Jane Lappin chairs the National Academies of Engineering Transportation Research Board Vehicle-Highway Automation Committee and is co-founder of the annual Automated Road Transportation Symposium.  She is recently retired as Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs for Toyota Research Institute where she monitored global regulatory affairs related to highly automated vehicles.  Previously, Jane worked for USDOT Volpe Center, where she managed projects assessing public response to advanced vehicle technologies and the impact of those technologies on driver behavior.  Jane served as USDOT secretariat to the trilateral US-EU-JPN international research collaboration on intelligent transportation, and as the US co-chair of the US-EU-Japan Automation in Road Transportation Working Group.  Before discovering her true calling in transportation, Jane worked for Abt Associates in their business strategy group, for the Canadian International Development Agency evaluating women’s economic development programs in Bangladesh, and co-directing a public health survey in Haiti.  She studied sociology as an undergraduate at Boston University and earned an MBA from the Simmons College Graduate School of Management, the world’s only all women’s business school.  Ms. Lappin is currently consulting on automated vehicles safety, operations, and policy issues.

Asaf Degani is a Technical Fellow at General Motors R&D.  His research focus is on the analysis and design of human-machine interaction with special emphasis on autonomy.  He supports several major projects at GM concerning automated vehicles and leads research work on the implications of this technology with respect to the public space, public acceptance, and ethics.