Frankenstein and the future networked car

So what do Frankenstein and the future networked car have in common, you ask? Simple: both are compelling stories brought to life in Geneva, Switzerland.

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein the creature is seen climbing Mont-Salève after having fled Geneva during a lightning storm:

“I thought of pursuing the devil; but it would have been in vain, for another flash discovered him to me hanging among the rocks of the nearly perpendicular ascent of Mont-Salève.”

Mont-Salève, overlooking Geneva
Photo: Benoit Kornmann

Of course, the future networked car is a very different type of story, but compelling nonetheless. The laboratory in this story is the ITU Symposium on The Future Networked Car being held within the Geneva Auto Show on March 5 to 6, where many new ideas will be brought to life by convening leaders and technical experts from the automotive and ICT communities.

The event, organized by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), will consist of high-level dialogues and several technical sessions; these include a session on integrating nomadic devices in cars, where I will discuss how technology standards can help minimize driver distraction. The dialogues will cover road safety and innovation for the future car, and will feature key leaders such as the presidents of Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (Jean Todt) and Infiniti (Johan de Nysschen). The technical sessions will explore automated driving, connected car use cases, emergency services, and, of course, nomadic device integration. Speakers for these sessions come from a mix of automakers, tier one suppliers, ICT companies, standards development organizations (SDOs), industry groups, and government agencies.

The symposium also includes a session jointly organized by the ITU and UNECE Inland Transport Committee that deals with the human factors and regulatory issues introduced by automated driving. This session is an encouraging sign that the ITU and UNECE will continue the collaboration they started last June (see my previous post, “UN agencies take major step towards international standards for driver distraction”).

Hope to see you in Geneva!

Reducing driver distraction with ICTs

Inappropriate use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially mobile phones, is a chief culprit behind driver distraction and road accidents, and with automobile manufacturers scrambling to develop a “connected” driving experience, the ICT and automotive industries are becoming ever more closely entwined.

However, this integration of cars and ICTs need not come at the expense of driver safety, and there are strong grounds on which to argue that ICTs have great potential to enhance rather than diminish vehicle safety systems.

Under the banner of intelligent transport systems (ITS) the automotive and ICT communities are working towards a convergence of automobiles and ICTs that prioritizes drivers’ safety and broad consensus has it that international standards are the tools through which this will be achieved.

Over the past two years, as chairman of the ITU-T Focus Group on Driver Distraction, I have had the pleasure of leading a group tasked with laying the foundations for driver-distraction standardization work in ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T).

Established in February 2011, the Focus Group reached the end of its study period in March 2013 and has been instrumental in raising awareness around ITU-T activity on driver distraction and the scale of this workload, as well as in providing clear direction to ITU-T’s driver-distraction work plan. The group has also been successful in opening lines of communication with key organizations and drawing new expertise into the ITU-T standardization process.

The Focus Group’s final deliverables take the form of five technical reports that describe:

• use cases and user interface requirements for automotive applications 
• system capabilities for improving the safety of driver interaction with applications and services (situational awareness management) 
• approaches that enable external applications to communicate with a vehicle

The reports are freely available here.

The conclusions put forward by the reports are being taken up by the two groups leading ITU-T’s standardization work on driver distraction, Study Group 12 (Performance, QoS and QoE) and Study Group 16 (Multimedia). New related work items calling for external coordination and collaboration may also be addressed by the Collaboration on ITS Communication Standards, a forum working to create an internationally harmonized set of ITS communication standards to enable the deployment of fully interoperable ITS products and services in the global marketplace.

Safe interaction with applications and services
The Focus Group’s work is just the beginning of an international standards effort to help drivers interact safely with applications and services — and not just apps on phones, but apps running in the cloud, in roadside infrastructure systems, and in the car itself, to name just a few locations.

The Focus Group’s Use Cases report details the use cases and user scenarios being targeted by this standards effort, but for now let’s look at Use Case 2, Scenario A (arbitration of external message), which illustrates how ITU-T is working towards a comprehensive framework for managing distraction and workload.

Keeping priorities straight
In this user scenario, a navigation maneuver is given priority over a social media ‘status update’ message. The blue call-out boxes indicate where the ITU-T Recommendations under development can enable safe interaction between the driver and applications. For instance, ITU-T Recommendation G.SAM will define mechanisms for prioritizing navigation, G.V2A will define the communications interface between the app and the driver-vehicle interface (DVI), and P.UIA will recommend characteristics of the auditory social media message.

Remember that the focus here is not on how to implement social media in the car, but rather on how best to manage workload and distraction.



Giving a navigation maneuver priority over a social media status update message

In for the long haul
Speaking from our perspective at QNX Software Systems, a subsidiary of BlackBerry, the work of the Focus Group marks the beginning of a long road ahead. Within ITU-T, QNX will continue to:

1. Work with the relevant parties to identify solutions to the problem of technology-related driver distraction and workload. These parties include automotive, telecommunications, and consumer electronics organizations; standards development groups; academia; and government agencies.
2. Determine which aspects of the solution should be standardized, and help drive this standardization.
3. Align QNX product roadmaps as solutions develop.

Certainly this is a long-term strategy that will take years to realize, factoring in the rigour of ITU-T’s standards process as well as the significant amount of time needed to deploy technologies in vehicles on a meaningful scale.

Join the discussion
A workshop hosted by ITU and UNECE at ITU headquarters in Geneva, 27 June 2013, will address “Intelligent transport systems in emerging markets – drivers for safe and sustainable growth” with a view to analyzing recent advances in ITS with emphasis on improving road safety in developing countries.

This workshop includes a session dedicated to driver distraction in which I will present the outcomes outlined by the Focus Group’s technical reports to spur discussion on the likely course of corresponding ITU-T standardization work.

The workshop is free of charge and open to all interested parties, including non-members of ITU, and online ‘remote participation’ will be available to all those unable to travel to Geneva. Please join us for what will certainly be a richly informative and interactive event!

This post originally appeared on the ITU Blog.

Can auto wag the ITS dog?

Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) promise to deliver many benefits, from increased road safety to better traffic flow. It’s no surprise, then, that when people talk about ITS, it is often within the context of the auto industry. But is the auto industry alone big enough to attract the businesses needed to innovate and deploy ITS?

This question came up repeatedly at the Fully Networked Car Workshop held at the Geneva Auto Show, for the simple reason that auto is dwarfed by the telecom industry. Car volumes are measured in millions, whereas mobile phones are measured in billions. (In fact, evidence suggests the world may contain more mobile phones than toothbrushes.) It is likely, then, that businesses will focus on ITS-related applications, services, and infrastructure for phones — not cars.

Workshop panelists also pointed out that ITS extends beyond the auto or other transport industries; it is about enabling a connected society on the move. Consumers want mobility solutions that enable them to stay connected to all aspects of their lives in meaningful ways — not just optimize the efficiency and safety of getting from point A to point B.

The need for global standards
Regardless of whether auto or telecom drives ITS, we will need global standards for how these systems work. The good news is, major international standards development organizations (SDOs) are already trying to collaborate on the global standards needed to make ITS a reality. In fact, the Fully Networked Car Workshop was jointly sponsored by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).

The ITU has also started a collaboration on ITS Communications Standards. The next meeting of this collaboration will take place at SAE Headquarters in Troy, Michigan, USA on April 3, 2012.

A non-starter without industry participation
Mind you, success of ITS standards cannot solely depend on cooperation of the SDOs. Industry involvement is just as important.

Some workshop participants argued, however, that standardization inhibits product differentiation and thereby acts as a barrier to industry participation. But others felt this could be managed by standardizing on the lower layers (i.e. communications layers) and differentiating at the higher layers (i.e. application layers). The one caveat raised was that some aspects of the higher layers need to be standardized for safety reasons. But even then, it is possible to standardize on safety and still differentiate on user experience.

Panelists also discussed the threat of government regulation as a motivation to develop and deploy ITS. Someone pointed out, however, that competition often acts as a bigger motivator for companies than the threat of regulation.

Wagging the dog?
So what will drive innovation and deployment of ITS? It seems that global standards created with industry participation are crucial. Perhaps even more important, the auto industry must start working more closely with other industries such as telecom and consumer to develop ITS solutions that not only help people get from point A to point B efficiently and safely, but also deliver value in other ways to consumers on the move — unless of course you believe that the tail can wag the dog!