Sharon Barkai is a Nexagon Mobility Network Engineer at Nexar, an AECC member company.

Describe what inspires you about the connected car industry.

The connected car industry is inspiring for many reasons. One is the promise of better safety, and the creation of the initial infrastructure for autonomous vehicles, which promises not only safety but also better stewardship of the environment. From the technology point of view, what I find inspiring is that connected car cameras will be enabled by Multi-access Edge Compute, to make sense of all the vision and sensor data, coming in from the real world, in real-time. This creates endless possibilities – creating an index and operating system for the physical world, and building many applications on top of it. As cars “see” the world around them, they will create huge data streams that can be incredibly useful to the future of driving and managing our cities, based on the smart use of the network’s edge.

Tell us about your involvement with AECC.

Together with the AECC, we want to ensure that new technologies and standards meet the connected vehicle ecosystem’s future needs. We believe that the goal of a crowd-sourced memory of the roads and what’s around them will need to be standards-based, to deliver network features and benefits which are accessible to everyone and provide a robust and economical solution. As part of this effort, we’re working on an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard for mobile edge source routing.

It takes a village to create and promote standards since the underlying concepts and ideas need to be socialized and provide a common ground for the imagining of connected car applications of the future. In my mind, the AECC is the village where the standards for the future of this industry will be defined.

What have you learned from collaborating with the AECC?

With so many challenges facing connected vehicles and the utilization of high-volume data, the question is how do we identify the best practices and use cases that matter most? What are the use cases that can best be addressed by collective action from car manufacturers and technology providers?

These questions lie at the heart of the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium as we try together to gain a deeper understanding of emerging trends and to subsequently translate this into concrete actions. Our work with the AECC has shown the benefits of working together, especially with regards to upcoming mega-trends and their implications for the industry around:

  • Geolocation – matching resources to location, localizing uploads (vision-based localization); and
  • Intelligent Driving – Parking convenience, double-parking hazards, non-line of sight issues etc.

Can you share what you have enjoyed most about being an AECC member?

The ability to converse with like-minded technology architects and to reach a common understanding through cross-pollination of ideas.

In your experience, what is the benefit of joining the AECC – particularly for “non-car” companies and industries?

We believe that the solution for the connected car won’t be defined as a closed-garden approach within one provider or another. The more car camera information is created from a network of diverse cars, the better the data is and the more value it can create. Joining the AECC means that we can take a part in defining the data, its use, and most importantly, see the day when the AECC’s vision materializes.

Our readers are interested in your views on the future of the connected vehicle market. Where do you see it going? How will it evolve?

The connected vehicle market is closer than we think it is – and that is what makes it truly compelling. Cars will come with several built-in cameras in 2024-2025, and the industry will need to contend with the use and value this large stream of data can create. Much like the GPS in the smartphone created many apps that are network dependent, with the mere ability to share location — from ride-hailing to crowd-sourced navigation – cameras will change the driving experience. When AI is applied to the vision stream and the car camera network reaches a certain mass, the same new rush of valuable applications will emerge, changing driving from something that is limited to our line of sight, to an experience and capability that is enabled by non-line-of-sight vision of what’s around us.

We invite you to learn more about becoming a member of the AECC. With collaboration among OEMs, MNOs, cloud, app, and service providers, the AECC can help accelerate the development of high-value digital services across the ecosystem. Get in touch to learn how you can help invent the future of the connected car and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to stay up to date.