Last week I had the honor of making my first trip to Kiev, Ukraine, to speak at Navimotive, the largest autonomous vehicle conference in Eastern Europe.
It is so exciting to meet software engineers from all over the world who are working on autonomous vehicles. This is particularly true Ukraine and other geographies that are new participants in the world of autonomous vehicles.
The event was hosted by Intellias, an automotive software firm with over 1,000 engineers. It is fantastic that there are engineers in places like Kiev and Lviv and Odesa working in C++ on similar problems as engineers in Bavaria or Detroit or Silicon Valley or China or India. Self-driving cars truly are going global.
The speakers came from around the globe, including:
- Green Mobility from Denmark
- HERE Technologies, which has a large Ukrainian office
- Esri, which also has a large Ukrainian presence
- OpenStreetMap
Many other international and Ukrainian companies were present as well.
My hope is that in the next few years self-driving cars will become as visible in Kiev as they are in Mountain View, and that engineers from all over the world have the opportunity to contribute to that future!
David Silver 