Driving Innovation: A Speaker Series Powered By Nissan Motor Company

2014-10-07 Speaker: Greg Larson, Chief, Office of Traffic Operations Research, Caltrans Division of Research, Innovation and System Information Automated vehicles have been promised to all of us since the World’s Fair in 1939, but they have never been closer to reality than they are today. While serious research on vehicle automation has been going on nearly 30 years, Google’s recent successes have reinvigorated public interest in the topic, and the technology seems to be marching toward inevitable commercial availability. As the representative of a large transportation infrastructure owner and operator, Caltrans, Greg Larson will talk about the impacts of vehicle automation on the overall transportation system, some of the remaining societal and institutional challenges, and the importance of coupling automated vehicles with connected ones. Greg Larson has worked for Caltrans for more than 23 years, first as a Research Engineer at the Transportation Laboratory, then as a Senior Electronics Engineer a