 It's a pleasure to be here. We own and drive, many of us own and drive cars that we do not really need. On the other hand, many of us decide not to own a car, but sometimes we like to have access to one. So this is not really something that is sustainable for a long term. Our vision for the future is one where mobility is actually shared. It's based on like a shared vehicles, but this is something that is a concept that you can find and realize today. There are several services that offer some form of vehicle sharing, car sharing, bicycle sharing, so on and so forth. Everybody likes them? Nobody uses them. Or very few people use these kind of services because they're still at the level of convenience or availability that is not what people want. I am convinced that in order to make this vision for shared mobility a reality, what we need is technology. That's the technology of autonomous cars, where cars, whenever you need a car, you can call one with your smartphone, the car will come to pick you up, taste you whatever you need, you sign it away. And this is, I think that actually here in Singapore, it's a very unique opportunity to make this vision a reality. This is what we are doing and this is why we are focusing on Singapore. And we tell you more of the story, but this is really where we see this happening first. Some of you may have heard that actually yesterday, there was an event with LTA, the Ministry of Transport, where we actually signed an agreement with LTA that will support us in developing this vision for driverless, shared cars or driverless taxis or however you want to call them in the coming years, okay? So, okay, I will be talking about autonomous cars, test driving vehicles, however you want to call them. And I think that there is a lot of confusion in the media and in general public about what self driving cars are, what they're useful for, what they can do, what they cannot do. When people talk about self driving vehicles, autonomous cars, the first thing that people mention, the first thing that comes to mind is safety, okay? People say that, you know, we all know that, you know, almost all traffic accidents are caused by human errors, you remove the human, hence you remove the errors. At least this is the principle, so then you remove all traffic accidents. Yeah, this is great. Other things that people mention is the convenience, okay? So now, you know, you don't have to drive, so you can text or check your email legally while the car is driving itself. Okay, you can sleep or you can watch a movie or any other activity that is more productive or more pleasant than just driving. Third reason is increasing access to transportation. For example, people who will not be able to drive otherwise because for example, they cannot see well or maybe they are too young or maybe they are too old or maybe they have one day too many, right? So they can actually drive home safely. Other reasons include things like increasing throughput and efficiency of traffic or maybe reducing the environmental impact, okay? These are all fantastic things. However, if you think, each one of these areas is what each one of these benefits is actually taking the existing transportation system and making it a little better, okay? I think that, you know, this is great but that's not all there is to it. I think that, you know, what we are really interested in is to try to figure out how this kind of technology can actually change the way that the transportation system works, okay? Common in the startup world to talk about disruption, right? We want to change the world. I think that's what I'm interested in is not make the world a place that is a little bit better but it's a place that is very fundamentally different. In a better way. Now, I talk about, you know, five different potential benefits. How do you compare, you know, how do you say which one is more important or better than the other? So it's hard to compare. So what I will do is take a little bit of a cynical stance and convert everything into dollars, okay? The numbers are referring to the US market, okay? So what is the value of safety? What is the value of your life? Well, probably to you is priceless, your loved ones and your friends and your family is priceless. To the government, at least in the US, it's worth about $9 million, okay? So this is what they call the cost of a statistical life. So this is the number that the government, you know, when they have to initiate their considering a new project, they say, okay, so if I do this, this will cost me, you know, this many million dollars, but this will allow me to save this many lives. And they compared it to, it's worth it, then let's do it some, otherwise it's better to get people killed, you know? Right, so it's a little bit cynical, as I said, but you know, this is the kind of calculation that people make. Now, in 2014, NHTSA, which is the agency in the US that looks after the national, you know, highway safety. They released the report where they estimated that the economic cost of traffic accidents is about $300 billion a year. The societal cost, you know, essentially the pain and suffering and all these things that make people's lives miserable is being estimated to be about $600 billion, okay? So assuming that with autonomous cars or with whatever other technology, we can reduce all the traffic accidents to zero, benefit to society would be about $900 billion a year, one, almost one taken, a lot of money. Let's look at other things. We can reduce congestion. The cost of congestion has been estimated to be about, what is it, $100 billion a year. What is the cost of pollution? Another $50 billion a year. Okay, but now what is, for example, the value of the time that you get back by not having to drive? So I did a very simple calculation back of the envelope. I took the one half of the median wage in the US, which is an embarrassingly low number, okay? And multiplied by the number of hours that American drivers spend behind the wheel every year, the number that you get is about 1.2 trillion dollars a year. So you see that already the value of the time that you get back by not having to drive is more than the value that you get from safety, okay? It's a societal value. It's not to say that autonomous cars should be unsafe, right? But if you compare the benefits, the benefits is higher from the productivity or just the value of getting back your time. But if you look at this pie chart, we only, we got half of it. What is the other half going? Now, if a car can drive by itself, there is no point in keeping the car parked in the garage, right, or, you know, on the side of the street. If you think of it, most people throughout the world, most people who own a car, they invest a sizable chunk of their disposable income in Singapore, more than in other places, right? But then they use this car for roughly 5% of the time. The rest of the time, the car is parked usually in some pretty expensive piece of real estate. So usually people, not only they pay for the car, but they also pay for the privilege of not using their car, okay? Again, this doesn't make a lot of sense. If the car can drive itself, so it doesn't make sense to keep it parked. It makes better sense to just have the car drive and drive somebody else, okay? So then if you start thinking in this context of car sharing, then you get all the benefits, okay? So now I, clearly I don't have to pay for parking. But not only that, I don't have to waste time looking for parking, okay? I don't have to walk to and from the parking space. If a fleet operator is actually buying the cars, you have a lot of economies of scale, sensing for insurance, servicing, maintenance, everything else. So if we estimate that we pull the benefits to the public is about $1.8 trillion, okay? And this is estimating what we call the sharing factor that is of about four or five. That essentially one of the shares of vehicles can replace five, four or five, you know, parallel to all vehicles, okay? So what you see here is that it is a very sensible market, right? And most of the benefit is actually coming from the ability to share this vehicle in a very convenient, in a very convenient way. Now, the next thing is to talk a little bit about what are these autonomous vehicles? Because as I said before, there is a lot of confusion in the media and in the general public about what certain vehicles are and what they are not. There is this classification of vehicle automation capabilities that is being proposed by Midsend. Okay, so level zero is not automation. That's your old fashioned, you know, for model T, you know, this is a car with just nothing automatic. Right, so level one is something like cruise control. You start combining one function. So cruise control is something that you can push the button and it maintains the speed, but then you still have to drive and, you know, hit the brake, right? If you combine this function, two of these functions together, then you get what is called level two, okay? So level two is something that has cruise control and maybe automated steering. You're still required to be constantly engaged in driving and be ready to take over from the automation at any time. This is what the Tesla autopilot is, okay? Despite the name, this is what it is, okay? Level three is something where the car can actually take over without requiring you to drive all the time, but it will require you to take over control given sufficient warning. What is a sufficient warning? I don't know, right? Level four is a vehicle that is designed to be able to drive by itself without any human intervention at all times, okay? As you may see, I'm not used to it at all because I think that these are two fundamentally better ideas, okay? Because essentially, if you do any of these things, you are essentially designing your automation with the human as a safety critical piece of the system, okay? And sorry, but even though I can design, I can do the best job possible with the automation, I cannot design the human. And in particular, humans are known to not be able to work well with automation, for example, and use a little bit of a paradox because the better the automation gets, the less capable a human is at paying attention and being able to take over, okay? It saddens me, I mean, you may have heard of the Tesla accidents that happened in May, and a person unfortunately died as a result. I think that a lot of that is due to the fact that people engage the autopilot and they think that, you know, they start by, okay, so let me pay attention, and then the thing is working well, so their minds start drifting off, and then they start checking the email, and eventually they end up watching a DVD, right? Watching a movie, and that's how people die, okay? So this is a very, you know, from my point of view, this is a very fundamental one, you know, just better the app, and so we don't want to do that. For me, what we want to do is just make it clear, you need to drive the car, or the car driving center. There must not, it cannot be any kind of uncertainty on who is in charge, okay? Or in particular, there must not be any kind of, like a forced handover that require a human to just intervene, you know, especially on short notice, okay? So if you're thinking of how you want to realize the one that's in the car, and if you really want to care about safety, then I think it's a really bad idea to have humans as a critical, on the critical path in your system, okay? Now, even though many, so for example, Google has driven, you know, their car for about, what is it now, is 1,700,000 miles or something like that. That looks like a big number. Tesla autopilot has driven for 130 million miles. This may seem big numbers. But actually if you look at these numbers in the context of, you know, the rate of accidents, you know, for human drivers, and actually people have done some math correctly, and the Land Corporation recently released a report where they estimated that in order to prove in a conclusive way that autonomous cars are safer than human drivers, you need to drive for about five billion miles. Good luck with that, okay? So I think that the safety argument is an important argument. I think that it will eventually be true, but I think that this is something that will eventually be true on an asymptotic scale, okay? Some, at some point it will happen, but there's not something that I'm counting on today. Okay, so I think that, you know, benefits are really coming from other benefits. As we discussed, the time value of product. For that, you need level four, right? So if the car is requiring you to pay attention, you have to sit there and pay attention, and at that point I can just as well drive, right? So I cannot sleep, I cannot check my email, I cannot watch movies, I have to just pay attention to this thing from my point of view I would rather drive, okay? So for this you need level four, car sharing, the obstacle to car sharing are really two, you know, actually it's really one, it's availability, okay? Availability of a car when you need one, and then availability of a parking spot when you want to get rid of the car, okay? Now if the car is able to drive itself and deliver itself to you, or disappear when you don't need it anymore, that's all you need, okay? So again, therefore you need the car to be able to drive by itself when nobody's inside. So from my point of view, level four autonomy in your world, people call this full autonomy is essential to capture the benefits that we discussed, okay? And the less is from my point of view, is pretty much pointless. It's cool, it's a nice gadget, it's something that you can brag about with your friends and your girlfriend, you know, show off, but it's not that it's really changing the way that we think of mobility. So how do we get there? You know, people very often ask me, okay, so when is it that we will see autonomous cars as, you know, everywhere, I think that. So, look at this picture where I'm showing here the different levels of automation that I showed before, okay? Remember that I consider two and three as the danger zone, okay? So you mark them in this kind of way. And then let's look at the scale and the scope of the deployment, okay? So here is just a prototype or just driving around in a closed course. And this is something that where you actually have a mass deployment everywhere, okay? From looking at the way that people are approaching this problem, you know, we want to do the scale eventually, right? So we want to have complete autonomous cars driving around everywhere, right? The way there are two paths that people are following. One is what I would call the OEM path, okay? So these are the companies that make millions of vehicles, okay? And of course, when they think of incremental steps, okay, so we cannot go from here to over there in one step, right? So we want to take little baby steps. But the car companies typically, I mean, this is my interpretation of their thought, okay? So this is not the result of what they're thinking, but this is what the way that we see them behaving. So they are used to producing millions of cars, right? So for them, baby steps are always measured in millions of cars. So it's just develop a little bit of capability on millions of cars. Do an automated parking, advanced cruise control, right? So these little bits, but deploy them, you know, at scale on the whole, you know, on the professional vehicles, okay? So you can think of that as, you know, just taking baby steps in terms of capabilities, but deploying them on commercial production vehicles, okay? And if you want to do that, then you have to cross this danger zone, okay? This is where Tesla is today. And this is where people die, okay? So on the other hand, what I think is a better path is another path that is actually followed by more the technology companies in a sense, right? So for example, Google, ourselves. So what we are thinking of is we go directly to full autonomy, to level four. We don't do anything less. And for us, the baby steps are, let's start with one vehicle. Okay? Driving around in a parking lot, right? And then let's move away from the parking lot to a place like one north, right? So we're driving now. Then let's go to two vehicles. Let's go to five vehicles. We go to 10, to 20, so on and so forth. Let's try to expand the scope, okay? So this is the path that we're following, okay? I think that there is also benefit that the thing that, you know, on one hand, here you're not getting any benefits. So here you're only getting some publicity stance, okay? You have to cross this dangerous zone. And I think that it will not be another 15 years or so before you will be able to go into a car dealership. Hang over the price of the car and get out with the keys to a car such that you push the button and the car takes you home. Okay? So you're looking at 2030 or so before you actually get any major benefits. With this other path, I think that we are much closer. Okay? So we are actually aiming at some limited or some commercial department within a couple of years. So actually this is a video that shows a little bit of our vision. So what you will see in this video is something like it will not be completely novel to you because nowadays, you know, many people use Uber or Grab or Lyft or some taxi booking app such that when you need a car, you can just call, you know, book a car and the car will eventually come and pick you up, right? And take your total to your destination. But there are two main differences. Okay? So the main difference is that a Lyft, Grab or Uber and any of these guys, when the car arrives, there is no one inside. Okay? What does this allow us to do? This allows us to, first of all, the main thing is that we actually can increase the availability of cars. Believe it or not, there are just not enough taxi drivers in the world in order to serve all the demand for mobility. Okay? So one, increase availability. And especially on Friday nights when it's raining, right? So this is my experience in Singapore, you know, good luck getting a car on Friday nights when especially when it's raining. Second point, we can personalize the ride and, you know, making the ride more comfortable and a better experience for the user. Third, we can also reduce the cost. Okay? So 40% of the cost structure of taxis and Uber and all these things is about, essentially, the livelihood of the drivers. Okay? The second benefit is by the time that you have, unlike taxes and, you know, a system like that, by the time that you get to your destination, our backend system has already computed where the car should go next. Go pick up the next customer, where the customer is or go be recharged or serviced or maybe just where to park in order to be able to pick up the next customer in the minimum possible time. Actually, you know, there was a promotional video so there was some amount of choreography involved. This is actually footage, you know, real footage from our vehicle. This actually was from a couple of months ago. This was May. And, you know, this is the vehicle, you know, banging around at one more. And there is no choreography here. You will see people crossing the street and, you know, they don't know that there will be risk in their lives. You know, but this is the thing in this, and this is the spare. But, you know, the car is pit-a-second. So, you see that the car stops for pedestrians. You will see that the car is actually able to cope with kind of, you know, situations that may seem trivial to you as a person, but actually from the point of view of a robot trying to move around is actually quite challenging. For example, you will see here that as the car makes a left turn, there is a car parked in our lane, blocking our lane. And there is a car parked in the other lane. You know, kind of like an almost opposite fight. So, now we had to make the decision that in order to make any progress, we actually had to get into the other lane, which technically we shouldn't do, right? But, people do it as long as there is nobody else coming in the other direction and it's safe to do so. And then go back to our lane. There is a traffic light, it's red. There is another vehicle already there. So, we queue up behind the other vehicle when the traffic light turns green that we eventually go for it, okay? So, not surprising. What is surprising is that there is nobody driving. So then, the kind of studies that we have been doing is not only about the technology that makes a car able to drive itself, we're also trying to understand what the impact on the country, on society would be. Right. This is actually a simulation that we did based on real mobility demand data here in Singapore and on taxi data to get in on the travel times between any two points in Singapore and a given time of day. And what you will see, I mean, you recognize that this is the shape of city, the area, right? That's all the work. What you see here is the time of day. Whenever you see red, that's an empty card, okay? Either stopped at the parking lot or a station waiting for a customer or driving to pick up a customer. Whenever you see blue is actually a passenger traveling. Where you see the blue bubbles is actually passengers waiting for a vehicle, okay? And the bigger the bubble, the bigger the queue for the vehicle, okay? So this is the middle of the night, not even happening. You would see that around 5, 36 people start waking up and going to work. And you will see that there is these flows of vehicles that actually go from the city to the residential areas to pick up people, right? And bubbles, you know, queues forming up in the residential areas and then all these people get rid of that and so on, okay? Now, what do you get out of this? Is that we estimated that about a fleet of about 300,000 cars will actually serve the immediate needs of every single person in Singapore with waiting times and, you know, rush hour of about 15, 20 minutes on average, okay? How many is 300,000 vehicles at the time where we did the study? There were about 800,000 passenger vehicles in Singapore. What this means is that you can take all of your cars, so 60% of them, you know, to some, you know, some other country, you know, get rid of all of those cars. The big benefit of this clearly is, for example, you get in a TPV in a city like Singapore or pretty much any other city for each car, there are at least three, four parking spots. So if you get rid of half a million cars, you also get back two million parking spots that you can use it for, you know, people, residential units, parks and, you know, whatever else, okay? Especially in a place like Singapore, it's very important. Financial considerations, actually, we did this analysis of what would this mean in the US and Singapore. Actually, so this is the normal thing today, okay? So just all in a car, people who own a car. Actually, you would see that in Singapore, it doesn't make a lot of financial sense to own a car. You're actually, you would be better off by taking taxes every time, okay? In the US, it's different, right? Taxes are much more expensive. But you see that in both cases, if you had autonomous vehicles that are actually shared, you would reduce the cost of mobility by about one month. So let me tell you a little bit about the story. So actually, we started, you know, a project here in 2010. I, in my free time, I'm also a professor at the MIT, which is the Institute of Technology. Started in 2010, we started this project in collaboration with the Singaporean government. It's the Singapore MIT Alliance for Research and International Technology. And we had this ground to work on future of mobility, like a basic research. And we started working on this and we started working on the technology. We were doing these little golf cars. In 2014, we did this public trial of golf cars in the Chinese and Japanese garden in Jurong. I don't know if you've heard about that. We were doing on cars, and this is the point where we are at now. So it's a video that I showed you before. Essentially, we started the company in, so we started the smart project in 2010. Kalyan and I co-founded this company in 2013. Took us a while to get these things going and finally we were able to attract sufficient venture capital about one year ago. And we went, one year ago, we went from, I think we had two full-time staff and a couple of interns. Now we have, you know, more than 40 people. So a little bit of the story, right? And I think that, you know, we're really focusing here in Singapore because I think that there is the right combination of a societal need for more convenient, reliable, affordable, and sustainable transportation. Coupled with the forward-thinking government is actually willing to look at new technologies to make the quality of life of their citizens better. And we're also very happy with the talent pool that is available here in Singapore. In fact, as you can imagine, since 2010, I've been traveling to Singapore a lot, spending a lot of time here in Singapore to the point where my wife started wondering if I had a second family. And which is actually true. You know, I have all these, you know, team of wonderful people working with me, you know, since the day of March, right? So even though we hired all of them into the company about one year ago when we actually called the venture capital necessary to support them, they've been working with me and with one another for about five years. So the team was able to hit us, you know, the government. So we have about 40 plus at this point. We are probably looking to hire about at least 100 more people within the next year or two. Two thirds of the team are based here in Singapore. Right now we are based at 321, which is a place where there are a lot of furniture stores and us. But what we like is this showroom format for the office because we need to have the cars in the office where people actually work, you know, co-ordination, working on the software or something. About half of the team has advanced degrees from, you know, leading universities in the world and we're leading universities here as well, okay? And we're really leading the world in terms of, you know, like robotics autonomous vehicles. We wrote a lot of the state of the art papers on robotics autonomous vehicles, but not only that, but also on the things like how would you manage the fleet of autonomous vehicles, what kind of impact will happen society and so forth. So it's a very exciting. And let me conclude before I pass the word to knock. Let me conclude with a few comments on a quote that has been attributed to Harry Ford. So apparently he said that if he had asked people what they wanted, people would have replied, we want a faster horse, okay? So this is the early 1900s, right? So this anecdote, it's not real, okay? So, but this anecdote, you know, is usually taken to signify that the right answer, what people really wanted was not a faster horse, they wanted the Model T, right? The Ford Model T, and which evolved in the car as we know it today. And claim that we still have a lot of work to do. That was not the right answer. What people really want is not a faster horse. It's not a car. What they want is mobility. They want easy, convenient, affordable, sustainable access to mobility. And this is what we are trying to provide. First in Singapore, then in the world, starting in 2019, okay? So let me conclude here. And this is the overview of what we are doing and why we are doing it. Now I want to pass the word to teacher Korn Wampironsen, also known as Nock. Thank you. So Nock has been, you know, there is, in some of this career, you know, there are a number of events that happen that change everything. It's very fortunate to have Nock joining me as, she started working with me as a postdoc when we were at SMART after, you know, she did a PhD at Caltech. She's been working with me as SMART for a number of years. Then she had to go back to her home country in Thailand. And we were actually able to get her back here. And, you know, she's really my right-hand person, you know, in the company. She's really the person who's really like a superstar, you know, researcher, engineer, developer, and she's leading a lot of the work on. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Thank you so much for the opportunity.