Interpreting Safety Outcomes: Waymo's Performance Evaluation in the Context of a Broader Determination of Safety Readiness

This paper frames recent publications from Waymo within the broader context of the safety readiness determination for an Automated Driving System (ADS). Starting from a brief overview of safety performance outcomes reported by Waymo (i.e., contact events experienced during fully autonomous operations), this paper highlights the need for a diversified approach to safety determination that complements the analysis of observed safety outcomes with other estimation techniques. Our discussion highlights: the presentation of a "credibility paradox" within the comparison between ADS crash data and human-derived baselines; the recognition of continuous confidence growth through in-use monitoring; and the need to supplement any aggregate statistical analysis with appropriate event-level reasoning

Supersymmetry in the Stolz-Teichner Project on Elliptic Cohomology

We investigate the role of supersymmetry in the Stolz- Teichner project on elliptic cohomology. We systematically develop the theory of super semigroups of (self-adjoint, compact) operators on Hilbert space and apply it to give a simplified proof of the relation between K-theory and supersymmetric Euclidian field theories of dimension (0 +1 /1) described in the survey paper 'What is an elliptic object?' by Stephan Stolz and Peter Teichner. Furthermore, we present results towards a more geometric description of these theories. We then turn to the role of supersymmetry in the conjectural relation between conformal field theory and elliptic cohomology, addressing the question raised in the aforementioned paper as to which notion of 'super conformal surfaces' is appropriate in the CFT approach to elliptic cohomology. We explain how the classical notion of SUSY curves gives rise to a notion of supersymmetric conformal field theories that satisfies the requirements demanded by Stolz and Teichner. The key observation we use is that every complex supermanifold has an underlying cs manifold. It should be pointed out that our definition of supersymmetric CFTs is not quite complete at this point. However, we investigate in detail the aspects relevant to the holomorphicity properties of the partition functions of such supersymmetric CFT