Ep. 22 | Cruise’s Sr. VP of Engineering, Mo ElShenawy, on Developing Autonomous Vehicles

04/15/21 • 53 min

Moore's Lobby: Where engineers talk all about circuits

To say that autonomous vehicles represent a huge number of engineering challenges is an understatement. To some engineers, they seem insurmountable. To others, like Mo ElShenawy, they're part of another day at the office.

This week, Dave speaks with Mo ElShenawy, Senior VP of Engineering for Cruise. Cruise began as a startup out of Y Combinator and rose to prominence as a powerhouse of machine vision and data processing for autonomous vehicle development. Acquired by GM in 2016, Cruise today works with companies like Honda and Microsoft to bring fully autonomous (and zero emissions) vehicles to scale.

Mo runs Cruise's largest department, leading 1,000+ engineers in what is arguably one of the most significant engineering challenges of our generation. In this episode, you’ll hear Dave and Mo discuss the hardware and software challenges of designing AVs, why AVs should be safer than human drivers, and why Mo doesn’t believe in “tech for tech’s sake.”

Meet Mo ElShenawy

Mohamed “Mo” ElShenawy’s career has spanned several unique industries that share a unifying need for scalable automation technologies. He joined Cruise in 2018, where he now leads over 1,000 engineers as Senior Vice President of Engineering as the team tackles safe, scalable AV deployment, starting with San Francisco.

Meet Mo ElShenawy

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Ep. 21 | Carnegie Mellon's Karen Lightman on the Intersection of Tech and Policy for Smart Cities

"Smart city" isn't exactly an engineering term. And yet engineers are responsible for developing the technologies that take a city from being advanced to being "smart," including wireless communications, sensor fusion, and machine-learning algorithms implemented to serve public life.

But it turns out the real hurdles in the way of smart city technologies are much more human and complex than we may realize.

In this episode, Dave speaks with Karen Lightman, the Executive Director of Carnegie Mellon's Metro21 Smart Cities Institute about how engineering and public policy work hand-in-hand in smart cities. Hear about the tragedies of falling in love with a chip design that doesn't have a market, the dangers of avoiding standards in the tech industry, and the importance of testing smart city technologies in real-world "living laboratories"—or "living sandboxes," as Karen prefers to call them.

Next Episode

Ep. 23 | Arduino Co-founder Massimo Banzi on How Arduino Took the World by Storm

For some, it's a prototyping tool. For others, it's a gateway to freedom of expression.

It's been a powerful tool for STEM education, an object of scorn, and the hardware platform that's launched a thousand Kickstarters.

But no matter what your expectations are, Arduino will surprise you in 2021.

Hear all about the origins of Arduino as an exercise in usability and open-source philosophy. Learn how Arduino transformed the maker movement and vice versa. And listen in as the co-founder of one of the most popular hardware platforms on Earth talks about the beauty and backlash of making hardware simple enough for all.

This episode has a wealth of insights about the nature of creativity in design, but it also has several excellent quotes from Massimo Banzi, including:

“So I showed up with a bunch of potatoes and lemons...”
"When they looked at Arduino, they said, 'What the hell is this thing?'"
"...you, as a developer, were expected to be a professional. So you were supposed to suffer a little bit, you know?"
"The world is full of grumpy engineers."

and, of course,

"Baby talk for potheads."

Meet Massimo Banzi

Massimo Banzi is the co-founder of Arduino, one of the most popular hardware platforms in history. He is an electrical engineer and educator, as well as a self-described open-source advocate.

An important part of Massimo's career is his background in interaction design, which has provided him formal training on how to make hardware accessible to everyone.

Banzi has been a professor at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI), the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, the Domus Academy, and the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. He's also co-founded two FabLabs—digital fabrication labs—in his home country of Italy.

In addition to his work with Arduino, Massimo has served as a consultant for brands like Prada, Whirlpool, and Adidas.