Dr Richard Porter

ZENZIC

Alan Banks

Techworks

Simon Brewerton

RDM

Luca Cenciotti

Jaguar Land Rover

Kirsty Lloyd-Jukes

Waymo

Laksh P

Tata Consultancy Services

Dr Michael Braisher

Department for Transport

Dr Nick Reed

Reed Mobility

Ryan Lamm

Southwest Research Institute, TX, USA

Siddartha Khastgir

PRINCIPAL ENGINEER

Dr Jason Zhang

RESEARCH FELLOW

Shufeng Chen

PROJECT ENGINEER

Mike Freeman

PROJECT ENGINEER

Dr Emre Esenturk

RESEARCH FELLOW

Mariat James Elizabeth 

LEAD ENGINEER

Dr Chenling Li

RESEARCH FELLOW

Krishnam Raju

PROJECT ENGINEER

The inaugural UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship Scheme will receive £900 million over the next 11 years, with six funding competitions and 550 fellows set to be awarded. It will help to establish the careers of world-class research and innovation leaders across the UK business and academia, providing a boost to the pipeline of talent needed for the future. The scheme supports early career researchers and innovators with outstanding potential in universities, UK registered businesses and research-focused environments such as research councils' institutes and laboratories. The support will enable each fellow to tackle ambitious and challenging research an innovation and develop their own careers.

Academic or business hosts will benefit from funding of up to £1.2 million over a four-year period. The programme will also provide hosts with an opportunity to attract and retain the most talented individuals (UK or international) to their organisation.

Siddartha's Fellowship is supported by a team of industry leaders in the future mobility sector, who will support the seven-year programme. Find out more about the structure of the Advisory Board below.

Fellowship Brief

The global Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV) industry is estimated to be worth over £50 billion (by 2035), with the UK CAV industry comprising over £3 billion of this. However, while prototype CAV technologies have existed for some time now, ensuring the safety level of these technologies has proven to be a hindrance to commercialisation of CAV. It is suggested that, in order to prove that CAV are safer than human drivers, they will need to be driven for more than 11 billion miles, an unfeasible proposition. Furthermore, industry trends in CAV suggest the widespread adoption of Machine Learning (ML) in the autonomous control systems. ML-systems are non-deterministic in nature, resulting in different behaviours and a lack of transparency around the CAV system. Therefore, it is often difficult to identify reasons for a particular failure in such ML-based systems and take the corrective measures.

Siddartha's UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (FLF) programme will develop pioneering testing standards to enable robust and safe use of CAV with a focus on creating fundamental knowledge as well as research methods and tools. With safety as an underlying theme, Siddartha's FLF will focus on testing scenarios and environments using simulation, and creating evidence to prove CAV and ML-based systems are safe.

As the UK'S representative on various international standards committees, Siddartha will aim to help position the UK as a world leader in CAV research and innovation, for a long lasting societal and economic benefit, whilst also creating a world leading team of researchers in CAV evaluation at WMG. The programme's research outputs will provide a clear route to deliver impact through the development of international standards.

Team