Robert Gee is the strategy manager responsible for standards, government, and intellectual property globally, within Continental’s Architecture and Networking Business Area. He collaborates with customers, consortia, governments, and other companies to enable safe transportation, sustainable business practices, and consumer information needs.
Spanning more than 30 years, Robert’s experience at IBM, Loral, Motorola, and other leading companies includes military and commercial communications systems, space and terrestrial technologies, and secure government communications for dozens of countries in Europe, North America, and Asia. He has a Master’s Degree in Computer Science, a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering, and over 20 issued patents.
Robert’s experience extends to the news and entertainment industry, in which he is a national television Emmy Award recipient for his work as a producer for CNN. He has been credited for successfully pioneering the modern contracting approach for citizen photojournalists, and at one point had a CNN-estimated syndication audience of over 1 billion viewers.
The Pop in Your Job – What drives you? Why do you love your job?
Some lessons aren’t taught in a classroom. While my wife and I were fortunate to walk away from two terrorist attacks, dozens of people near us did not. The lesson we learned was that the daily grind and the disagreement of the moment are frivolous in comparison to making positive differences in others’ lives, sometimes as simple as starting with a smile. As engineers and scientists, we collaborate to do even more, such as working on cooperative and connected technologies that can address millions of unnecessary Roadway Injuries and Deaths (RIDs) each year. It is a daunting challenge, but one that can bear a wonderful result: not only at the macro level in which the statistics are large, but at the individual level, conveying friends and families to gather together each evening after their daily activities, helping to keep them safe throughout all modes of transportation, and enabling the more important activity of human connection to occur. Doing this broadly across all demographics, regardless of transportation means or individual financial situation, greatly motivates me because it aligns with the tough lessons learned in those fraught situations that my wife and I experienced. It’s always about the people. After all, Point A to Point B isn’t the point, unless we are successful in getting to B.
Case Study
Monday, December 09
06:00 pm - 06:30 pm
Live in Dearborn, Michigan
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Life-saving cooperative and connected V2X technology has been invented, standardized, and tested. And yet, mass deployment always seems to be a tantalizing few years away. The fault is not with the technology, and certainly not with the societal benefits of preventing roadway injuries and deaths. The complexity lies between the major stakeholders: as the first vehicular technology that requires commitment and complex coordination between vehicles and between vehicles and infrastructure, it is no longer sufficient for one or even a few manufacturers to launch V2X as occurred with seatbelts and airbags. Instead, private industry, governments, and constituents must be involved, and the motivations for each of these stakeholder groups are different. The motivations are like currencies: understanding what the relevant currency is, and how it could encourage the related stakeholder to do its part, will be key in the initial deployment stages of V2X. Furthermore, each stakeholder expects a vastly different time period to realize its return on investment. Absent a governmental mandate, we will discuss how to address these differing currencies and payback expectations because without such reconciliation, reducing preventable RIDs will remain out of reach, somewhere in the future.
In this session, you will discover how to:
Panel Discussion
Tuesday, December 10
04:00 pm - 04:40 pm
Live in Dearborn, Michigan
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