7^th ACM Computer Science in Cars Symposium (CSCS 2023)

The 7th ACM Computer Science in Cars Symposium (CSCS) took place on December 5, 2023, at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences (h_da) in Germany. The proceedings of the symposium have been published in the ACM Digital Library as CSCS ‘23: Proceedings of the 7th ACM Computer Science in Cars Symposium. This collection captures the depth and breadth of insights shared during this collaborative exploration of AI and security in the automotive domain.

We are grateful to everyone who attended our conference and to all the authors for their valuable contributions. Your participation and input have greatly contributed to the success of the event. We hope you had a great time at the conference. Please keep an eye out for updates on next year’s event.

About CSCS

CSCS brings together researchers, practitioners, developers, and anyone interested in solving the myriad complex problems of modern vehicles. The conference offers a common platform to discuss new developments in vehicle technology and its applications. The two main topics of the conference are Artificial Intelligence and Security for Vehicles. In addition to the presentation of current research contributions from these areas, the conference offers the opportunity for networking, joint brainstorming on current challenges and the development of new solutions.

Artificial Intelligence and Security for Vehicles

Artificial Intelligence and Security for Vehicles are both very important research areas due to the current drive in making vehicles fully autonomous and more and more connected. Computers will be responsible for handling the driving and changing conditions or environments make this very challenging and important for ensuring safe operations of driverless vehicles. However, the associated connectivity of vehicles must be secured against attackers, as successful attacks can have devastating effects.

Technology and automotive giants have vested interest and large investments to make autonomous driving commonplace. With rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and security for vehicles at so many different sources it can get hard to keep up with the state-of-the-art. Whether it is a record-breaking achievement of the world’s first “fully autonomous” taxi service or a new security protocol for over-the-air updates, the place to discuss and learn would be CSCS.

Conference Program

Keynote Speakers

Prof. Jan Peters, Ph.D.

Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany

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Jan Peters is a full professor (W3) for Intelligent Autonomous Systems at the Computer Science Department of the Technische Universitaet Darmstadt since 2011, and, at the same time, he is the dept head of the research department on Systems AI for Robot Learning (SAIROL) at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz, DFKI) since 2022. He is also a founding research faculty member of the Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence. Jan Peters has received the Dick Volz Best 2007 US PhD Thesis Runner-Up Award, the Robotics: Science & Systems - Early Career Spotlight, the INNS Young Investigator Award, and the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society's Early Career Award as well as numerous best paper awards. In 2015, he received an ERC Starting Grant and in 2019, he was appointed IEEE Fellow, in 2020 ELLIS fellow and in 2021 AAIA fellow.

Despite being a faculty member at TU Darmstadt only since 2011, Jan Peters has already nurtured a series of outstanding young researchers into successful careers. These include new faculty members at leading universities in the USA, Japan, Germany, Finland and Holland, postdoctoral scholars at top computer science departments (including MIT, CMU, and Berkeley) and young leaders at top AI companies (including Amazon, Boston Dynamics, Google, and Facebook/Meta).

Jan Peters has studied Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical and Control Engineering at TU Munich and FernUni Hagen in Germany, at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the University of Southern California (USC). He has received four Master's degrees in these disciplines as well as a Computer Science PhD from USC. Jan Peters has performed research in Germany at DLR, TU Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (in addition to the institutions above), in Japan at the Advanced Telecommunication Research Center (ATR), at USC and at both NUS and Siemens Advanced Engineering in Singapore. He has led research groups on Machine Learning for Robotics at the Max Planck Institutes for Biological Cybernetics (2007-2010) and Intelligent Systems (2010-2021).

KEYNOTE: Lessons from Robot Reinforcement Learning

Autonomous robots that can assist humans in situations of daily life have been a long-standing vision of robotics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive sciences. A first step towards this goal is to create robots that can learn tasks triggered by environmental context or higher-level instruction. However, learning techniques have yet to live up to this promise as only few methods manage to scale to high-dimensional manipulator or humanoid robots. In this talk, we investigate a general framework suitable for learning motor skills in robotics which is based on the principles behind many analytical robotics approaches. To accomplish robot reinforcement learning from just few trials, the learning system can no longer explore all learn-able solutions but has to prioritize one solution over others – independent of the observed data. Such prioritization requires explicit or implicit assumptions, often called ‘induction biases’ in machine learning. Extrapolation to new robot learning tasks requires induction biases deeply rooted in general principles and domain knowledge from robotics, physics, and control.

Martin Arend

BMW Group, Germany

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Since 2019 Martin Arend is General Manager Automotive Security. Part of his responsibilities are setting Automotive Security Standards, Methods, Processes, Strategy, Architecture and Functionality for the Connected Car within the BMW Group.

Martin Arend started his career as Business Development Manager in a medium-sized enterprise introducing Bluetooth Technology into client’s projects. Joining BMW Group 2003 as a Telephony/Telematics specialist he was promoted Head of CE Connectivity in 2010. 2014 he changed to the position Head of Sensors and Algorithms for Advanced Driver Assistant Systems (ADAS). 2015 he moved into the position of General Manager E/E Architecture, Technologies within BMW Research, New Technologies, Innovations, responsible for Research and Pre-Development with focus on future vehicle architectures, Enabler- and Software Technologies, including Security, in an early stage of the development process. He completed his degree in electrical engineering at Ostbayerische Technische Hochschule in Amberg/Bavaria. He holds several international patents for BMW Group.

KEYNOTE: Automotive Security Management System – State of Practice

Have you ever thought about why it is a bad idea to neglect security in vehicles? And why security and complexity never will be best friends? And how to manage this challenge in a complex vehicle anyway? Introducing what matters most from a security perspective and looking at the attackers landscape we describe some details of our security approach and provide some insights into regulation and our cyber security management system. Concluding with an outlook and the question "what's next?"

Hassan Mohd

Continental Automotive, Germany

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Hassan Mohd is Manager – Product Cybersecurity Management Systems Planning and Operations at Continental Automotive. In this role he is responsible for defining Automotive Product Cybersecurity Methods, Processes, and new Business Models.

Hassan Mohd has profound experience in the Automotive Industry. He started working with Continental Automotive in 2017. He joined Continental Business Consulting team and in his role as Managing Consultant, he was responsible for R&D process improvement topics, ASPICE conformity, Gap analysis and implementation of CSMS processes. Prior to Continental Automotive, Hassan worked for HERE Technologies in Berlin in the Automotive go-to-market and operations team. Hassan holds an MBA in International Business from TH Nürnberg and a bachelor’s degree in commerce from Delhi University.

KEYNOTE: Cybersecurity Regulations with Impact on Europe

As the complexity of Automotive systems increase, the need for state of art product cybersecurity alongwith with harmonized standards and audit guidelines shall become extremely essential. Have you ever thought what standards and regulations are currently in place or shall be introduced in the upcoming years? What are ongoing activities from Industry Bodies to achieve harmonized standards as reference implementation for the industry?

Conference Committee

Björn Brücher

Intel Germany

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Björn Brücher is a technical lead in computer cloud graphics at Intel in Germany and the General Chair of the CSCS conference this year. He is an experienced professional in computer science with broad technical acumen across CPU & GPU in hardware and software with extensive experience in software development, optimization, and validation. As a trusted advisor and industry influencer he led projects in the autonomous driving area in close collaboration with German car manufactures. Most of his professional life he focused on computer graphics and high-performance computing. He holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Siegen, Germany. Preservation of the environment, green energy, and electromobility are what he is interested in. Implementing innovative solutions in private life, proven to work, and being vocal about it in public.

Christoph Krauß

Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences and INCYDE GmbH

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Prof. Dr. Christoph Krauß is full professor for Network Security, spokesperson of the IT Security expert group, and head of the research group Applied Cyber Security Darmstadt (ACSD) at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. Furthermore, he is Head of Automotive Security Research at INCYDE GmbH, which he co-founded. At the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE, he is Principal Investigator and coordinator of the research area Secure Autonomous Driving. He has over 15 years of experience in IT security. His research and interests include automotive security and privacy, railway security, intelligent energy networks security, trusted computing, network security, efficient and post-quantum cryptography, and security engineering.

Program Co-Chairs

Mario Fritz

CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Germany

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Mario Fritz is faculty member at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Saarbruecken, Germany and professor at the Saarland University. Previously, he was senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and post-doc at UC Berkeley and the International Computer Science Institute on a Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His research focus is at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning with Security & Privacy. His recent work focuses on Deep Learning techniques that allow end-to-end training of complex and multi-modal approaches. He has over 90 publications - 50 in top venues. His key contributions include work on visual domain adaptation, latent factor models, the Visual Turing Test, privacy in visual data, and attack as well as defenses for machine learning models. He has served as area chair for ECCV and ICCV, is associate editor of TPAMI and is member of the ACM Europe Technology Policy Committee.

Hans-Joachim Hof

Technical University of Ingolstadt, Germany

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Hans-Joachim Hof is full professor and vice president of Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt, Germany. He leads the research group „Security in Mobility“ in the CARISSMA Institute of Electric, Connected, and Secure Mobility (C-ECOS). His research focus is on the security testing of vehicles as well as on secure automotive software. Previously, Hans-Joachim was a full professor at the Munich University of Applied Sciences, Germany and research scientist at Corporate Technology of Siemens AG, Germany. He holds a PhD from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. Hans-Joachim is a member of  the board of the German Chapter of the ACM and of the German national computer science association (Gesellschaft für Informatik).

Oliver Wasenmüller

University for Applied Science Mannheim, Germany

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Oliver Wasenmüller is full Professor at the Mannheim University for Applied Science. His research is in the intersection of Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence with a focus on automotive. Previously he was a team leader for "machine vision and autonomous vehicles" at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). He is both speaker and reviewer in many scientific conferences in this field and co-organizes also the IEEE CVPR workshop SAIAD.

Web Chairs and Local Organization Chairs

• Dominik Bayerl, Technical University of Ingolstadt, Germany
• Timm Lauser, Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, Germany
• Lukas Kaupp, Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, Germany
• Jana Brücher, University of Applied Sciences Munich, Germany
• Oliver Grau, Intel Germany

Program Committee

• Apratim Bhattacharyya, Qualcomm AI Research
• Dennis Kengo Oka, Synopsys
• Dominik Bayerl, Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt
• Florian Fenzl, Fraunhofer SIT
• Frank Kargl, University of Ulm
• H. Gregor Molter, Porsche AG
• Kevin Gomez, Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt
• Marc Stöttinger, RheinMain University of Applied Science
• Markus Enzweiler, Esslingen University of Applied Sciences
• Markus Tschersich, Continental Automotive Technologies GmbH
• Mert D. Pesé, Clemson University
• Philipp Heidenreich, Opel Automobile GmbH
• René Schuster, DFKI
• Sheikh Mahbub Habib, Continental Automotive Technologies GmbH
• Stefan Katzenbeisser, University of Passau
• Stefan Milz, Spleenlab.ai / Ilmenau University
• Tim Fingscheidt, Technische Universität Braunschweig
• Timm Lauser, Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences
• Tim Leinmüller, Denso
• Timo Saemann, Valeo
• Timo van Roermund, NXP
• Tobias Eggendorfer, Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt

Venue

Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences is one of the largest universities of applied sciences in Germany. It is located in the City of Science Darmstadt. One of the highlights of Darmstadt is the Mathildenhöhe, which was recently recognized as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences,
High-rise building. Photo: Britta Hüning

Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences,
Campus and Building C10. Photo: Jan Hosan

City of Science Darmstadt,
Mathildenhöhe. Photo: Mathias Ulrich

Organized by members of