Introduction

Driverless cars, also called self-driving cars or robot cars, are one of the great technological advances for the future transportation. With the investments by the U.S. government and innovative companies in recent years, several companies and research institutions working in the field have fully demonstrated that self-driving vehicles are technically viable nowadays. Moreover, the last decade has shown a great leap in public interest in driverless car technologies. There is a common goal of making driverless cars a reality by 2020's.

Although driverless car technology has become more and more viable recently, we still have a long way to go for self-driving in public. No matter how smart self-driving cars are, safety is the most important thing. Driverless cars do have the potential to positively benefits humanity. Car manufactures have continually added automation features to improve vehicle safety since many decades ago. A full 90 percent of accidents are caused by human errors, such as loss of focus, sleepiness, etc. But robot cars have great technology strengths on safety over human weaknesses. They can react in milliseconds to avoid accidents. This is why the first thing every advocate of driverless cars brings up is the technology's safety benefits.

Additionally, a variety of non-technical issues, such as legal, liability, regulatory, culture, privacy concerns, need to be addressed. These will help consumers trust the capability of driverless cars to give up control and embrace many potential benefits that driverless cars present.

Both tech and non-tech issues will impact driverless vehicle integration into tomorrow's roadway, in particular, the ecological problems because self-driving cars would be mostly propelled by electricity. Of especial importance would be the humanitarian aspect of this technology since driverless cars could significantly improve the quality of life of handicapped people.

Making a strategic decision for automotive innovation is top priority. Both federal governmental policy-makers and technology leaders may need to work together for these. So this is why we advocated the COM.DriverlessCar summit to build a bridge between two sides.

COM.DriverlessCar 2014 the International Summit on Driverless Car Computing,  is the premier forum featuring with a mixture of inspiring presentations and interactive discussions on driverless car technology and non-technical challenges. Researchers, practitioners, Policy-makers, decision-makers, and managers from government agencies, industry, and academia are invited to discuss the latest trends, strategies, challenges, research and applications as well as policies and business potentials for driverless cars.

Summit Highlights

This year, COM.DriverlessCar 2014 features a very exciting event program on self-driving cars, including leading-edge keynotes, panels, tech shows, federal lab tours, test drives, etc. from governments, industries, and academia. There will be a great opportunity for everyone to learn the latest innovation, trends, and interrelation, vision, future impacts and challenges, and new perspectives from other world-class leaders of all three sides at the event.

In particular, here is a key list of the self-driving car sessions:

1) USDOT Keynote: How Talking Cars Will Transform the Way We Travel

2) NVIDIA Keynote: The Future Car - Horsepower Replaced by Computing Power

3)  MIT Driverless Vehicle Tech Show:

a.  The Intelligent Co-Pilot: a Path toward Fully Autonomous Vehicles

b.  The Future with Self-Driving Cars

4) Emerging Tech Panel+: Tech Insights: Big Data, Driverless Car, Sensor, Geospatial, Visual Computing

5) USDOT-FHWA Tech Show, Lab Tours & Test Drives: FHWA Connected Vehicle/Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) Activities

6) Driverless Car Reception/Banquet with governmental policy-makers, industrial world-class leaders, etc.

7)  Self-driving Vehicle Papers, Tech Talks, Posters, etc.

COM.DriverlessCar 2014 will take place on Aug. 4-6, 2014 in Washington DC, where U.S. President Obama, Vice President Biden, and many national leaders such as Hillary Clinton ever spoke there as well as some Medias (CNN, NPR, etc.) hold the panels there too. We also offer Online COM.* Virtual Conference (COM.* VC) as well as for COM.BigData 2014 and COM.Geo 2014 concurrently. For more info, please visit the conference website.