The road to commercializing autonomous vehicle technology for people has split into two paths.

In one camp, AV developers like Argo AI, Aurora, Cruise, Motional, Waymo and Zoox are aiming straight for full autonomy — a system that can handle all driving within certain conditions and with no expectation for a human to take over. In other words, the passenger can fall asleep or play on their phone.

Then there are some automakers, notably Tesla, that are taking an it-will-improve-over-time approach to autonomy. In these cases, an advanced driver-assistance system may offer limited autonomous features with the plan that over time a greater level of autonomy may be achieved.

Billions of dollars have been invested in these varying paths — each one with its own set of true believers. And in the middle sits Nvidia, the chipmaking giant that develops and supplies automakers and AV developers with the tools they need to deploy autonomous technology.

We're excited to announce that three experts from Aurora, Nvidia and Waymo who are working on AV technology will join us onstage at TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 to help dissect the challenges and opportunities of each approach and weigh in on which might deliver first at scale.

Our speakers are Yanbing Li, senior VP of engineering at Aurora; Saswat Panigrahi, vice president of strategy, product management and data science at Waymo; and Sarah Tariq, the VP of autonomous driving software at Nvidia.

Li, Panigrahi and Tariq bring decades of experience to the field.

Li leads all software development for Aurora, including autonomy, ground truth, mapping, simulation, cloud infrastructure and data platform. Prior to Aurora, she was a VP of product and engineering at Google and led the Enterprise Services Platform (ESP) organization in Google Cloud.

She also led product development, engineering and go-to-market strategy at VMware and worked for Synopsys in various research, development and engineering leadership roles. She holds a PhD from Princeton University, a master's degree from Cornell University and a BS from Tsinghua University (Beijing) in electrical engineering and computer engineering.