Wen-Chung Kao is a chair professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan Normal University, New Taipei, Taiwan. Before he joined academia in 2004, he was a department manager with SoC Technology Center, ITRI, Taiwan, an AVP with NuCam Corporation, Foxlink Group, and the co-founder of SiPix Technology Inc. His research interests include system-on-a-chip (SoC), embedded software design, flexible electronic paper, machine vision systems, and digital camera systems.He is the president of the IEEE Consumer Electronics Societyand a fellow of IEEE.

The presentation will delve into the challenges faced by the European automotive industry, highlighting the lack of software expertise and complex supplier interdependencies. It will propose continuous software integration and verification (CX) as a solution to improve software KPIs and enhance competitiveness in the Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) race. The insights are drawn from Pickhard’s extensive practical experience rather than academic theory.

Friedhelm Pickhard, born in 1959, holds Dipl.-Ing. degrees in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Paderborn and in Electrical Engineering from Ruhr University Bochum. With over 30 years of experience in software-intensive product development and system engineering, gained from roles in the military and automotive sectors, has held prominent positions at Bosch, including President and Managing Director in India and CEO of ETAS. During his carreer acted as a board member at TTTech Auto AG.

We live in a world being redefined by software. In the past, connecting endpoints over a distance was the big challenge. The telephone system is the high point of that generation. The endpoints were just microphones and speakers, which are dependent upon the network to preserve the waveform.

Today we live in a very different world in which our devices are smart, and we no longer depend on a network provider’s smarts. In fact, those smarts create problems such as buffer bloat. We now implement systems as a collection of devices and are no longer confined to a single box. The components can be scattered across the world and can be part of multiple systems.

This new way of thinking is at odds with an infrastructure that puts barriers in the path (subscriptions) and second-guesses innovation by trying to “add value”. This is even more the case as AI has accelerated the pace of innovation.

Bob Frankston (born June 14, 1949) is an American software engineer and businessman who co-created, with Dan Bricklin, the VisiCalc spreadsheet program. Frankston is also the co-founder of Software Arts. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City in 1966. He earned a S.B degree in computer science and mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, followed by a Master of Engineering degree in computer science, also from MIT. Following his work with Dan Bricklin, Frankston later worked at Lotus Development Corporation and Microsoft. Frankston became an outspoken advocate for reducing the role of telecommunications companies in the evolution of the Internet, particularly with respect to broadband and mobile communications.