Are you sure you are safe?

Robots are becoming part of our everyday lives, from making cars, vacuuming the house, to assisting surgeons with precision operations. In the future, robots may be driving us to work or doing our groceries. They are tireless machines, but are they safe to operate around us? Can manufacturers fully test them, or is this an impossible task? In this talk, we examine the role that Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering can play in obtaining the assurance we need. We discuss what can be done now, and what we would like to achieve before we welcome autonomous robots into our lives.

Autonomous systems can sense, reason, and interact with the real world. Advances in Artificial Intelligence and related technologies have raised our expectations for engineering fully-autonomous systems including driverless cars and interactive companions. While the expected societal, economic and safety benefits are significant, some unfortunate incidents (e.g., Uber, Tesla) indicate we're not there yet. In this talk, we'll explore the opportunities coming with these systems, the challenges for engineering trustworthy autonomous systems and analyse what all this means to our everyday lives.