Automotive Engineering - April 2023 - 33

LEADERSHIP FEATURE
Omari: ADAS guru, Latitude CEO
Sammy Omari serves
two roles. He's executive
director of Ford's
ADAS technology development
and CEO at
Latitude AI, the autonomous-tech
organization
that Ford set up in
the wake of Argo AI's
demise. Swiss-born, he
comes to Ford from
Motional, the AptivHyundai
JV focused on
commercializing SAE
Level 4 vehicles where he was VP of engineering and
head of autonomy, systems and mapping.
" What brought me to Ford is the potential to give
people their time back, " he said. " The average
American spends 20 days, almost 500 hours a year
sitting in a car. Just giving a fraction of that time back
to our customers would have a massive impact. " He
also joined Ford for its massive global scale, strong
brands, and the software, machine learning and robotics
talent that Ford has onboarded. He said Field is
building a unique culture that will enable Ford to " execute
on the vision of building cost-effective and powerful
ADAS systems. "
The most difficult problem to solve, Omari said, is auSammy
Omari
tonomy. " We have to ensure that when we launch L3 that
it's ready, it's safe, and it provides an amazing experience. "
Ho: Connected vehicle software
Roz Ho, Model e's chief connected vehicle software
officer, spent more than 30 years working in software
and technology for a number of companies, most recently
as VP and global head of software for HP,
where she led a team of 4,000 engineers. Before that,
Ho spent nearly 20 years at Microsoft as a software
engineer and eventually
corporate VP.
" I believe that technology
can really help improve
peoples' lives, " she
said. " Ford is working on
things that are going to
improve the world, starting
with making people's
time spent in their vehicles
more productive,
more entertaining and
more enjoyable. And
Ford itself is undergoing
Roz Ho
AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING
a cultural change. These sort of translations and the team really
attracted me to Ford. "
Ho compares the transformation of vehicles, via software, to that
of cell phones over the last 15 to 20 years. " At that time they were
just about making calls. Now they're indispensable to our lives. That's
what we're going to do with the vehicles, " she said. " First, we have to
build a stable, high-quality platform, the right architecture. And in
doing that, deliver better quality and solutions that are limited only
by our imaginations and the resources we apply.. "
Purdy: Digital product domo
The former head of John Deere
Laboratories, Alex Purdy, is responsible
for planning Model e's digital products
for customers, technologies and services
for Ford's embedded software and hardware
portfolios. At Deere, he directed the
ag equipment giant's precision agriculture
strategy and business development.
Purdy admits to being attracted to " big
problems " like the waste he saw in farming
that was solved, in some cases, by Deere
technology such as the sensor-based
Interactive Combine Adjust product. In
Ford, he sees a comparatively greater
scale yielding similar success.
" I think we're at an equally impactful transition point here with moAlex
Purdy
tor vehicles, " Purdy said. " We really need to be rooted in a deep customer
understanding: what drives them, what their ecosystems are. "
He admits that connecting development teams and enabling them
" to speak a common language and use common tools " is no easy
feat but he's optimistic Ford's institutional knowledge and new culture
will prevail.
Bedichek: platform architecture director
Designing, building, verifying and deploying Ford's next-generation software
systems and services is the job of Rob Bedichek, Model-e executive
director of platform architecture. He comes to Ford from Intel, Inc.,
where he served as VP and general manager of system software and
simulation engineering across 12 geographic
regions. He was also senior director
of platform architecture at Apple.
" The hardest thing about the hardware
is getting the right combination of programmability,
making it sensible to the
programmers, something they can write
lots of software on and evolve over time,
and push that out to customers, "
Bedichek said. The vehicle, he explained,
with all of its networks, CPUs, and memory
is really a " distributed multicomputer
that has to be programmed by a team of
people that understand it as a computer,
Rob Bedichek
April 2023 33
ALL IMAGES: LINDSAY BROOKE
Automotive Engineering - April 2023

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