Safety Testing Self Driving Cars needs to consider the possible Deep Learning Weaknesses

Philip Koopman, professor of Carnegie Mellon Univ., believes the biggest hole in a Federal Automated Policy published late Sept. is in the regulators' failure to tangle head-on with fundamental difficulties in testing Machine Learning -- a problem already known to the scientific/engineering community. Representativeness of data Carmakers are building a fake city, for example, in Michigan to test autonomous vehicles. What's important, though, is whether the test data represents real-world driving conditions? A highly autonomous vehicle is designed to operate only in a certain designated area such as "driving only in downtown Pittsburgh." In DoT lingo, this concept is the "Operational Design Domain."