Company

Michael is the CEO of Edge Case Research, a company he founded with Philip Koopman to make autonomy safer. His experience with autonomous vehicles began nearly twenty years ago at Carnegie Mellon University. He built lunar rovers for Red Whittaker, autonomous scientific robots that explored Antarctica, and self driving technology for tackling harsh off road terrain. Ten years ago, Mike and Philip Koopman began researching techniques to design and verify autonomous systems. Today, he applies this experience to lead Edge Case Research with the goal of providing validation technology for autonomy across a range of industries, including self driving cars, materials handling, and robotic work cells.

Phil is an internationally recognized expert on autonomous vehicle (AV) safety who has worked in that area at Carnegie Mellon University for over 20 years. He is also actively involved with AV safety policy, regulation, and standards. His pioneering research work includes software robustness testing and runtime 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 co-founder of Edge Case Research, which provides tools and services for autonomous vehicle testing and safety validation.

Chris is the co-founder and CEO of Aurora, which is building self-driving technology to deliver the benefits of the future of transportation safely, quickly, and broadly. Chris has been instrumental in instigating and advancing the development of self-driving vehicles over the past 15 years. Before founding Aurora, Chris helped build Google’s self-driving car program and served as its CTO. He was a faculty member of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where he worked with house-size trucks, drove robots around in deserts, and was the technical director of the DARPA Urban and Grand Challenge teams. He earned his PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University and his BSc in computer engineering from the University of Manitoba in 1998.

Matt joined ANSYS as the Vice President of Business Development and Corporate Marketing in April 2017. He is a seasoned industry veteran with decades of experience, most recently as senior corporate development executive at SAP. In that role, he identified targets, executed transactions and delivered on the business cases for shareholders. Previously, he served as the executive vice president and chief financial officer of Ariba, leading corporate development and human resources. He was part of the management team that transformed Ariba to the cloud, fueling its growth and a nearly 400 percent increase in share price. Before joining Ariba, he headed corporate development at FreeMarkets and served in various consulting roles at Accenture.