The 23rd DVN Workshop—the 6th in America—is happening less than one month from now. Everyone on the DVN team is working dilligently to make it a success. It will be different from all 22 of the past events, for it will totally focus on safety; up to now DVN Workshops have been organised in terms of two lighting domains, design and safety technologies.
Why is this DVN Workshop different from all other DVN Workshops? Primarily because of the alarming trends with traffic deaths in America: 38,680 of them in 2020, up 7 per cent vs 2019, despite significantly less driving on account of the pandemic. The fatality rate hit 1.37 deaths per 100 million the worst rate since 2006. That’s a trend in the wrong direction, and it seems to be gaining traction; in the second half of 2020, the number of deaths was up more than 13 per cent. It’s a daunting problem in a challenging regulatory and cultural environment. DVN wants to contribute to reversing this wrong-way trend by facilitating discussion and adoption of effective solutions.
The workshop will start with presentations on the status of safety on the roads, with lectures by three experts from UMTRI, IIHS, and Mount Sinai-Icahn School of Medicine. Then, lighting managers from Audi, Volvo, GM, Ford, and Jaguar Land Rover will present their achievements on safety improvement. A very interesting safety-technology session will feature talks by experts from Marelli-AL, Valeo, Varroc Lighting Systems, Hella, and Koito-NAL. A special fourth session involves vehicle interiors, an increasingly important domain to enhance safety by dint of driver monitoring systems and other technology; there will be lectures from Ansys, Radiant Vision Systems, Grupo Antolin, Xperi, and Eyeris.
The fifth session, focusing on regulatory topics, will include lectures from top experts in lighting regulations and the science and technology behind them: Geoff Draper, Bart Terburg, David Puglisi, Joshua Schwab, Michael Piscitelli, John Bullough, Michael Flannagan, Rainer Neumann, Wolfgang Huhn, and Michael Larsen.
The two last sessions cover light source innovations and technology enablers for safety at night. Lecture topics will include status and trend reports on LED, OLED, matrix, and µLED light sources from AMS Osram, Kyocera SLD Laser, Lumileds, Everlight, Samsung, TI, AML Systems, Docter Optics, Covestro, and LMT.
Travel restrictions will prevent some would-be participants attending in person, so we have arranged for online attendance in real time or in a replay mode to account for time zones, via our DVN US Workshop online platform. And if you haven’t yet registered, well, you’ll want to do so while there’s still space available!
Sincerely yours,