On June 24, the KI Data Tooling consortium presented its first research results at Volkswagen's Drive Forum in Berlin. Over 100 visitors were given an overview of the current status of the project, initial results and further challenges in various presentations, discussions and posters at the event.

The event was opened by project coordinator Dr. Hans-Jörg Vögel (BMW) and Stefan Heidemann (German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection) as representative of the funding body. In his pre-recorded keynote, Norm Marks from Nvidia then went into detail about the importance of synthetic data for autonomous driving. This was followed by a panel discussion, in which Prof. Dr. Frank Köster (DLR), Dr. Thomas Stauner (BMW), Armin Koehler (Bosch), Dr. Gerhard Schunk (Valeo), PD Dr. Hardi Hungar (DLR), Prof. Dr. Christoph Stiller (FZI), Dr. Robert Bruckmeier (BMW), and André Rolfsmeier (dSpace) addressed the relevance of data and scenarios for the safety argumentation of autonomous driving systems. Thereafter, Dr. Andreas Albrecht from Bosch gave a second keynote on the subject of "Systematic data-driven engineering as the key to secure AD function development". Thus, the main topics of the project and their importance in the overall context of autonomous driving have all been addressed in the morning section of the event.

Before the lunch break, the first results of KI Data Tooling on these topics were presented – first in a short presentation on the Data Tooling Workflow. This workflow was then specified in detail by the subproject leaders with it’s various building blocks. Visitors were also able to gain in-depth insights into the consortium's activities to date in a poster session during the breaks and in three parallel lectures in the afternoon. In a concluding interactive exchange session, the project coordinator and the subproject leaders were able to discuss and answer the attendees' questions, which had been collected throughout the day via a virtual tool. Through many interesting questions, it was possible to shed light on the work done so far as well as the upcoming challenges and goals of the project.

The importance of a complete data solution, which is the aim of the project, was once again confirmed by the event and the lively discussions. However, in the next few months until the project is completed, further central questions in connection to autonomous driving will have to be answered.

The agenda of the event can be found here: https://www.ki-datatooling.de/de/mid-term-presentation