32. Florian Thaler - VVR GmbH - Testing RL Agents for safety-critical systems

# Intro

Self driving cars have been a highly debated topic for years now, but today on the show we are not going to focus on the state of those autonomous vehicles, driver assisting systems or what so ever, but instead we are going to focus on the testing aspect of autonomous operating agents. 

Today on the show I have the pleasure to talk to Florian Thaler, researcher at the Virtual Vehicle Research GmbH in Graz, focusing on testing reinforcement learning agents for safety critical systems.

Florian will tell us about his experience building a testing infrastructure for a vehicle development platform that applies the training paradigm of reinforcement learning to achieve its goals. He will share with us some of the important concepts and practises of testing RL and Machine Learning systems in general.

# References

* Florian Thaler: https://www.linkedin.com/in/florian-thaler-78744b214/

* Virtual Vehicle Research Center: https://www.v2c2.at/

* Spider Platform: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7JgCbBiPtk

* Spider Platform https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LDrxTxPDB8

* https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.10742.pdf : Testing Machine learning systems