Date and time: Tuesday 9 September 2025, 13:30-14:15 CEST
Speaker: Dr. Trent Victor, Waymo
Title: Making the ADS Safety Case with Predictive Acceptance Criteria of Retrospective Safety Impact
Where: Online on Zoom: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/69560887455
Host: Martin Törngren, martint@kth.se
This seminar is part of the “Safety Next” workshop program taking place at the 44th SafeComp conference in Stockholm, where we will delve into the new frontiers of safety-critical computing systems!
Bio: Dr. Trent Victor is Director of Safety Research and Best Practices at Waymo where he oversees safety publications (see waymo.com/safety/research), Safety Impact assessments (see waymo.com/safety/impact), and coordinates the development of best practices such as the Safety Case and industry standards. Within Waymo, he represents the Safety team in Deployment Readiness Reviews and other development projects.
Prior to Waymo, Trent was Senior Technical Leader at Volvo Cars Safety Centre, Adjunct Professor in Driver Behavior at Chalmers, and Adjunct Professor at University of Iowa. Trent has published extensively in the field of Crash Avoidance and Autonomous Driving Safety Research (>100 papers, >7300 citations). He has been awarded top awards such as Automotive News’ 2021 safety innovation executive of the year, the US Government award for Safety Engineering Excellence, Jerome H. Ely Human Factors (journal) Article Award, and Volvo Cars Technology & Innovation Award.
Abstract: Waymo, operating autonomous ride-hailing in five US cities, openly shares its risk assessment approach to build trust, facilitate standards and regulation, and expand the Waymo Driver’s reach. This talk will detail Waymo’s complex, evidence-based risk determination, covering its Safety Framework (pre-deployment methodologies and acceptance criteria and safety governance), the Safety Case (pressure testing and validating the Framework), and retrospective Safety Impact analysis of crash data (validating post-deployment predictions).
This talk will also discuss current challenges and development needs. By sharing its tried-and-tested model for “absence of unreasonable risk,” Waymo aims to encourage industry practices and regulations, fostering safe, trusted, widespread autonomous driving adoption.
