Sachithra Hemachandra
Staff Tech Lead Manager, Cruise

June 6, 11:00am
Location: Magnolia

Panelist: Artificial Intelligence for Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving is one of the fastest-growing industries leveraging artificial intelligence solutions. Autonomous driving has been using a suite of modalities like cameras, LiDARs, RADARs, microphones, ultrasonics, city-traffic data, and everything around in order to bring autonomous cars to a boring reality. This panel will bring together experts in the field of AI for autonomous driving to discuss the frontiers of Perception; the field of distilling sensor data into representations understandable by the autonomy stack. The panel is comprised of a diverse group with several years of experience in building robots and complex perception systems for the purpose of autonomous passenger vehicles and delivery robots. This panel will discuss challenges to developing a scalable, safe, and ethical perception system for the future. Topics will include, but are not limited to long tail problems in autonomous driving, data mining, perception architectures, ML Infrastructure, and future technologies, among others. The panelists will provide their viewpoint not only from a performance perspective but from the lens of an experienced practitioner balancing reliability with practical computing considerations. This is an excellent opportunity for attendees to gain a deeper understanding of the latest advancements in AI for autonomous driving and the pivotal role it will play in reshaping our transportation landscape.

Dr. Sachi Hemachandra is a Tech Lead Manager at Cruise leading a Perception Team working to help autonomous vehicles better understand long tailed behavior of surrounding agents. Prior to Cruise, Sachi was a staff research scientist at the Toyota Research Institute where he led the tracking team and helped design the perception stack for L4 driving. He started his career in self driving joining the Waymo perception team in 2016 where he worked on object tracking and sensor fusion. Sachi holds a PhD in EECS at MIT in 2015 in robotics where he worked on Semantic mapping and use of natural language in robotics.