Philip J. Koopman

Prof. Philip Koopman is an internationally recognized expert on Autonomous Vehicle (AV) safety whose work in that area spans almost 30 years. He has also been involved with AV policy and standards as well as more general embedded system design and software quality. His pioneering research work includes software robustness testing and run time monitoring of autonomous systems to identify how they break and how to fix them. He has extensive experience in software safety and software quality across numerous embedded system, transportation, industrial, and defense application domains including conventional automotive software and hardware systems. He is faculty emeritus at the Carnegie Mellon University ECE Department where he taught software skills for mission-critical systems until 2025. In 2018 he was awarded the highly selective IEEE-SSIT Carl Barus Award for outstanding service in the public interest for his work in promoting automotive computer-based system safety. He originated the UL 4600 standard for autonomous system safety issued in 2020. In 2022 he was named to the National Safety Council's Mobility Safety Advisory Group. In 2023 he was named the International System Safety Society's Educator of the Year. In 2024 he received the Industry Legend award at the Self-Driving Industry Awards 2024 event. He is the author of the books: Embodied AI Safety (2025), Understanding Checksums & Cyclic Redundancy Codes (2024), How Safe is Safe Enough: measuring and predicting autonomous vehicle safety (2022), The UL 4600 Guidebook (2022) and Better Embedded System Software (2010).