Automotive, Computer Software, Education/Learning, Research

Prof. Philip Koopman is an internationally recognized expert on Autonomous Vehicle (AV) safety whose work in that area spans over 25 years. He is also actively involved with AV policy and standards as well as more general embedded system design and software quality. His pioneering research work includes software robustness testing and run time monitoring of autonomous systems to identify how they break and how to fix them. He has extensive experience in software safety and software quality across numerous transportation, industrial, and defense application domains including conventional automotive software and hardware systems. He is a faculty member of the Carnegie Mellon University ECE department where he teaches software skills for mission-critical systems. In 2018 he was awarded the highly selective IEEE-SSIT Carl Barus Award for outstanding service in the public interest for his work in promoting automotive computer-based system safety. He originated the UL 4600 standard for autonomous system safety issued in 2020. In 2022 he was named to the National Safety Council's Mobility Safety Advisory Group. In 2023 he was named the International System Safety Society's Educator of the Year. He is the author of the books: Understanding Checksums & Cyclic Redundancy Codes (2024), How Safe is Safe Enough: measuring and predicting autonomous vehicle safety (2022), The UL 4600 Guidebook (2022) and Better Embedded System Software (2010).

Media Experience

Driverless Semi Trucks Are Here, With Little Regulation and Big Promises  — The New York Times
“This technology is really good at things it’s practiced, and really bad at things it has never seen before. From a safety point of view, nobody knows how it’s going to turn out,” said Philip Koopman (College of Engineering) about Aurora Innovation's driverless semi trucks in Texas.

Elon Musk’s Tesla moves to launch free self-driving taxi service in California  — The Washington Post
esla is preparing to launch a taxi service in California that could eventually shuttle passengers in autonomous vehicles around the state, if a recent permit request is approved. “Getting the permits in place is a due diligence thing,” said Philip Koopman (College of Engineering). “The real question is, are these things going to be safe on the road?”

Uber's CEO says he wants to find a way to work with Tesla because 'no one wants to compete against Tesla or Elon, if you can help it'  — MSN
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said he’d rather collaborate with Elon Musk than compete after Tesla announced its paid robotaxi service launching this summer. Phil Koopman (College of Engineering) noted that Tesla may face challenges securing federal approval for its steering wheel-free Cybercab and would also need state-level approvals to expand its robotaxi network.

Self-driving cars are popping up in the West. But are they safe?  — Yahoo!
Waymo is expanding its self-driving taxis across the U.S. by partnering with Uber. While offering 24/7 service and improved safety, concerns remain over reliability and regulation. As Philip Koopman (College of Engineering) noted in a congressional hearing, "Computers might never drink or text and drive, but they are notoriously brittle when facing the unknown."

Its never going to happen but a distracted Musk should handover CEO reins at Tesla  — Forbes
Forbes reports on Tesla’s weak earnings and calls for Elon Musk to step down. Musk bets on self-driving robotaxis, comparing AI vision to human vision. Philip Koopman (College of Engineering) disagrees, noting Tesla’s cameras perform poorly at night and its software struggles with new driving conditions. “Machine learning runs out of steam before you get to common sense,” he said. “Machine learning has no common sense; it has false confidence.”

On roads teeming with robotaxis, crossing the street can be harrowing  — Washington Post
Phil Koopman, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who conducts research on autonomous-vehicle safety, said the Waymo cars had no excuse not to stop. “A person making the decision not to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk is acting with the knowledge of potential penalties, ranging from a traffic ticket, to a civil tort lawsuit for injuries, to potential jail time,” Koopman said. “In California, a computer driver can’t even get a meaningful traffic ticket yet and is certainly not worried about going to jail.”

Waymo’s Robot Taxis Are Almost Mainstream. Can They Now Turn a Profit?  — New York Times
“Waymo has not had the big crash yet,” said Phil Koopman, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in autonomous vehicles. “I don’t know if they will have a big, embarrassing, problematic crash, and based upon the data, they don’t know, either.”

Tesla was in 'full self-driving' mode when car hit, killed motorcyclist on SR 522 in April  — MSN
Phil Koopman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studies autonomous vehicle safety, said he doesn't see Tesla running robotaxis without human drivers on nearly all roads for another decade. The safety record Musk cites is based on having a human driver supervise the automated system, he said. “Unless you have data showing that the driver never has to supervise the automation, then there's no basis for claiming they're going to be acceptably safe,” he said.

GM's Cruise to start testing robotaxis in Phoenix area with human safety drivers on board  — MSN
Phil Koopman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studies autonomous vehicle safety, said Phoenix is a good choice for Cruise to restart its operations, in part because it has less stringent regulations than the company faced in San Francisco.

Tesla's bet on robotaxis is a long way from paying off  — Reuters
"Everyone else has found out that what they thought was a two or three-year project turns out to be a 10 or 20-year project," said Philip Koopman, a Carnegie Mellon University professor working on autonomous vehicle safety. "Tesla's found that out too."

Despite fear of self-driving vehicles, this expert says their expansion is inevitable  — KJZZ
ROY: Well, one of the biggest problems is that there are very few experts if any who aren't working at these companies. But among the people who've looked at the data are people like Professor Philip Koopman at CMU, who himself is quite a skeptic, has acknowledged that, you know, some of Waymo recent data indicates both progress and that they are even with human-driven ride-hail drivers, if not slightly better. So what's critical here is that there is progress and demonstrable improvement.

AV Safety Expert Proposes a New Classification for Autonomy Levels  — autoevolution
In any discussion about autonomous cars, you may have already heard about Level 2, 3, 4, and 5. They refer to the classifications made by SAE J3016, a document that tried to establish what autonomous-driving cars are expected to do. Philip Koopman thinks these classifications are only helpful from an engineering point of view, not to regular drives. This is why the AV safety expert decided to propose a new classification system.

Will state-by-state regulation of self-driving vehicles work -- and keep people safe?  — ABC News
Philip Koopman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, warned lawmakers in an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the bill's current language lacks specific guidance in several areas.

Gaming while driving: Tesla allows it, Mercedes does recall  — The Detroit News
“MB is following the regulatory rules as they are supposed to – in sharp contrast to what we’ve been seeing from Tesla,” said Philip Koopman, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. If NHTSA doesn’t take action against Tesla, the agency will have one standard for Tesla and another for Mercedes and other automakers, Koopman said.