ELLIS Unit Madrid is pleased to announce the online invited talk “Autonomous Driving at the Crossroads”, which will be delivered by Dr. Holger Caesar, tenured Assistant Professor in the Intelligent Vehicles group at TU Delft and Co-director of ELLIS Unit Delft. The seminar will take place online on 9 July at 10:00 CEST / Spain time and is organised by Prof. Luis M. Bergasa, member of ELLIS Unit Madrid, in collaboration with ELLIS Unit Delft.
Autonomous driving is currently being reshaped by scaling laws, end-to-end learning and foundation models, while increasingly ambitious claims suggest that full autonomy may be close to being solved. In this talk, Dr. Caesar will examine this optimistic narrative against the empirical reality of the field, focusing on the unresolved challenges that remain in perception, planning, simulation, evaluation and safety.
The seminar will revisit the evolution from classical autonomous vehicle stacks to modern vision-language-action systems, highlighting where current approaches still fall short. Dr. Caesar will also discuss why greater accountability is needed in VLA and E2E systems, particularly as foundation models become increasingly relevant for embodied AI and safety-critical autonomous systems.
Dr. Holger Caesar’s research focuses on autonomous vehicle perception and prediction, with a particular emphasis on scalable learning and annotation approaches. His work has received more than 21,000 citations, and he is best known for developing influential autonomous driving datasets such as nuScenes and nuPlan, as well as for contributions to PointPillars and Neuro NCAP. The talk is aimed at researchers, PhD and MSc students, engineers and professionals working across autonomous driving, robotics, computer vision, machine learning, perception, planning, simulation, evaluation, safety and foundation models. No registration is required; the access link will be announced soon.