Marco Pavone
Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics @ Stanford University
Senior Director, Autonomous Vehicle Research @ NVIDIA
IAS SEMINAR #01
Turin / OGR / MEZZANINO / 30 JUNE 2025 / 10.30 AM CEST
Ensuring Physical AI safety in AI-enabled autonomous systems
Marco Pavone
Riccardo Mariani
Vice President, Safety @ NVIDIA
EVENT&WEBINAR
Foundation models, trained on vast and diverse data encompassing the human experience, are at the heart of the ongoing AI revolution influencing the way we create, problem solve, and work. These models, and the lessons learned from their construction, can also be applied to the way we develop a similarly transformative technology, autonomous vehicles (AVs). In this talk, I will highlight recent research efforts towards rethinking elements of an AV program both in the vehicle and in the data center, with an emphasis on (1) composing ingredients for universal and controllable end-to-end simulation, (2) architecting autonomy stacks that leverage foundation models to generalize to long-tail events, and (3) ensuring safety with foundation models in the loop.
Marco Pavone
Dr. Marco Pavone is an Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University, where he directs the Autonomous Systems Laboratory, the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford, and the Stanford Center for Aerospace Autonomy Research. He also leads autonomous vehicle research at NVIDIA. Before joining Stanford, he was a Research Technologist within the Robotics Section at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He received a Ph.D. degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010. His main research interests are in the development of methodologies for the analysis, design, and control of autonomous systems, with an emphasis on self-driving cars, autonomous aerospace vehicles, and future mobility systems. He is a recipient of a number of awards, including a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Barack Obama.
Riccardo Mariani
Riccardo Mariani is the vice president of industry safety at NVIDIA. He’s responsible for developing cohesive safety strategies and cross-segment safety processes, architecture, and products that can be leveraged across NVIDIA’s artificial intelligence-based hardware and software platforms. Prior to NVIDIA, he was chief functional safety technologist at Intel Corporation, and before co-founder and CTO of Yogitech, an industry leader in functional safety technologies, acquired by Intel. Mariani has contributed to multiple industry standards efforts throughout his career: he is currently convenor of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42/JWG 4 on AI and Functional safety, as also co-convenor of IEC 61508, the international standard on functional safety. He is the recipient of the 2024 IEC 1906 award and the 2021 Ron Waxman DASC Meritorious Service Award. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electronic engineering and a Ph.D. in microelectronics from the University of Pisa in Italy.
