All right. Good afternoon, everybody. We are all very excited to be here with you on behalf of secretary elaine chao. Our let our panelists introduce themselves in a moment. We want to let you know we appreciate how much you taking the time to be here with you today or to be with us today, youre a critical audience for us, representing the researchers, for advanced transportation, trv is an fantastic event. You tend to be a lot of people that understand what were saying more times than not and hearing from you helps to inform everything were doing. We appreciate everyone who came to the Human Trafficking panel earlier today. With safety being a top priority its something we need to take action on here and now. We look forward to you coming back later today. Well be talking about the secretarys top priority, to engage with these Innovative Technologies to ensure, to foster innovation while ensuring that the publics legitimate concerns over safety, security and privacy are kept on the forefront. My name is finch fulton. Everything were looking at today has been my portfolio the past three years. Im very excited about this conversation. To my left is james owens. Hi. James owens, the active administrator for the national thask association or nitsa. Very active these days because its a very exciting time to be involved in surface transportation. Theres so Much Technology and innovation going on right now that presents opportunities and challenges for any safety agency. Im jim murkel, executive director of the integration office. Our role is to ensure that uas are safely integrated into our National Air Space and also to ensure we keep that as innovative as possible. My name is diana roth. I oversee all the 1. 1 billion worth of research in the different modes, plus the 75 million in the University Transportation centers. I also look at technology such as backup gps in case satellites get knocked out and spectrum and connecting vehicles and Automated Vehicles. Wonderful. So, the show for today, well all give brief presentations to show you foundational background of everything going on in terms of policy initiatives, regulatory initiatives, laying the foundation for conversation, then well have back and forth questions and then you should see a number of policy staff around the room with no cards. If our policy staffers could hold their hands up, youll see these note cards. If you can wave them over, that will allow us to take questions from the audience. We do this because this is currently being aired live on cspan. We need to make sure we take questions, not take statements if you know what i mean. Were looking forward to this conversation. To start with how we have been handling these new and emerging technologies, you are probably aware at this point that the secretary announced nontraditional and emerging council in march of last year. Also looking at new technologies that we havent been established to handle. We did start focusing on the types of petitions weve been receiving where you see the nontraditional tumbling but making sure were incorporating outreach initiatives, regulatory initiatives, making sure we use this to inform the other types of work were doing in the department. Needless to say our friends at the faa that work on drones are bringing in the Lessons Learned and figuring out how to inform the work the faa is doing. A lot of learning has been going back and forth between the faa, nitsa, all of the assets. Maybe theres some day we need to include a scooter working group. Thats a question diana has been thinking hard about. We need to make sure we have good Interagency Partnership because we have authorities that touch other agencies. This is a good place for everyone to go. And i think weve had some good success so far. We just put out a request for comment. They just closed on friday the 10th. We got 1300 views of that and 26 official responses from commenters, challenging us to be thinking of technology in certain ways. So well be reading those. It just closed friday. We have not read them yet. Reading those, taking them in, understanding them and well take next steps from there. We had 27 Public Comments not 26. The secretary attended so she could announce Automated Vehicles 4. 0, ensuring American Leadership and Automated Vehicle safety. It builds on the departments approach for safety. We started, of course, with the cornerstone of safety, automated driving systems 2. 0, vision for safety, highlighting 12 safety features important for Automated Vehicles consider posting voluntary self statements, making sure the public knows how theyre creating these technologies. Last year, or in 2018 at the end of 2018 we produced Automated Vehicles 3. 0, preparing for the future of transportation. This took this cornerstone of safety and laid a foundation so that we have one d. O. T. Approach for how we engage with these automated technologies. It highlighted the federal, state and local role in these technologies and where do we belong and where does the federal role in research belong as we work with new and emerging technologies . What you see in Automated Vehicles 4. 0 is a continuation of these themes. The feedback i got was well, its what we expected. It should have been. We took comment on 2. 0, 3. 0 and we put out a number of requests for comments and we listened and took those seriously. The engaged Transportation Community should have seen this coming. Its been fantastic, the feedback weve gotten. We are putting this out for Public Comment as well. Were always better off hearing from everybody. As weve been engaging with our interagency partners and partners at the white house we didnt have a perfect idea of how many agencies were involved. My best guess is something around 13. If you dont know all 38 agencies involved, one, please go to transportation. Gov av. How can we better tie together these pieces . As we look forward to the future we have billions of dollars being spent on this research. We have dozens and dozens of initiatives going on, to make sure we accurately communicate these technologies and make sure the public can understand what is expected of each Automated Vehicle manufacturer and what it means when they engage in public transit, there are so many different initiatives that even i wasnt aware of, someone who is highly focused. It should serve as a map for you all to look as an american innovator what are the tools in place to connect these dots and be able to utilize Government Resources to ensure that america can continue to lead in the innovation of these technologies . 36 states plus the department, plus the district of columbia are actively engaged in the testing of these technologies. Types of insure actives they would like to see. Weve been working with our state and local, outlines the federal role. We look forward to working with you all in this room on these things. It does highlight the principle. We highlighted what our principles are that align with our authorities. You should see some of the same principles and understand the foundation for how weve been engaging but also how do we tie in the different authorities that we ourselves do not have . You see things like privacy come pack into effect, you see things around systemwide impacts coming into effect, drawing some of the Cyber Security partnerships we have with dhs, tsa and on the dod side, all the work theyre doing, tying together the department of energy, what happens when you make a connected vehicle. All these pieces are here and theyre now aligned for the first time under one set of principle principles. One of the activities weve been using to inform ourselves again, im talking about the policy activities that are underway, well have some of our partners talk about the regulatory activities they have under way. Diana will be talking about some of the research and spectrum related activities. With 60 million that congress provided to us to inform and engage the public on automated, first and foremost on safety, secondly on generating the type of data for safe integration of technology and third working with our state and local partners on the types of operations theyre comfortable with today, bringing them in so we have a coalition that are working together to explore what this technology can do, how to bring it in the system safely and how we can all Work Together. Thats the criteria with which we judge these grants and weve got great results. Rural applications, urban applications, working with people with disabilities and those that have good understanding of these initiatives and even looking at trucking applications versus transit applications versus pure automated applications. Weve got it all. Fantastic work. Probably many of you worked on these grants yourselves. Thank you for doing a great job. That made our life better. Now were in the process of cranking them out, going through all the activities. Youll see more headlines to come. Really the one thing that i would like to flag since jay is here, a lot of the things we learned from the very successful president s Drone Pilot Program we brought into this process, not only with how we processed it but how well execute t there are thipgs were doing recently in this administration itself that are informs our activities. Youll see echos of it, improvements over time as we learn from each other and have these conversations as an agency in the department. One of my favorite initiatives that weve been talking through and that the secretary did a great job announcing, and her focus on accessibility is starting to drive through since 2017, weve tripled the amount of research thats gone to accessibility insure actives and the secretary announced not only a number of research and policy driven initiatives but more of the intergovernment work bringing together the assets in the federal government, bringing back the coordinating council and accessibility since the george w. Bush administration, tying together these knots and row search initiatives to tie all the excitement around Automated Vehicles to ensure were bringing in that subject matter expertise so we can have the deployment of these grants, whether its the 40 million for the complete deployment grants that help use technology for accessibilities that can go from their beds to vehicles or to transit to their desk and back home, completing every trip they would like to make along the way not just working curb to curb but door to door and bed to desk. Its important in technologies here today, deploying that and taking the Lessons Learned. With the Inclusive Design challenge i love the mantra nothing about us without us. That is us, putting out a challenge to all the innovators, universities to Work Together, taking the standards that are already developed, creating new standards, helping to bring in this community of knowledgeable people with the actual engineers and Decision Makers of the Innovation Community together so were thinking proactively about the challenges that people with all sorts of accessibility needs, cognitive, visual, auditory, mobility challenges. Bring them in so we can Work Together to address concerns before it becomes a problem down the road. Cooking them in on the front end will hopefully help alleviate a lot of future challenges and lower that barrier to access blt. We want to take the lessons learn maryland that program and apply them to todays technology so were not waiting on Automated Vehicles to solve all problems and were not looking for silver bullets. One of the things we highlighted you see this in av 4. 0 and a lot of the work that james owens is doing in nit sch ni nitsa, we have to do a better job of what level it is or otherwise, but what its real capabilities are. So people riding in a vehicle, people that are regulating this. People that are just members of the public, that are seeing these things going on but dont know what they mean, they cannd if they get into a vehicle that this say level two vehicle. What does that mean . Driver assistance vehicle. Youre always in charge. Or is this a level four vehicle where youre not supposed to be hands on the wheel but youre supposed to be paying attention . There is not a truly self driving vehicle on the road today nothing for sale today. That remains the case. Increasingly brought into the vehicles that are improving safety today. We cannot let any of those things be conflated with actual self driving. It gives people Unrealistic Expectations of what their vehicle can do but it takes away the public trust in this technology in the future that can have the safety outcomes we really care about. Its important we get our technology correct, that we simplify it. We have everyone understanding what we mean if we talk to engineers versus the policy wogs that understand what it means to be level one vehicle versus level four vehicle. Driver assist functions and automated driving system functions or or av functions, we have to clarify what that is and make sure everyone understands, so that we can, so that we cannot lose the public trust. So this is something that you have seen us work on, we worked with some of our partners like sae, pave, consumer reports, on their documents and we are happy they came and talked to us beforehand and we had a lot of discussions with them so were happy with that, and that does serve as a starting point for more conversations, and more work that we need to be doing, to produce these things, for public consumption, and to inform ourselves even as the d. O. T. And the partners in congress, we are all in this together. We are still working on our Automated Vehicle work force, we hope to be able to produce this soon, but as we think proactively of the impact these technologies bring, we need to make sure were engaging and bringing in the community of people that are impacted and one of the main outreach initiatives weve been doing with the blessing and funding of congress is the Automated VehicleImpact Report and looking at the Trucking Community and the Transit Community because theyre the ones who are likely going to bring the technologies into their system first. We had workshops. We brought them in. We had wonderful engagement with partners might not normally expect to be working, with the teamsters, uaw, bringing them in and having workshops firsthand so we can understand their needs and making sure were proactively thinking of and addressing these things. So we brought in four agencies, the department of labor of course, health and human serses, and commerce, so hopefully we can have something to produce for you soon because it really is a very interesting thought process we go through when trying to predict the future and predict what the impacts will have for specific people. So stay tuned on that one. Lastly, the Automated Vehicles comprehensive plan. This one has also referred funding from congress. But it is the most devilishy tricky problem we have because we have to predict the future and predict the future of regulations and which no lawyer is comfortable doing and predict the research and tie this together and that is why it is critical to put out there 4. 0 to outline the departments rules and what were focused and doing and the regulatory agenda out in public that omb produces routinely so you see what the plans are for regulations and you have the policy initiatives. How do we tie them together . How do we get from where we are today where we have a number of roles being put forth, for consideration and Research Initiatives and other policy initiatives, how do we get to where we are today and full and safe integration of ought mated vehicles into, Automated Vehicles into our National Transportation system. Thats what this project. Is so when we ask for comments on 4. 0, were thinking about how do we tie these things together to be a truly comprehensive plan and its not going to be right but we want to be as not wrong as possible. We cant prodict the future but were going to try, and it is going to be fantastically interesting and my colleagues on the stage, maybe excluding jay, i dont know, probably bring him in to some meetings, this is something were working on over the next number of months. So with that, i just leave you my information. I am always available to all of you. Please feel free to reach out to me, reach out to the policy shop, we are at your service. We are assets for you. We are all going to be working together on this. And we will be calling for to you make Public Comment on this document, right here, and on other things. Nothing we do is not done without taking Public Comment, and making sure were looking around every corner at what the impacts may be and how we should be shaping our actions. So with that, i will turn it over to you, james. Thank you, and its a pleasure to be here this afternoon, i appreciate you all being here. Its an opportunity for us to talk to you, share with you whats going on in our agencies. You are important stakeholders. We believe in very much reaching out to the public and getting feedback, so that we can make the ideally the best decisions possible or at least the decisions in light of the information weve been given. Let me start by noting that nhtsa as you all know first and foremost a safety agency. As the nations Vehicl