Autonomous Container Ships
Richard Bowers, GC Alumni '93, MA from Indiana University in Computer Science '96

Richard has worked at BellSouth, Verizon, Sprint Nextel, among others, as an employee and a consultant, working on a variety of backend business systems. He worked in Customer Relationships Management systems, discount engines, FCC and SEC reports, using C++, Java, SQL, and scripting.

Currently he is employed at SAIC (recently renamed Leidos), where they assumed that because he'd worked for the phone company, he'd understand how to work on satellite communications. So he ended up working on distributed sensor systems like the tsunami buoy network for a few years, then as the technical lead and product owner on the DARPA ACTUV program â?? a government project that's trying to make large autonomous ships able to drive in a predictable way, following the law, and have them work for long periods of time. He still occasionally gets his hands dirty, mostly helping fix Linux problems and doing peer reviews.

Richard will be talking about the approach for autonomous ships which the government is pursuing, technical challenges, and commercial futures for this project. If there's interest, he can also talk about things like the development processes they use and cybersecurity.